Nobody has ever made me feel like I didn’t belong here. “If everything changed, then I’m not connected here any more,” Smith said. ![]() ![]() Only two individuals identified as a person of color, and they were split on the mascot.ĭylan Smith of Randolph said he understood how people felt, but times have changed.Īs a graduate of RUHS, he said when he came back to town, the mascot connected him to the school. He told the crowd of about 75 gathered March 9 that he had been looking into the history of the mascot and said that when it was first used it was a skeleton rider, but in the 1980s it took a turn toward the racist image some have had problems with and some believe the rider began to look too much like a Ku Klux Klan member atop a horse.Īt the meeting March 9 at Randolph Union High School, opinions on the mascot ran about two to one against getting rid of the Galloping Ghost mascot, although some of those supporting the mascot were okay with getting rid of the rider that had caused some of the angst. Orange Southwest School District Superintendent Layne Millington has been deep in that fight for years and was the one who ordered a controversial mural of the mascot painted over in the gym. The Galloping Ghost, a phantasmic image of a horse, sometimes carrying a rider ranging from a ghostly figure to a skeleton to what some have called a hooded Ku Klux Klan member, has been a source of heated debate. ![]() (Herald / Darren Marcy)Ī scheduled meeting to hear a complaint against the Randolph Union High School mascot never really got off the ground after neither of the two people representing the groups bringing the complaint showed up. Her research and teaching interests revolve around Indigenous–Settler relations in Canada.RUHS alumnus Dylan Smith speaks in defense of the school’s Galloping Ghost mascot. Lisa Cooke joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada in 2009 after earning her PhD in Anthropology from York University in Toronto, Ontario. The research for this paper was conducted under and in full compliance with Yukon-Canada Scientists and Explorers Act Research Licenses #06–02S&E and #07–27S&E. I thank the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Northern Scientific Training Program, and York University's Research Cost and Fieldwork Cost Funds for their financial support. And finally, to David Neufeld who provided much guidance that enriched my observations and challenged my thinking – Thank you. To the many visitors willing to tell me about their trip, thank you, our conversations were never dull. I also thank the residents of Dawson City and Whitehorse (and many little cabins in between) who have shared time with me over the years. I extend a heartfelt Mähsi cho to everyone there. I owe an accumulating debt of gratitude to Glenda Bolt who shared time with me at the center and then hours more reviewing and re-reviewing drafts of things written. This paper would never have been possible without the welcoming support of the staff at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre. In so doing the ghosts that haunt ideas of ‘North’ as a scape of national–cultural originary pride come to life, unsettling this settler colonial cultural production by making visible the legacies and structures of displacement, dispossession, and violence that lay at the core of the project of Canadian nation-building. In a moment of incredible courage the Tr'ondëck Hwëch'in opened their doors to a powerful exhibit titled ‘Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of Residential Schools: Finding Our Way Home'. This article ends in the opening created by one such interruption at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre in Dawson City, Yukon. It is haunted by ghosts that come into view and jam up the (seemingly) smooth narrative surface of ideas of ‘North’ in Canadian settler colonial national–cultural imaginaries. This cultural production, however, is not static or stable. I argue that the ways that ‘North’ is infused with originary qualities and held up as emblematic of senses of Canadian selfhood places it within the structure of the phantasm in ways that work to reinforce settler colonial relations and interests. How does ‘North’ operate as a phantasm in these imaginaries? And what spaces of potentiality open up when the ghosts that haunt this phantasm come into view and are granted the due they demand? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Canada's Yukon Territory and looking to the emerging field of settler colonial studies for guidance, I am asking these questions in the context of Canada as a settler colonial project. In this paper, I ask two questions of ideas of ‘North’ in Canadian national–cultural imaginaries.
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