CHON-FM celebrated 40 years as the radio voice of Yukon First Nations over the weekend, with a concert at Rotary Park in Whitehorse and honours for some of its most prominent voices.
Four decades on, station staff say CHON’s mission of ensuring a place on the airwaves for Indigenous people is as important as ever.
“It’s always a matter of hearing yourself in broadcasting,” said station manager Juliann Fraser. “So if you don’t hear yourself or see yourself on TV, then you feel isolated, alone, excluded.”
In the early 1980s, George Henry and Jan Staples set about changing that. The couple worked together to lay the groundwork for the station — Henry rallying support and appearing at regulatory hearings of the CRTC, Staples doing audience surveys and filling out reams of applications.
“We kind of joked that we started with a conditional three-year broadcast licence and a $20,000 debt,” Staples said.
Henry, who died in 2021, also played a key role in setting up Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon, the society that owns CHON, and Television Northern Canada, the precursor to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN).
“In oral culture, in oral tradition, being able to tell stories and tell stories well is something I think people in the Yukon do really naturally,” Staples said. “And people were thirsty for the sound of their own stories and language.”
CHON-FM morning show host Charles Eshelman in the station’s office. (George Maratos/CBC)
That connection with Indigenous people up and down the Yukon River is what makes CHON so important, said morning show host Charles Eshelman.
“CHON has always been the canoe that’s going down our river then stopping at various houses all at the same time,” he said.
“We’ve got different hosts throughout the years and different people that have touched other people and relatives and
different decades of news stories and big events that people remember and that’s what makes it important.”
Henry and Staples were both honoured for their work Saturday, as was late Champagne and Aishihik First Nations Chief Bob Charlie, and Ben Charlie, who at 84 is CHON’s longest-running radio host.
Ben Charlie still works five days a week. He said he still loves playing music, speaking his Gwich’in language and talking to people from Alaska to the Northwest Territories.
“Somebody will call in and say what’s going on in their community,” he said. “And I talk to a lot of different people that I used to know…. So I never get tired of this, put it that way.”