An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place

Located in the Yukon Valley in a remote stretch of northwest Canada, Dawson City is known as a Klondike Gold Rush town. However, for many centuries before gold was discovered in the area in 1896, and long after the Gold Rush had ended just a few years later, the region has been inhabited by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people. This experimental animation from the Dawson City-based filmmaker Dan Sokolowski explores how Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in storytellers and geologists view Ëdhä Dädhëcha̧, or Moosehide Slide – a prominent rock-slope formation that, today, dominates the view from Dawson City’s Main Street, and has long held deep significance to the local Indigenous people. Alternating between a text that describes a ‘prehistoric, pseudo-circular rock-slope failure’ in the technical language of science, and a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in story that recalls how locals once used the landslide to fight off cannibals in the evocative language of myth, the piece makes for a rich contrast between these two very distinct ways of seeing, knowing and understanding.