Canada Post, Commemorative Stamps, and the Klondike.

By Patricia Roussel and David Dean

This post is part of the Canada Post and Canadian Culture series.

This is the first post in a limited series dedicated to studying the history of Canada Post. Inspired by recent 2025 labour disputes and renewed public conversation about Canada Post, the intention here is to examine the cultural impact and historical legacy of a controversial yet essential Canadian Crown Corporation. A national institution and the nation’s leading postal operator, Canada Post in its earliest iteration proceeded Canadian Confederation itself.

In this co-authored post Patricia Rousell and David Dean will explore the connections between postage stamps, shaping national identity through processes of commemoration, and how this relationship plays out in praxis with a case-study of the 1996 Canada Post-issued Klondike Gold Stamp Series.

Canada Post and Imag[in]ing Canada on Stamps

In 1908, Canada issued a set of eight stamps commemorating a uniquely Canadian historical event: the founding of Quebec three hundred years earlier. Four of the stamps were strikingly different from any previously issued by the Dominion which had, with one exception, always featured a portrait of the ruling monarch.[1] The two highest level stamps offered imagined scenes of the French “discovery” of Canada: Champlain’s departure from France (on the 15¢ stamp) and Cartier’s arrival (on the 20¢). Equally unusual were the 5¢ and 10¢ stamps which depicted Champlain’s habitation and Quebec c.1700 respectively. The remaining stamps, used for regular postage, would have seemed more familiar, especially to anyone who remembered the 1897 issue marking Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Each of those stamps had featured a double portrait of the Queen, one from the beginning of her reign and one from the 1880s. Similarly, the remaining four stamps of 1908 were double portraits of, respectively, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and James Wolfe.

The decision to issue the Quebec tercentenary stamps on July 16, 1908, was made by the Postmaster General. Information about how to manage supply and demand was sent to local postmasters in a circular letter six days before, explaining that the stamps were being released to meet “what appears to be a popular wish.”[2] Philatelists (those who study postage stamps and their production) call such stamps commemoratives. These are issued “usually for a limited period, to mark a particular event or anniversary,” unlike definitive stamps used for normal, everyday postage and available indefinitely until replaced by a new design. Although what counts as a commemorative stamp is debated by philatelists, most agree that the first commemorative stamp was issued by Peru in 1871 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first railway in South America.[3] The first British Empire commemorative was issued by New South Wales in 1888 to celebrate the centenary of the British settlement in Australia. Canada’s first, the Quebec tercentenary issues, were released in considerable numbers and were reported to be hugely popular.[4]

Anniversaries offer the opportunity for the state, through its postal authorities, to mark a past event it considers to be historically significant and worthy of celebration. As Eric Hobsbawm (thinking about European state building between 1870 and 1914) remarked, postage stamps are the “most universal form of public imagery other than money” and have considerable “publicity value” for the nation state.[5] In Canada, the Postmaster General, a cabinet position in charge of the Post Office Department, had ultimate authority over what was commemorated and celebrated on postage stamps between 1867 and 1981. This was a largely internal matter until 1969 when a Stamp Advisory Committee was formed, composed of philatelists, historians, designers and others. The committee remained after the Post Office Department was replaced in 1981 by Canada Post, a crown corporation managed by a President/CEO and a Board of Directors.

Canada Post, like the Post Office Department it replaced, plays a significant role in shaping our sense of nationhood and the national imaginary. Its website explains some of the criteria used to determine whether a topic is worthy of a postage stamp. Commemorative subjects must relate primarily to Canada, have national significance, and have popular appeal. Examples provided on the website include “Canadian history, traditions, accomplishments, or natural heritage,” “social, cultural, political, economic, or business life,” and the “birth, work, or an event in the life of an outstanding Canadian.”[6] The workings of the Committee are confidential, requiring an access to information and privacy (ATIP) request.

If the institutionalized backstories about Canada’s commemorative stamp program are not easy to come by, historians can employ other research strategies to explore the nature of commemorative stamps, the messages they convey, and the parts of the story that they exclude or silence. They can locate the stamps in their political and cultural context, situate them within a historiography, examine their distribution, explore public reactions as expressed in print and digital media, and subject them to rigorous visual analysis. In this post, Patricia will bring her insights into a significant set of stamps issued in 1996 to mark the 100^th anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Commemorating the Centennial: The 1996 “Discovery” of Klondike Gold Stamp Series

Canada Post, Yukon Gold Rush, 13 June 1996, Pane of Ten, Designed by Steven Slipp, Unitrade Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps (2022), catalogue #1606i, p. 320. Photo Credit: David Dean.

Issued on June 13th, 1996, to mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of gold in the Klondike, five commemorative stamps designed by Nova Scotian graphic designer Steven Slipp were printed and distributed across Canada. Available as a pane of ten as well as individually, these stamps depict key elements of the Klondike Gold Rush, namely: the “discovery” of gold, stampeders travelling north with their supplies, the North-West Mounted Police controlling the border, saloons and showgirls in Dawson City, and mining technologies such as sluice boxes.[7] Each stamp follows a consistent visual structure, featuring what Slipp describes as one “colourful” individual, a large typographic title, a landscape (photograph or engraving), a related print document, and a gold foil sun element.[8] With a print run of 2,400,000 each,[9] these stamps found their way into post offices, onto envelopes, and into personal collections, where they continue to offer a visual representation of the popular story of the Klondike Gold Rush as a defining moment for the Canadian North.

A striking feature of the pane of ten is the narrative created by the short sentences printed above and below each row of the five stamps, in English and French respectively. Together, these captions form a timeline of the gold rush, beginning with the “discovery” of gold by Tagish man Keish, known in most English contexts and labelled here as “Skookum Jim,”[10] in 1896 and concluding with “ordinary men gambling on their dreams.” This captioning strongly influences where viewers’ eyes are drawn and what they pull from specific elements of the stamps’ imagery.

Canada Post, Yukon Gold Rush, 13 June 1996, Skookum Jim Mason Staked the First Claim, 45cents multicoloured, designed by Steven Slipp, Unitrade Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps (2022) catalogue #1606a, p. 320. Photo Credit: David Dean.

According to Slipp, there was considerable research put into each of the stamps by members of Canada Post’s Stamp Advisory Committee for several reasons: to determine the national significance and relevant details of the subject, and to provide the selected designers with an abundance of information and visuals pertaining to the subject. The decision to feature Keish as the main figure of the first stamp was made by managers in the Stamp Products division at Canada Post, which at the time was led by manager William (Bill) F. Danard.^[11] The analysis which follows explores the significance of prominently featuring Keish at the start of this commemorative series, while also addressing the gaps between the stamp descriptions, its imagery, and the perspectives present in Canada Post’s portrayal of the Klondike Gold Rush narrative.

As noted, Keish is positioned at the centre of the stamp. He stands in front of golden text reading “Bonanza,” with George Carmack’s infamous discovery claim behind him and a claim stake to his left. Keish holds a gold pan tucked under his arm and wears a tailored suit, with his famed gold nugget chain hanging from his jacket. To his right, there is a beautiful image of the Yukon River coated in a glistening gold, with rolling mountains on either side and a giant frog looming over the river. The background is rendered in different shades of purple, with the frog outlined in gold.

Each of these features speaks to a different part of the discovery story, as decided upon by Canada Post’s Stamp Advisory Committee.  What do these carefully thought-out features say about the narrative that is being commemorated, especially considering that Keish, an Indigenous individual, is at its centre?

The popularized beginning of the gold rush dates to August 1896, when Keish, Káa Goox (Tagish Charlie), Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack), and George Carmack found gold in Rabbit (later re-named Bonanza), Creek in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory. Keish and Shaaw Tláa were siblings, Káa Goox their nephew, and all three were members of the Tagish First Nation, whose homeland spans present-day southern Yukon and northern British Columbia. George Carmack, originally from California, met Keish while working on the Chilkoot Pass, where Keish earned the name “Skookum Jim,” meaning “strong” in the Chinook dialect, for carrying heavy loads as a packer.[12] Their relationship later led to Carmack’s marriage to Shaaw Tláa and the couple’s move north in his pursuit of gold.

It is important to note that this “discovery” narrative often obscures the fact that Indigenous peoples, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in specifically, had long known of the presence of gold in their lands.[13] While accounts of who among the four first found the gold remain contested, Carmack was officially credited after staking the initial claim, granting him greater access to the land and the riches it held. For many years, he remained at the centre of this narrative due to racial hierarchies that privileged settler perspectives and experiences. Though the stamp seems to invite a different narrative by foregrounding Keish, Carmack’s authority remains present, marked by the discovery claim behind Keish with the inscription “G.W. Carmack filing at Forty-Mile.” Following this filing, news spread rapidly, drawing over 30,000 outsiders to the region by 1898. They completely reshaped the land and renamed it the “Klondike,” a mispronunciation of the Hän word “Tr’ondëk.”[14] This upheaval irrevocably transformed the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in fishing camp of Trochëk, sitting at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, as the tent city across the river grew into Dawson City, bringing years of dispossession and violence to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in.

According to oral histories collected by respected Northern anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, Keish’s original presence at the “discovery” was not driven by the hunger to find gold; rather, he travelled far north from his Tagish community to search and care for his sister, Shaaw Tláa. Another important factor that brought Keish to the site was his frog spirit-helper, which he claimed to have acquired earlier in his life when he saved a frog and returned it to water. This frog was later recognized as having been the Tagish spiritual figure Tl’anaxéedákw, or “Wealth Woman.”[15] Wealth Woman appeared to Keish in a dream and took him to her father, who promised Keish great riches as a reward for having saved his daughter when she was in the form of a frog.[16] These stories and dreams emphasize that Keish’s experience in the gold rush was deeply situated within his Tagish culture, a connection that this stamp’s imagery clearly acknowledges with the frog hovering over the river.

The contrast between the left and right sides of this stamp creates a visual reckoning in the Klondike Gold Rush narrative. In front of the discovery claim, Keish is presented within a prospector mythology, which Cruikshank interprets as him being praised as an “exception of his own race,” or portrayed as an Indigenous individual who wanted to be a white man.[17] With this, settler-colonial values are imposed upon Keish as the original “exploiter” of Yukon gold. Yet on the left side, with Keish’s frog spirit-helper appearing over the river, that settler-colonial narrative is disrupted; instead, his Tagish worldview interprets the discovery narrative in a completely new light.

This commemorative stamp is remembered by Canada Post as an effort to grant Keish the historical recognition he was long denied within the discovery story of the Klondike Gold Rush.[18] Issued nationally and circulated widely, this stamp continues to shape how the Klondike Gold Rush is presented. Today, a framed stamp sheet of this series hangs in the Dawson City Post office, where locals can see it and perhaps consider how it reflects the history of their home.

Overall, the stamp signals a tentative shift in collective memory by juxtaposing settler imaginaries with Tagish worldviews. It provides a canvas to reshape the story, centring an individual who was once overlooked, even as broader Indigenous experiences during the Gold Rush remain in the background. This stamp represents an important step toward creating space for reimagining how the Klondike Gold Rush has been, and continues to be, understood as a significant event in Canadian history.

The Public History of Stamps

Patricia’s close reading of the 1996 Klondike stamp issue is part of a larger SSHRC-funded project on the public history of postage stamps, “Philately in Troubled Times,” which explores how history, memory, and identity are conveyed through stamps. Philatelists and stamp collectors have for decades demonstrated passion for and deep knowledge of postage stamps and postal history, yet this living archive has been largely ignored by public historians. On the other side, collectors focus attention on the materiality of stamps and rarely engage with how representations are constructed, the historical and historiographical contexts, or the theory and practice of history and public history. This project aims to bridge this gap by creating an accessible database of the first historical stamp issued by various currently and formerly existing countries, and by offering case studies such as the one Patricia has discussed here. Other team members are examining stamps issued by Bhutan, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and San Marino.[19]

The process of creating the database has raised many questions about how we conceptualize the past and identify what counts as history, and has uncovered aspects of how national imaginaries were negotiated variously over space and time, through colonization and de-colonization, locally, nationally, and transnationally. Our project challenges complacency about what is commemorated by asking questions about choices and by identifying what is silenced and erased. It asks how the past is represented on stamps by interrogating processes, production, and design choices. More generally, it traces shifts and trends over time across the globe, from when the first stamps were issued in the 1840s to the present day. As the Klondike case study shows, it is not only what is represented on stamps that matters, but  also how those representations are made to do history and memory work; how they perform the past to shape a national imaginary both in Canada and beyond; and what is omitted, silenced, and erased in their making.

Patricia Roussel is an MA candidate in Public History at Carleton University. Her graduate research examines the history of public commemoration and the heritage community in Dawson City, Yukon, on Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory.

David Dean is a Distinguished Research Professor in History at Carleton University. He recently published Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling (Routledge, 2025), and leads the SSHRC-funded Philately in Troubled Times project.

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[1] Unitrade Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps (2022), 49-74. The exception was the Imperial Penny Postage “Christmas” stamp issued in December 1898, which featured a world map marking the British Empire in red. The Province of Canada (prior to Confederation) had issued stamps featuring beavers and Jacques Cartier. Unitrade Specialized Catalogue, pp. 41-48.

[2] Robert Miller Coulter, Circular to postmasters. Tercentenary series of postage stamps, 1608-1908, Library and Archives Canada, ID 2186244.

[3] R.J. Sutton, The Stamp Collector’s Encyclopedia (Philosophical Library, 1966), 76.

[4] Over 35 million of the 2¢ stamp were printed, compared to just under 20 million of the 2¢ 1898 imperial penny postage stamp. Unitrade Specialized Catalogue, pp. 68, 74. See also H.V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 261-262.

[5] Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 281.

[6] Canada Post, “The Canada Post stamp program,” October, 17, 2025, https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articles/philatelic-products/stamp-program.page (last updated October 17, 2025). See also Jesse Robitaille, “‘Inner workings’ of Canada Post’s Stamp Advisory Committee explained,” Canadian Stamp News, April 4, 2017, https://canadianstampnews.com/inner-workings-canada-posts-stamp-advisory-committee-explained/.

[7] Sluice boxes are long trays lined with riffles that separate gold from sediment by channeling water to trap heavier materials like gold and black sand, which are later panned to search for gold dust or nuggets.

[8] Steven Slipp, email to Patricia Roussel, January 12^th, 2026.

[9] This was slightly below the 1995 Arctic series of five stamps (3,000,000 of each stamp) but identical to those issued in 1996 commemorating Olympic gold medalists and Canadian authors. Unitrade Specialized Catalogue (2022), pp. 314, 321, 323.

[10] Keish’s English name, “Skookum Jim,” continues to be widely used in commemorative contexts, including the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre in Whitehorse, the oldest Indigenous organization in the Yukon, and the Skookum Jim Award administered by the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada.

[11] Steven Slipp, email to Patricia Roussel, January 12^th, 2026.

[12] Jody Beaumont and Michael Edwards, First Nations Interpretative Manual (Travolution, January 2024), 129, https://travolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/First-Nations-interpretative-manual.pdf.

[13] Helene Dobrowolsky, Hammerstones: A History of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, 2014), xiii.

[14] Helene Dobrowolsky, Hammerstones, xii.

[15] Julie Cruikshank, “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 1 (1992): 24-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/482563.

[16] John Sandlos, “Who Was Skookum Jim?” Canadian Mining Journal, November 1, 2023, https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/featured-article/who-was-skookum-jim/#:~:text=Keish%20also%20maintained%20a%20rich,the%20large%20group%20of%20participants.

[17] Cruikshank, “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives,” 33.

[18] Steven Slipp Design, “Postage Stamp Design: Commemorative Postage Stamps,” SlippDesign.ca, https://slippdesign.ca/commemorative-postage-stamps.shtml.

[19] Led by Principal Investigator David Dean and Project Manager Anna Kozlova, the team members are Mario Baker Ramirez, Chantal Brousseau, Declan Da Barp, Charlie Ham, Charlotte Johnston, Joy Karinge, Trevor Peeters, Patricia Roussel, and Jaime Wood. This post draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.