https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/
Yukon’s beloved Gold Rush history is ‘a hot mess of highly questionable colonial behaviour,’ argues Lori Fox
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.
For the rest of this article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/sourdough-rendezvous-name-opinion-lori-fox-1.5896834