There were a lot of people involved in that TEST program. And when it was at its peak, the people numbered probably in the hundreds, I would think, between participants and parents. Yeah, it was amazing what he managed to encourage and produce from such an out-of-the-way place as Old Crow
John Firth
John Firth spent a long time getting around to writing his biography of Jean-Marie Mouchet, the Roman Catholic missionary who founded and ran the Territorial Experimental Ski Training (TEST) Program.
In 2024, he published North Star: The Legacy of Jean-Marie Mouchet (FriesenPress, 324 pages). In a recent interview he discussed how he came to write the book.
“Well, what got me started on it was having met him and talked with him forty years ago … forty-five years ago, I guess it is,” he said.
“Basically, I just thought, you know, listening to his philosophy, listening to what he wanted to accomplish and how he was doing it, and knowing what his track record was by that point, in 1981, I thought, you know, there’s a story here that’s a lot deeper than just a guy who’s coaching a bunch of people. So I just sort of hung onto that idea for basically twenty-five or thirty years.”
Mouchet himself was not particularly keen on the idea, having the conviction that the program was more important than he was.
“This book was a long one incubating,” Firth continued. “He’d had other people approach him and ask him if they wanted to do it, and he always said no. And then when I said to him, I think it’s time to write that book, and I’ve still got those interviews we did back in 1980. He thought about it for a while and finally he said, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s do it.’ He just felt everybody was trying to put him up on a pedestal. He didn’t want that, that’s for sure. He didn’t want to be there. He said, ‘That’s not me.’”
Firth’s book begins with Mouchet’s roots in Malbuisson, France, where he was born in 1917, and where he acquired the skills (woodcraft, skiing and marksmanship) that would serve him so well when his vocation (being the youngest son) took him to the priesthood. A love of Jack London’s stories helped guide him to the North, after serving in the French Resistance during World War II.
It was during his posting in Telegraph Creek that he began to develop his ideas about skiing, as a way to help Indigenous youth to reconnect with the land and their traditional values, while at the same time providing them with the means to adapt to the social and cultural change that was having an impact on them.
He would develop these ideas much further when he was reposted to Old Crow in the Yukon, in 1955.
“There were a lot of people involved in that TEST program. And when it was at its peak, the people numbered probably in the hundreds, I would think, between participants and parents. Yeah, it was amazing what he managed to encourage and produce from such an out-of-the-way place as Old Crow.”
His students began to be noticed at competitions outside the Yukon.
“Martha Benjamin’s accomplishment brought it out of the shadows, so to speak, when she won that Canadian championship. She’s still around. I chatted with her in January. She still skis a bit and she still goes out and does what she can on the trails, but she is ninety-something years old now.”
Later there would be branches in Inuvik and Whitehorse.
Firth’s book was a finalist for the Canadian Book Club Awards in the Non-Fiction/Education section.
“I don’t know what we ended up with, but we were in the top three, anyways. No, we didn’t win it, but we were a finalist for it. It also won an award from the International Skiing History Association, which is a worldwide body of skiing, snowboarding sports people, and they give out awards each year for books and films about the sport.
“They contacted me and asked me to submit my book to it because they had heard about it. So I did that and ended up winning the award. It’s called the Ullr Award, named after the Norse god of Winter.”
It’s decided by a panel of judges from Europe and North America,
“So that was kind of cool that I won that. Dawn and I went down to Lake Placid to get it, even though we made the vow that we would not go into the United States. We were promised that we would be going to a good Democratic corner of New York State.”
John Firth is the Yukon’s current Story Laureate and an international award-winning author/storyteller who writes about the history, the people and the places of the North. His books include The Caribou Hotel: Hauntings, hospitality, a hunter and the parrot; One Mush: Jamaica’s Dogsled Team; Yukon Sport: An Illustrated Encyclopedia; River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Rush; Better Than A Cure: One Man’s Journey to Free the World of Polio (Ramesh Ferris with John Firth); Yukon Quest: The 1000-mile dog sled race through the Yukon and Alaska; and North Star: The Legacy of Jean-Marie Mouchet.
John Firth was awarded the annual Heritage Award from the Yukon Historical and Museums Association, in 2019.
