Previous Award Recipients

1994  BONAR COOLEYBonar Cooley was a founding member of the Teslin Historical & Museums Society (THMS) in 1972. The founding pieces of the George Johnston Museum...

Violet Storer (d. 2007) was born somewhere along the Teslin River to parents Jenny and Bill Laberge. She was raised as a Tagish Kwan hunter and gatherer with traditional values…

Edith Josie’s parents were from Fort McPherson and moved to Eagle, Alaska in the days when no one travelling on the land noticed the Alaska/Yukon border. Edith and her…

Before he became a working electrician, Sam Holloway was the writer, publisher and editor of The Yukoner Magazine. Sam’s company description was “Welcome to the history…

Dick North has been a talented interpreter of northern history and he started out in 1936 when he was a reporter for the Alaska Empire in Juneau. He was commissioned by…

Al Oster took a trip up north on a whim in 1957. He was so impressed by the Alaska Highway that he wrote a song about it and persuaded his family to move to Whitehorse…

Nora Garside (1910-1993) was born in England and retired to Whitehorse in 1965 after she and her husband worked at the Choutla Indian Residential School for more than…

The Mayo Historical Society was inaugurated in 1981 when eleven people came together to discuss the declining state of some historic dwellings in Mayo. Restoration of the…

Ken Coates was raised in Whitehorse and has worked at universities across Canada and in New Zealand and was the founding vice-president of the University of…

The Carcross Tagish Dancers group was co-founded by Carcross/Tagish elder Angela Sidney and Clara Schinkel in 1973. The women used dance as a vehicle for the preservation …

Joe Henry was born in 1898 in the Blackstone River drainage. He married Annie Mitchell in 1921 in an arranged marriage and the couple lived the rest of their long lives together,…

In the mid-1960s Jimmy Smith was the efficient manager of the Whitehorse Tourist Services, a business complex that included a motel, restaurant, gas station, cocktail…

Vic Tubman received recognition from the City of Whitehorse in 1994 when he was presented the Volunteer of the Year Award. Vic continues to serve as a Director on the…

Respected Champagne and Aishihik First Nations elder Annie Ned spent a lifetime maintaining and promoting the culture and language of her people. Her stories and…

Father Pierre Veyrat OMI was a French Oblate priest who arrived in the Yukon as a young man and spent his life in mission service. He ran the Ross River mission for 40 years…

The Klondike Visitors Association began as a small museum and historical society. Over time, it developed into a non-profit organization that supports and promotes tourism…

Roy Minter (d.1996): Roy came to the Yukon in 1955 as a Canadian army captain with the Northwest Highway System. He left the service and joined the White Pass & Yukon Route (WP&YR)…

The Council for Yukon Indians (CYI), now the Council for Yukon First Nations (CYFN), served as the negotiating body for Yukon First Nations during the land claim process…

Murray and Donna Swales arrived in the Yukon in 1973 and spent many years operating various businesses in the territory. Their work involved a range of services that supported travellers…

Bill Irving (1927-1987) was an internationally recognized arctic archaeologist and professor of anthropology. In 1965, Irving was an archaeologist with the National Museum of Man in Ottawa…

In the early 1980s, Larry Barr’s mining company, Territorial Gold Placers, commissioned artist Jim Robb to do a series of paintings of the old cabins and mining sites in the Yukon’s…

Angela Sidney (1902-1991) was given two names at birth: Ch’óonehte’ Ma in the Tagish language of her father and Stóow in the Tlingit language of her mother…

In 1965, the Ben-Elle Hotel was built by Stan and Mae Bandera who made a significant investment in the future of Whitehorse by creating a 22-room building on the end of Main Street…

Julie Cruikshank began her career in 1979 by documenting the lives of northern women. Her first book, Women: Lives and Legends, set the direction for her later publications, which…

Johnny Johns (Yêl Shàn) (1898-1988): started a big-game guiding business in the Southern Lakes in 1917. In 1926 he was the first Yukon First Nation person to obtain his…

John Gould’s (d. 2012) knowledge of the goldfields and mining technology made the Klondike a living museum for all those who were lucky enough to hear him speak…

Catherine “Kitty” McClellan (1921-2009) was a cultural anthropologist renowned for her documentation of the Tlingit and Tagish culture. She travelled to the Yukon in…

1984 Chappie and Mattie ChapmanCharles "Chappie" Chapman (d.1985) was a Mounted Police Officer in 1920 when he volunteered for the Whitehorse detachment where he worked as a...

Kathy Jones-Gates was the director of the Dawson City Museum and Historical Society for many years and worked with long-time residents to create…

Jim Robb arrived in the Yukon from Montreal in 1955 and began a long career focused on the people and places of the Yukon. His earliest artwork was…

Allen Arthur Wright (1916-1983) served six years with the Royal Canadian Engineers during the Second World War and…

Construction began on the White Pass & Yukon Route (WP&YR) railway in 1898. The line between the coast at Skagway and the head of navigation on the Yukon River at White Horse Rapids was completed…

Bruce Harvey was the first Parks Canada superintendent of Yukon Historic Sites. Bruce was a founder of the Yukon Historical and Museums Association…

The Capital Hotel was built in the 1920s, at a time when Whitehorse was trying to regain momentum after a difficult stretch in the territory’s history. The population had dwindled in the years before…