Canada: America’s Neighbor to the North - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 362

Canada's profile demonstrates the idea that demography is destiny. The two largest
ethnic groups in Canada are of British descent (about 28 percent of the total population)
and French descent (about 23 percent). Officially Canada is a bilingual nation. All public
documents and trade labels are written in both English and French. Most of the French-
speaking Canadians live in the province of Quebec, where they comprise about 80 percent
of the population. Canada (like the United States) also has sizable segments of Asian- and
Near East-descended citizens. About 57 percent of Canadians speak English as a first (and
family) language, while about 21 percent speak French, and the rest speak one or more of
over a dozen other languages, including Chinese (Canada's third most common language).
Blacks account for about 13 percent of the population of the United States, but their
number in Canada is relatively small. The differences trace to geography and climate as
well as to the use of slaves in the rice and cotton plantations of the American South. Great
Britain outlawed slavery in its empire in 1834, thereby making Canada a refuge for run-
away American slaves. Canadians pride themselves on continuing their tradition of open-
ing their doors to those seeking refuge and asylum. This tradition came into generous play
during the Vietnam War, when hundreds of Americans took Canadian residence to protest
the war and to escape military service.
Native Americans (including Inuit) make up 3 percent of Canada's population. They
are widely and thinly spread among tribes, languages, and settlements. In recognition of
their Native Americans, Canada has recently created a province carved from the Northwest
Territory that gives its 25,000 Inuit inhabitants a considerable measure of self-governance
and control over land and mineral rights.
WHY IS THE YUKON TERRITORY SO FIRMLY FIXED IN SONG AND STORY?
The Yukon Territory covers 207,000 square miles, more than twice the size of Great
Britain, and has a total population of about 36,000. It abuts Alaska to the west, British
Columbia to the south, and the Northeast Territory to the east. Its Klondike River is forever
bound to memories of the great gold rush (1896-1904), when more than 80,000 fortune
seekers endured Arctic hardship, glaciers, mountains, and frozen wilderness to stake claims
in the Yukon gold fields. During the gold rush, more than $100 million was hacked and dug
from the Yukon. Author Jack London found no gold, but his stories of the gold rush endure:
Son of the Wolf and The Call of the Wild . Robert Service, poet of the Yukon, tells of how he
was drawn to “its big dizzy mountains, to its deep deathlike valleys, the cussedest place”
he knew, with a human comedy of fierce, larger-than-life characters (see “The Shooting of
Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”).