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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

This episode was inspired by a clip from the PBS animated TV show Molly of Denali, which an algorithm fed to me over Halloween. In this clip, Molly's classmate, Jake, wants to dress up as Walter Harper for Halloween. Walter Harper had Athabaskan and Irish ancestry, and so Jake's costume is this homemade outfit that he has made to look like regalia. But Jake is not native. So this clip is about

how regalia is not a costume, and it's not appropriate for a non-Indigenous people to be dressing up in this way.

Walter Harper was the first person to reach the summit of Denali, so Molly and her friends put together a more suitable Halloween costume for him using mountaineering gear.

This is a really sweet clip. It's about friendship and about being respectful

of people's cultures and traditions.

But my first thought was,

hey, do we have an episode about Walter Harper?

Now we are about to have two,

since this is a two-parter.

Walter Harper's parents were Arthur Harper,

who was born in Ireland, and Sintana, who was Coyacan Athabaskan.

In some accounts, Sintana is also referred to as Jenny.

Arthur Harper had immigrated to the United States in the wake of the Great Famine in Ireland,

and he and Sintana had met in 1874.

Arthur was kind of a larger-than-life figure.

He was a prospector and trader who Hudson Stuck later described as, quote,

the first man ever to come to the Yukon country seeking gold.

...