, Northwest Territories, Canada
Yellowknife

Yellowknife, NWT, incorporated as a city in 1970, population 19,569 (2016 c), 19,234 (2011 c). The City of Yellowknife is the capital of the Northwest Territories and the territory's only city. It sits on the Canadian Shield, on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, 512 km from the Arctic Circle and approximately 1,513 km north of Edmonton, Alberta. Due to its northerly location, Yellowknife is the Canadian city with the most hours of summer sunshine, averaging 1,030 hours per year. The city and Yellowknife Bay were named after the Yellowknives, a Dene band who lived on the islands of Great Slave's East Arm and travelled as far north as the Arctic coast to obtain copper for knives and other implements. They, in turn, acquired their name from the copper-bladed knives they carried.

Indigenous Peoples
Yellowknife is situated in the territory of the Tlicho (Dogrib), a Dene First Nations people who historically occupied the land between Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake. The Tlicho were nomadic and relied on caribou as a source of food as well as material for clothing, shelter and tools. Although the Tlicho typically lived in small societies, they often gathered in larger groups for the spring and fall caribou hunt.

European Settlement
Peter Pond, a North West Company fur trader, was, as far as is known, the first non-Indigenous person to reach Yellowknife, possibly in 1785 and almost certainly two years later. Yellowknife Bay appears on a map he produced in 1785, but there is no surviving record of his travels in that year, and he may have drawn that portion of his map from information provided by Dene trappers. He did establish a post named Fort Providence, 30 km southeast of the present city, in 1786. Fort Providence operated as an outpost camp for Fort Chipewyan (1778), on Lake Athasbasca in what is now northern Alberta, until 1823. (Present-day Fort Providence, on the Mackenzie River, was built in 1869.)

Sir Alexander Mackenzie visited Old Fort Providence in 1789, en route north in search of the river that bears his name, and Sir John Franklin followed in 1820, camping near the site of the present-day city on his way to the Arctic coast. However, aside from an occasional hunter, trapper or prospector who camped in the well-sheltered bay, the area had few other visitors. Dettah, a tiny Yellowknife Dene community 12 km southeast, was the only settlement in the area.

The arrival of Europeans in the region brought diseases which severely affected the Indigenous population. In addition, fur traders introduced European-manufactured goods to Indigenous communities which altered their traditional patterns of life. For example, firearms and fishnets transformed hunting and fishing from a group activity to an individual one...

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