Yukon Vilzhiz

HAPPY 113th BIRTHDAY, THE YUKON
No I will not drop 'the'. Not even if Wikipedia and the Yukon Tourism website tell me to. It just sounds wrong to say "I'm going to Yukon".

So consider this my first step into doing research on Canadian First Nations and hopefully doing some personifications... as well as me getting off my lazy bum to do some proper research about the Yukon so she can become a more prominent character and I can be less ashamed of not knowing the history of the place I was born and voice act for, bahahaha.

Hopefully the title of this picture is "My name is Yukon" in Gwich'in, the language the word Yukon (which I believe is a corruption of a word) comes from. It means 'Great River' and originally belonged to what is now the Yukon River. The outfit she is wearing is traditional Gwich'in clothing. :3 The Gwich'in are the farthest north of any First Nations in North America with the exception of the Inuit.
I guess if I personify Gwich'in, s/he would be one of the Yukon's (and NWT's) ancestors along with the Inuit and the Tlingit, among others. :3 I'm still trying to figure out the history and decide when her character would have appeared along the timeline. Maybe as old as 1,200 years ago? Maybe as young as the 1700s. I partially believe that you can't have a personification until the nation is at least an idea, but I also believe that you can't ignore the indigenous people and their contribution to a place's history, so I'm having a bit of trouble.
Right now my head canon is that she wasn't among the people who came across the land bridge to North America (however it's hotly debated whether the sites in the Yukon are the earliest evidence of human life in the Americas) but I think she would have been just a newborn baby when the volcano erupted on the Yukon/Alaska border and the Athabaskan tribes scattered south to B.C./Alberta etc. So she's actually much older than she looks. Still, she didn't grow very much until the 1700s when American and Russian explorers started poking around, the HBC tried to set up shop, and prospectors started... prospecting.

IN ANY CASE, Happy Birthday, The Yukon.
If you're curious, her official name has been approved and it's Kate Sahneuti. :3
As always, her design belongs to ~ctcsherry