OPINION | It's about time Yukon Rendezvous dropped the colonialist 'Sourdough'

Organizers of the one-time Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous festival — either an all-ages winter carnival or a week-long bender, depending on your proclivities — recently announced they are dropping "Sourdough" from their name, and the festival would be hitherto known simply as "Yukon Rendezvous." The decision, they said, was the result of public feedback around the colonial nature of the word. 

The name change was met with fury from some Yukoners, many of whom took to social media and called it an "erasure" of Yukon history — by which they mean settler history, specifically that of the Klondike Gold Rush, from which "sourdough," as a moniker denoting a fortune-seeker who overwintered in the territory, originates. 

The slavish adoration some Yukoners seem to feel for that history sparked a torrent of what can, at best, be described as bigoted comments online — some directed specifically at the festival's executive director, who is a person of colour. 

This behaviour is bitterly ironic, as the history they are in such a rush to defend is racist, sexist, misogynist and — quite frankly — a hot mess of highly questionable colonial behaviour, which is exactly why the festival wanted to drop the association in the first place. 

Our colonial past is not something to be proud of; we stole the land, knowledge and resources of First Nations in the name of colonial capitalist expansion. That's the foundation of settler culture in the Yukon, and we continue, bafflingly, to glorify it.

We rewrite the dredging of water and the tearing up of land in search of gold as a tale of bravery in the wilderness. We minimize our exploitive dealings with Yukon First Nations. We conveniently ignore the sexism and gendered violence of the era, turning women working in the sex trade — often for lack of better options — into all-ages appropriate can-can girls.

It's the Romance of the North. 

And it's a lie. 

The Klondike Gold Rush lasted less than three years. 

We have a generation's worth of toxic mining messes — Faro, Keno, Wolverine — which sit largely on First Nations land. 

Yukon's reported rate of violent crime per capita was three times the national average in 2016, with 12 per cent of female victims being victims of sexual offences. 

The placer mining of which many Yukoners are so inordinately proud is little more than a destructive pastime, extracting $335 million a year for the miners while only paying out $100,000 in royalties.

Our colonial past is not something to be proud of.- Lori Fox

Much of our way of life is subsidized by the millions of dollars in annual transfer payments from the federal government. 

None of that matches with the fun-yet-hard-drinking, guns-guts-and-gold story of the noble adventurer that we love to tell about our past and present. That's because that story has never been true; it's the plotline of the cheap paperback we've written about ourselves, a romantic thriller in which we are the heroes, and the supposed courage and pluck of our ancestors the raison d'etre for the present. 

It's not surprising, then, that there are those among us so unwilling to let that story go that the simple dropping of one word — a word that denotes settler origin and ownership — sends them into a mean-spirited, furious panic. 

Rendezvous was long overdue for a facelift, and the name change is a good start. For real, wider change to really take hold in the territory, however, we will have to look critically and realistically at our colonial history, take responsibility for it — and then let it go. 

Just because something has always been one way doesn't mean that's the way it should always be.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.