A Walk Along The River

Exploring First Nations History, Indigenous Culture and Yukon Plant Medicine with Amber Berard-Althouse

It’s a warm Yukon summer afternoon and thirty or more people are gathered outside of the Visitor Information Centre in Whitehorse.

Some are tourists here on vacation and others are locals, like myself, taking a break from their regular Thursday. I’m here to go on a walk with Amber Berard-Althouse, a proud Tlingit woman and member of Kluane First Nation. I don’t really know what to expect but I’m curious and hoping to maybe learn something new on this gorgeous sun-shiny day.

Amber is leading free interpretive walking tours along the waterfront this summer with a focus on Yukon history through a First Nations lens, along with a bit of plant medicine mixed in. 

Although she was born in Edmonton and didn’t move to the Yukon until she was 13, it’s obvious from the way she speaks that this is where her roots are, where home is and where she feels most herself. Amber’s mom grew up in the Yukon and that’s where she gets her indigenous heritage from, as well as her love of plants.

Friendly, warm and happy to answer questions, it’s clear that she’s very good at her job. Amber said she wasn’t ever the best student and didn’t go to university but she always had big dreams and knew that she wanted to develop some skills. After graduating high school she worked as a waitress and did a lot of traveling. It was on those trips that she became aware of the similarities between indigenous cultures around the world and her interest in health and wellness began to grow.

In 2009 Amber started to do yoga and immediately fell in love with it. Yoga connected her to her body, to the earth and to a universal source. At the same time, she started learning more about medicinal plants and natural healing modalities. In 2014, as she was doing her yoga teacher training in Vietnam, she got a call back for a job at Parks Canada. She immediately returned to the Yukon and spent the subsequent ten years working for Parks Canada with Kluane National Park and Reserve as a heritage presenter.

Despite being very aware that she wasn’t talking to people on behalf of herself but instead speaking to them on behalf of the government, working for Parks Canada was overall a very good experience where she learned a lot. Her first mentor was Pauly Sias, an interpreter at Kluane when Amber first started, and it was through relationships like that as well as Parks Canada material, books, other coworkers and conversations with her elders and people in her community that she began to put together her interpretative walks and talks on Yukon indigenous culture and history.

Her work was basically storytelling with structure and it seemed to come to her quite naturally. 

“I’m an educator, I’m a comfortable public speaker and this all came from my interpretive experience with Parks Canada. I was a shy kid and that’s all changed” Amber said, reflecting back on her time in Kluane. “I highly recommend working for Parks Canada, especially if you’re First Nations because we need more indigenous representation in Parks Canada. Who knows where that career is going to take you.”

During the last few years though, it became more and more clear to Amber that she needed to follow her internal nudges to go after her dreams and try something new. Letting go of a good job with a steady income wasn’t easy but she faced her fears and on April 1 of this year, marked the beginning of a new chapter in her life: self-employment. She knew she wanted to uplift people, promote wellness and preserve indigenous knowledge. Working with a business coach, she decided to combine all the things she loved into one business.

Working for herself has been a journey towards self discipline. “I took a leap starting my own business and there’s no way I could have known how busy I would be,” she said. Having big dreams is one thing but doing the work every day to bring them into reality is a whole other ball game.”

Along with doing her walks and talks (including a few at this year’s Adäka Cultural Festival) and a stint at the university facilitating First Nations 101, she’s also working on some medicinal plant workshops, finishing work on her website and putting the final touches on an online coaching program that’s been in the works for the better part of the past two years. The eight-week-long online program will be all about healing and will include yoga, plant medicine, journaling, dancing, whole food recipes and much more. She’s hoping to launch it by the end of August and will, for the time being, only be offering it to indigenous women to further their healing journey.

“There’s still a lot of suffering and intergenerational trauma in our communities. I want to lift people up, I want people to see their value, I want people to feel empowered, I want people to be making money, not relying on the government or anybody else to help them. We heal ourselves. We are responsible for our own healing.”

The northern landscape and its medicinal plants are a large part of that healing journey for Amber. “The Yukon has helped me connect to my indigenous roots, to my family, to First Nations’ issues and culture and plant medicine. Colonization happened in the Yukon much later than in the rest of Canada. When the Gold Rush happened, people were still living nomadically here. My grandparents were still living nomadically. I think people are really surprised to learn that… If I would have stayed in Edmonton I wouldn’t be this person, I wouldn’t be a proud indigenous woman.”

One of her favourite things to talk about on her walks is the power of plants. “I want people to start realizing that not all medicine comes from a bottle and a doctor. Medicine is actually all around us and there is a lot that we can intuitively do to help ourselves heal.”

As Amber shares stories about the remnants of history that line the banks of the Yukon River, her pace mirrors the leisurely current of the water flowing past us. She makes a handful of stops as we walk slowly from Rotary Park all the way down to the Fireweed Market at Shipyards. Amber talks about some of the plants we pass by: willow and dandelion.

Her love for the Yukon and its indigenous culture shines through as she seamlessly weaves together historical information and traditional knowledge. The smell of cottonwood, wild roses and hot asphalt fills the air as people cycle past on their bikes while others enjoy the sunny weather from the comfort of a bench or a soft patch of grass. I forgot how beautiful the waterfront is this time of year and this has been the perfect reminder.

Amber will continue offering her weekly walks from the Visitor Information Centre until the end of August at which point she’ll shift her focus to her online coaching and to creating more walks for next year. “I can’t wait to see what the future holds… I really want to mentor Kwanlin Dün and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council people, especially youth, to become interpreters and to take over some of my walks. I have more walks in my head that I want to write and my dream is to help every single community in the Yukon create their own community walking tour of some kind so that there’s interpretive offers all around the Yukon.”

To find out more about Amber and her upcoming offerings, check out “Amber Heals” on Instagram and Facebook.