09/25/2026
As we approach the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30, Commissioner Webber invites you to take a moment to reflect, listen, and learn. Through the power of storytelling, Yukon Story Laureate, John Firth has written the personal story below that honours the truths of the past while helping to build understanding, respect, and reconciliation for the future
"Sometimes she needs to climb into the seat beside you"
by Story Laureate John Firth
I heard stories from residential school survivors and hugged them. I read about Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and questioned how such a thing could be happening. I saw people reacting to prejudice in all its blatant and not-so-blatant forms and defended their right to fair treatment.
I thought I understood reconciliation. I went to events to support the people who have been abused or honor those who died and listened to the stories, nodding my head in agreement at all the appropriate times.
I struggled, knowing that I learned most of my biases from my mother (prejudice is an acquired trait, not a genetic one).
Her prejudices were based in classism. Indigenous people were lumped along with a variety of other people in a lower social class than she, thus were politely tolerated as essential, but not welcomed as equals.
My father had no such qualms. When he went out on a binge, he would drink with anybody. But his addiction molded in me a self-preserving shield against people who abuse alcohol and, even though he wasn’t Indigenous, contributed to my perception of the social stereotype of the alcoholic Native.
All of us have our inherited intolerances whether we are aware of them or not.
I was aware of many (but not all) of my shortcomings and worked to overcome them. But even so - despite being cognisant of something I knew was a wrong that needed to be made right - patting myself on the back for showing up at the appropriate events and saying the politically polite words rang a bit hollow.
The whole honest empathy thing still felt remote from me.
I’m not an Indigenous woman. I’m not a residential school survivor. I’ve never been subjected to racism. I’m not part of a visible minority.
I recognized their pain, but I couldn’t feel it.
The dictionary defines reconciliation as “the act of coming to an understanding and putting an end to hostility” or “the state of being resigned to something undesirable, or the process of achieving this state.”
Rebert Joseph, the hereditary chief of BC’s Gwawaenuk First Nation and a residential school survivor, states that “reconciliation includes anyone with an open mind and an open heart who is willing to look into the future with a new way.”
How each of us become honestly invested in reconciliation – if we ever do become invested – is an individual story.
Sometimes she needs to climb into the seat beside you for it to become more personal.
Late one September afternoon, while driving south from Haines Junction, I pulled into the rest stop near the cut-off to Kusawa Lake.
I was the only vehicle there and all I intended to do was dump some food wrappings from my lunch into the garbage bin and peel an orange to tide me over for the remaining drive into Whitehorse.
I noticed another vehicle pull into the area by the outhouses but didn’t pay much attention to it.
However, the slamming of the outhouse door did catch my attention. I turned to see a jeep pulling very quickly out of the rest stop and zooming off down the highway.
I thought it odd that the timing of the slamming door and the departure of the jeep were so close together but simply thought 'that had to be one of the fastest outhouse stops ever.'
A few minutes later, I started to pull out of the rest stop when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a distraught Indigenous woman running across the parking area waving her hands.
"Did you see that car leave?" she asked breathlessly when she reached me, "They took my purse."
I was shocked when all my prejudices about people who aren’t like me raced to the front of my mind. Even as I knew immediately what I had to do, I hesitated, scanning her, looking for signs of alcohol or drug use.
“They took my purse,” she repeated plaintively. She probably knew what was going through my head because she had seen it before.
"Get in," I told her, mentally slapping myself across the back of my head for hesitating and stereotyping, "We may not see them but at least I'll get you to Whitehorse."
She literally sprinted around the back of my truck and hopped into the passenger seat.
"Thank you," she said. "They took my purse. My identification. Everything."
When I offered her my orange, she gobbled it down in short order, along with one of two granola bars I gave to her. The other she tucked into an inside pocket of her light coat - a part of being a street person, hoarding food even if you're hungry because you don't know when you might eat again.
"That was good," she said, "I haven't eaten anything in three days."
During the drive to Whitehorse it became apparent she was dealing with some mild form of mental illness. People later told me she is a long-term recovering alcoholic, still dry today, but has issues possibly related to her early drinking or some other undisclosed trauma in her life.
She held long conversations with imaginary people during which she described what had just happened, then answered questions that were apparently being asked. It was like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. When she wasn’t on the phone, she slept.
I asked her a few questions. Her name. Where she was from. Where she wanted me to take her - to the police? - "No. They won't listen to me. Just take me to the Salvation Army (I knew she meant the homeless shelter on Alexander Street. The Salvation Army building had closed a few years earlier)."
Every once in a while she would get agitated, start seeking for something around her seat, then begin to cry, "They took my purse. They took everything. They left me out there a long way from some place. I couldn't have walked anywhere. I could have died."
She was right. The temperatures were close to zero and dropping. There was a stiff, freezing breeze out of the south. It was a long walk to the nearest houses I knew about - one of which you can't see from the highway so she might have walked past without ever knowing it was there. With only a light jacket she wasn't dressed to survive a night in the bush.
If she had died out there, another indigent person frozen to death in a ditch, it might have been ruled an accident because there would have been no obvious signs of foul play.
But it wouldn't have been an accident.
If she had died out there, she would have been a murdered Indigenous woman - but no one would ever have known that except the driver of the other vehicle and me.
I wondered if this happens more than we care to think.
For my passenger, it was more than the loss of her purse.
She had trusted someone to drive her to a destination and wait for a couple of minutes while she used the rest stop…and he or she betrayed that trust. It told her that her life wasn’t worth the time to wait for her to finish her business in the outhouse.
How many by-standers might have pre-judged her, as I had started to do when she approached my vehicle.
I could have decided "it's not my problem. It's not my responsibility. I wasn't the one who drove away and left her to possibly die."
Except that if I had left her there, it would have been me who drove away and left her to possibly die.
When she hopped out of my truck and walked across the street to the homeless shelter, I waited to make sure she got safely inside.
I may never encounter her again, but I think of her often. I don’t think I will ever forget her because of my first reaction when my time came to be called upon. The change in her eyes from fear and anguish to desperation and resignation when I didn’t respond right away.
She was possibly going to become one of the murdered and missing, and I hesitated.
That moment has bothered me ever since.
It reminds me of a junior high school acquaintance of mine, Harry Atkinson – a First Nation kid from Ross River.
We never had much to do with each other in school, then went our separate ways in 1969 but we met again in the early 1990s.
Harry was a smart kid, a ‘tough as nails’ national championship medal-winning athlete, a gifted carver and artist, but alcohol had gotten the better of him, and as an adult he was living on the street.
When I saw him one day, sitting on a bench outside my office on Main Street, I stopped to say ‘hello.’ For a number of weeks, we talked briefly each morning. At first he was reticent but gradually became more vocal.
One morning he stood up and offered me his hand – something he had never done before.
“I never liked you in school,” he told me with the hint of a smile playing on his face, “Thought you were a bit of a white boy a-hole. But you’re not so bad.”
We shook hands. Reconciliation for both of us.
A few days later he wasn’t on his bench and I never saw him again.
Now the last words he spoke to me resonate as I ponder the initial rush of ‘white boy a-hole’ biases that took over my brain when that woman asked me for help.
Hope I can do a better job of living up to his belief in me in the future.
