Author's Note

Tracking the Caribou Queen has been more than a decade in the making. Begun as a personal reconciliation project to more honestly understand the role race and privilege played in my foundational thinking, the work predictably morphed into a multi-layered examination of my past, my psyche, and the insidious ways systemic racism shaped my youth in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, during the '60s and '70s. Tracking the Caribou Queen was painful to write.
The language in this text, offensive now, is the language of the times. For some, the material presented may trigger painful and unprocessed memories. It is not my intension to hurt or retraumatize any community of readers, but rather to reveal how my thinking about Indigeneity in those days was warped by stereotype, prejudice, and white privilege.
Uncomfortable as it was to face my own part in Canada's colonization of Indigenous Peoples, I believed that my way forward lay in telling my own experience as truthfully as I could. All of the events in this book are recounted in varying degrees of acuity and precision. In some instances, I have shaped chronology, geography, and identity to serve the story. I have changed names; melded the lives of two or more real people into one character; and altered gender, age, and even ethnicity to protect innocent people. My early life was intertwined with others, many of whom may be profoundly uncomfortable having their lives projected on these pages though the lens of a child, and later a teenager, sorting out her own issues of personal culpability. It is these people I endeavour to protect.
The book's adolescent love story is shaped by the intense longing of a lonely teenage girl. As such, I believe it is, at its heart, true.
Public figures, including my much beloved father, who spent the majority of his educational career in the Territories, have remained relatively unaltered. The attitudes of these men (and some women) were shaped by a different time and sensibility. My intention is neither to shame nor humiliate them, but rather to illuminate the systemic racism inherent in the settler experience and illustrate the trickle-down effect on subsequent generations based on entrenched ideas of paternalism, misogyny, and patriarchy.
I am, by no means, an expert on northern colonization, assimilation policy, or federal educational initiatives. Indeed, I would encourage white readers to further their own understanding of the impact of colonization by reading accounts from an Indigenous perspective.
This writing is drawn from my lived, individual experience. I feel compelled to own my whiteness-not good, not bad, just a fact-as much as I acknowledge and hold myself accountable for the missteps and mistakes that came from my generation and the generation before mine. My hope is that readers, be they Indigenous or settler, recognize aspects of their own lives in this work.
Colonizing people cannot begin to enable justice until we understand our place and agency in past injustices. In naming our participation, in owning the actions of the past, we can begin to take responsibility for our part in it. Only then can we make way for a right and equitable future as true Treaty People.

Margaret Macpherson
Edmonton, 2021