Postcards from the Edge Episode XI Part VI

So Yellowknife certainly does give off the ‘vibe’ of a frontier town… it’s kind of hard to explain unless you’re here… feels much different than the South, and different from Iqaluit too… hard to explain…
Yellowknife is fairly diverse: Of approx 20,000 people, I’ve been told about 19% are First Nations people. There are a whole bunch here: Dene, Gwich’in, Inuit, North Slavey, South Slavey, Inuvialuit, Metis, etc etc etc…. there are also about 300 Chinese people, about 1000 Phillipinos and about 1000 Vietnamese (so I was told by one of the Chinese docs up here)… also, there’s a large population of Indian subcontinent people, mainly immigrating here due to their skills in diamond cutting/working/engineering. So, this city certainly has been found to be more culturally diverse than others I have been to in Canada.
I think that may be what contributes to its feel as ‘frontier country’, especially in light of the ‘second gold rush’ of diamonds…. Whole bunches of people from around the globe coming in to stake their claim… incidentally, I went on a rock walk with a geologist near one of the old gold mines outside Yellowknife, and it was quite interesting seeing all the different types of rock (the mosquitos are HUGE and hungry…). We actually saw some old claim stakes and ramshackle digs made by people looking for gold in the 30s. So that was neat. However, it was also sad to see how much had been built and how much of the rock had been blasted and blighted just to find gold, especially since now, as the gold deposits are harder to extract, these landscapes have been abandoned… and they repeat the process at the diamond mines, all over again… OK, OK… getting off my soapbox again…
For those who wanted to hear more, um, “interesting” patient stories… I had a woman who booked an appointment to come see me, as she hadn’t been able to find her pulse for the last few weeks. That was it. I spent the visit teaching her that 1) it’s impossible to not have a pulse and still be able to come into the office to see me and 2) where the right places are to find a pulse. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I was helpful, although it certainly left me scratching my head at the lack of common sense in people in general, AGAIN.

julia