Dolman’s Imaginative Meanderings

by Palma Berger

The paintings of Mary Dolman’s at the Tintina Bakery lead one off into different realms. Her thoughts seem to meander over many subjects depending where she is. The meandering isn’t lost as her vivid imagination is right at hand to add colour and form.

She does seem to like being elevated.

Her journeyings to Peru resulted in a painting of a young girl in a valley surrounded by tall mountains. She named this piece “Sacred Inca Valley”.

Mary Doman and one of her paintings. Photo by Palma Berger

Looking out of a window with stone sills gives a view of jagged mountains, a deep valley and a path winding around one towering mountain. The harshness of the stone window ledge is softened by a small flowering plant growing there.

Then she came to the Yukon.

Dolman had been trained at Capilano College. She studied at Simon Fraser University, majoring in psychology intending to be an art therapist.

Instead she herself became wrapped up in the art. She taught herself a lot. She likes drawing from life. She admits it is a lifelong process of learning.

In the City she felt boxed in. “Everything is in a box; all so square in a city.” She then found herself at a point where she needed a change. .She decided to come north. It was October when she found herself in Dawson City. She quickly found a job here, and then surprisingly everything else fell into place for her.

She had been writing poetry, but discovered she preferred to express herself visually. Her ambition is to support herself with her art, but she doesn’t want to compromise herself. She wants to do art that she believes is good. But she is thrilled when a viewer can connect at an intuitive level.

Being in the Yukon really works for her, as nature and the extremes of climate inspire. “The light,” she says, “is truly amazing.”

She is elevated here one could say. A few of her paintings take the viewer above eagles or a swan, to gaze down on the earth as they see it. “Shoot Down the Sun” shows a sun reaching out tentacles with a full spectrum of colours towards a flying eagle. Below are the waterways of a Yukon river.

In another painting the sun changes the snaking river into peach coloured curves. This was showing the waters’ paths as seen from above in the Arctic.

“Panhandle Travellers” show the dark tails of whales as they dive beneath a sea of blue, with beams of mauve, pink, blue , yellow light shining down from the colourful clouds above.

Her fox is a sneaky part of another painting. The moon shines through midnight blue clouds in another. Just the curves of the Yukon’s rivers are shown in another couple of paintings. There is a feeling of spaciousness in all of them. None are cramped little areas. They all give a feeling of space heightened by colour.

All the paintings are highly original, and take us into the world of Dolman’s imagination. This is a world of much colour, nature transformed into something to show her feelings for nature, which Dolman shares so well with the viewer.

This is not her first art show. Her art has been on view at other times. One art piece was shown in Copenhagen, and she had her own art show in Prince George.

CORRECTION: In the item on Sylvia Strutton’s quilt show, I mentioned that Sylvia had shown her work at the Odd Gallery here. That was an error. Sylvia has shown her work only at Tintina Bakery and Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory.

Legend Tells Where the Mosquitoes Came From

by Dan Davidson

For many generations the Tsimpsian people of the Prince Rupert area shared with their children the legend of Goosluxxks, or The Tree Monster. A cautionary tale about a bloodsucking arboreal menace, it also had the virtue of providing an origin story for another kind of bloodsucker, one quite prevalent during the dog days of summer.

In the tale, the Goosluxxks is finally captured by the warriors of the clan and chopped into tiny pieces. Unfortunately the pieces become mosquitoes, that bane of the boreal forest. Well, at least they are a little easier to deal with than a two metre tall boogeymonster.

The Goosluxxks legend was presented at the

The Goosluxxks monster comes out to menace the audience. Photo by Dan Davidson.

Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Heritage Hall over the Discovery Days weekend with the cooperation of the Trondek Hwechin and the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.

More than just a story, the tale was acted out with over life-size masked characters and shadow puppets that were created as part of the arts festival.

Masterminded by carver Victor Reece (masks) and his partner Sharon Jinkerson-Brass (costumes), the black light shadow play was used to illustrate some of the dramatic fight scenes in the story, while the more than life-size Goosluxxks monster harried the audience as Reece narrated the legend.

The monster was played with lots of great growls by Carla Plaute, also from the Tsimpsian people. Following the play Plaute explained how the tale had been performed annually in her mother’s time. The practice had fallen out of favour, and the story had been told only until a few years ago when Reece carved his masks and brought live performance back to the people.

Reece, who now lives on Saltspring Island, was born in a traditional home, built on pylons, near pPince Rupert. He is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Tsimpsian nation and his hereditary name is Whe’X Hue, meaning Big Sky, which he has also taken as the name of the production company he shares with his wife and partner.

Jason Barber shakes hands with Staff Sgt. Al Hubley. Photo courtesy of RCMP “M” Division.

The Mounties Got Their Man

submitted

The community turned out to see Recreation Director Jason Barber received into the Special Constable program of the RCMP. Jason will serve with the detachment in Dawson for a while and then head off to Regina to take his training for full membership in the force. In the photo at right Staff Sgt. Al Hubley welcomes the new recruit.

Uffish Thoughts: The Keys to Restoring Democracy in Dawson

by Dan Davidson

If the man appointed as Trustee here were to have his way, there would be elections for a new town council in Dawson City before the end of the year.

Ray Hayes, who took on the job for the territorial government when the elected council was sacked on April 13, has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to be in his position for the normal length of time allowed under the Municipal Act. That would be a year from the time of the appointment, leaving hardly enough time for a new council to get its legislative and managerial feet wet before the next set of municipal elections in October of 2006.

The thing is, Hayes has remarked on a number of occasions that people keep telling him his timetable is too advanced, that things won't be ready by then.

As I observed in my last column on this subject, a lot of folks seem to be content with being managed rather than having an actual stake in how the town is run. Then, too, the rumour mill is still active on a number of topics, and it's really convenient for other folks to be able to say nasty things about people who are no longer in a position to fight back or even respond.

Really, there is nothing that anyone can say about the past with any authority as long as the forensic audit is still under way, but I hasten to add that this audit will not really answer all the questions that still exist with regard to the finances and activities of former elected councils. It would have been far better to call the public inquiry requested by the members of the last elected council. That would have included an audit and had the extra benefit of putting the numbers and the paper trail within a historical and narrative context.

Still, back to the main point, which is that there would be no point at all in trying to hold elections as things stand.

There are two key recommendations of the Carrel Report entitled "Trusteeship: Background and Consequences" that have to be addressed before any citizen in his or her right mind would even consider running for public office here, and neither of these have been discussed at this time, at least not by anyone here in Dawson.

The first is recommendation #4, which addresses Debt Relief. Carrell wrote "The municipality's total long term debt, including the cable t.v. loan and the recreation complex loan should be reduced to $1.5 million."

Elsewhere Carrell has written that there is no municipality in the Yukon which could have overcome the debt load (in proportional terms) that Dawson had fallen under. Leaving aside how that happened, a tale about which he and I will not likely ever agree, he's right on that point.

He says on page 12 that it would be foolish to attempt to restore democracy to Dawson "without giving Council not just a fighting chance, but a realistic chance to succeed."

His second key recommendation has to do with the building of a Secondary Sewage Treatment facility here, which is obviously not going to be the one that two governments sat back and watched while Dawson had it designed down to the nuts and bolts. No one here ever said we could afford a Sequencing Batch Reactor Plant, but no one elsewhere ever proposed any realistic alternative either.

Since whatever has to be done also has to be financed 90% by the YTG, Carrell's proposal that the government take over the full responsibility of the project is a very sensible one.

He suggests that the government build whatever it is (probably a lagoon across the river fed by either an underground pipe or by taking the pipe across on the new bridge) and lease it to the town for later purchase.

Given the success rate of sewage projects here, I doubt we'd ever want to own it. No sooner did we take ownership of the existing S&W system in the town than we had to begin what was at least a $10 million dollar, decade long, process of replacing nearly every metre of underground pipe in the town due to inadequate construction and design. We really don't want to have to do that again.

There is a third thing that needs to be settled, and that's the recreation centre.

Carrell didn't think that Dawson deserved or should get any help with its recreation complex woes, but he wrote that before the latest engineering reports were received here this summer.

It now appears that the roof problems which caused the emergency closure in March were the result of a leaky roof, which would probably mean either faulty design or faulty installation. What has been made public of the report doesn't go that far, but neither of these can properly be blamed on the residents or elected officials of the community.

I'd like to think that the territorial government, encouraged by the one elected official we still have,our MLA Peter Jenkins, would step up to the plate and seek a remedy for that problem before the winter season.

I'll wager that no one will want to become a councillor for the City of Dawson if it is clear that these three pieces of baggage will be the first things on the municipal agenda the day after the election.

It would be a recipe for another government takeover.