SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Among the people returning for Yellowknife's 75th anniversary was a woman who was raised by the town's most famous educator - Mildred Hall.

Helena Acikahte was contacted by B.J. Miller about returning for a visit to the place where she was raised. Miller, a member of the Red Hat Society which restored Hall's old log schoolhouse, the city's first school, has been busy conducting historical tours of the schoolhouse.

"When (Miller) contacted me and let me know what was going on, I was a little apprehensive because a person has memories and you don't want to wipe them clean," said Acikahte, as she sat outside the schoolhouse where the woman who raised her taught some of Yellowknife's first generations.

"I had a feeling that Yellowknife was now a great big sprawling metropolis, and (I thought) that when I came here and tried to locate where I had been raised and where I used to live, I wouldn't recognize it."

As it turns out, this is not the case at all.

"Yellowknife is still Yellowknife - it's just expanded and there's more buildings but it's still very much the same and I'm just thrilled to be here," she said.

Acikahte is Hall's niece. When Acikahte's father and mother split up in Texas, he asked Hall and her husband - Jock McMeekan, writer and publisher of the Yellowknife Blade, the town's first newspaper - if they would take six-year-old Acikahte in.

They did in 1949, and the three lived together in Yellowknife from then until 1961 except for a few years in Uranium City.

"She brought me back and the two of them raised me as their own, and so that's what brought me back to Yellowknife in 1949. I went to kindergarten and grade school, and in 1953, Jock packed us up and took us down to Uranium City ... and we stayed there for seven years," said Acikahte, who later came back to Yellowknife to graduate high school at Sir John Franklin before the family moved on again.

"All and all, I had an unbelievably good upbringing. It was full of adventure, certainly not uneventful. We had a great time, the three of us. They were great parents."

Though Hall retired from teaching when she and McMeekan adopted Acikahte, the young girl was taught much by her parents as she grew up in early Yellowknife.

"She made sure I was well read. She never hesitated to correct my English. It was as if I was being taught all the time but not in the environment of a school room," said Acikahte.

"I learned to appreciate Mother Nature, Mother Earth, and they taught me how to live off the land and entertain myself."

The cabin that they lived in, on the tip of Latham island, had no electricity or plumbing. Light was provided by kerosene lamps and candles, and the water they used came from Great Slave Lake.

Acikahte said they lived off the land, never having domestic meat like beef or pork. They would instead eat caribou, fish, goose and duck, as well as vegetables that Hall would cultivate.

Hall also experimented, and was successful with hydroponic gardening - using a set-up that was built by McMeekan - and garnered media attention at the time for the quality and size of her vegetables.

"We had the biggest cucumbers, the biggest heads of lettuce and tomatoes, and that served us all through the summertime."

There was a log cabin out by Tartan Rapids, and the family would go there by canoe, or someone would fly them over and leave them for a few weeks in order for them to gather berries and plants.

They would "pick berries because we had to make our own jams and jellies and chutneys, and that would suffice us through the winter. We also made our own root beer," said Acikahte.

She said the family would sometimes collect spruce bows and lay them on the floor as a mattress. "If we went up by canoe, Jock would anchor the canoe parallel to the beach, and it was wide enough that the two of them would sleep in the canoe and I would sleep up in the bow and we'd be rocked to sleep by the waves."

Though life was harder then, Acikahte said it was never bland.

"We always entertained ourselves, and we were always outside. It didn't matter whether it was winter or summer."

After 1961, the family moved west and in 1970, Hall died in Victoria, B.C.

Acikahte had her own family by then, and passed on the things she learned living off the Northern land to her own son.

"She was very strict, as were all teachers back in those days, and she taught me wonderful values and I've been able to pass them on to my son and I can see he is doing the same with his children."

Coming back North after all these years, and seeing the legacy her parents left behind - the physical representation of which being Hall's namesake school as well as the McMeekan Causeway - has been a journey of its own for Acikahte.

"It brought a tear. I was choked up a little bit," she said.

Acikahte brought old 8mm movies Hall had made that have been transferred onto Beta tapes, and left them at the Prince of Wales Heritage Centre.

As well, she donated a collection of the Yellowknife Blade newspaper, and a book containing all of McMeekan's "McMeek-anecdotes."

Acikahte has returned to Calgary this week but she plans to spend more time here helping to preserve our history, and hopefully to restore the cabin where she was raised - which currently stands in Fred Henne Park.