NorthWith 15 units, the facility provides short-term and emergency housing for Indigenous women and families including those fleeing abuse or recovering from addiction. It’s in honour of the late Ta’an Kwäch’än Elder. Shirley Adamson was a high-profile figure in Yukon politics, business and cultural lifeCBC News · Posted: Sep 22, 2025 1:09 PM EDT | Last Updated: 2 hours agoShirley Adamson in 2018. For decades, Adamson — Zhürá — was an influential and high-profile figure in Yukon politics, business and cultural life. She died in April 2023. (Meagan Deuling/CBC)The Council of Yukon First Nations (CYFN) is honouring Shirley Adamson — Zhürá — by dedicating a temporary housing facility in Whitehorse to the late Ta’an Kwäch’än Elder. CYFN operates the Family Preservation Wellness Centre in the neighbourhood of Whistle Bend and is naming it Zhürá after Adamson. With 15 units, the facility provides short-term and emergency housing for Indigenous women and families including those fleeing abuse or recovering from addiction. It also offers cultural programming, from recovery circles to cooking classes.Adamson, who died in 2023 at the age of 70, was a high-profile figure in Yukon politics, business and cultural life.She served as the first chairperson of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, Yukon vice-chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and grand chief of the Council of Yukon First Nations. She also served as CEO of Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon, chair of the board for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and director with Northern Vision Development, among other things.Family of Shirley Adamson pictured outside the Family Wellness Preservation Centre in Whitehorse. They’re holding a plaque of their mother that’ll be affixed to the facility, which is dedicated in her honour. (Cali McTavish/CBC)CYFN held a ceremony to officially name the facility Zhürá on Sept. 19. Adamson’s daughter, Christine Genier, said her mother had advocated for vulnerable women her whole life even before “it became really popular to pay attention to Indigenous issues.””It wasn’t easy to be a young mother, a young Indigenous mother in the Yukon in the 1970s and when she was advocating, it wasn’t just for herself, it was for the community around her,” Genier said.”Mum knew the challenges personally, because it was her lived experience, and she didn’t want anybody else to feel like they were going through that alone. Everything that mum did was for her family and it was for her people.”Shadelle Chambers, CYFN’s executive director, recalls a story about how Adamson worked with former Yukon MP Erik Nielsen in the 1960s and 1970s to find housing for First Nations women to have a safe place. “She had been working with our families and safe housing and safety for women for probably all of her life,” Chambers said. Christine Grenier, one of Adamson’s daughters, said her mother was incredibly passionate about passing on her knowledge to the next generation. (Cali McTavish/CBC)Gaps in housing for Indigenous peoplesThe Family Preservation Wellness Centre is the first such facility in the territory to be Indigenous-owned. CYFN Grand Chief Math’ieya Alatini said the space integrates language, ceremony and supports families – values she said Adamson worked tirelessly to uphold.”The integration of song, elders in the space is very much an Indigenous pedagogy, Indigenous way of being and way of doing,” Alatini said. Indigenous women are three times more likely than non-Indigenous women to experience violence, and according to the territorial government. Yukon has the highest number of people who have been victims of sexualized and physical violence of all three territories. The Family Preservation Wellness Centre aims to house families at the facility for 90 days, which is a standard for emergency housing facilities across Canada.CFYN Grand Chief Math’ieya Alatini outside the Family Preservation Wellness Centre in Whitehorse. She describes Shirley Adamson — Zhürá — who the centre is named after as a powerful matriarch and leader. (Cali McTavish/CBC)The facility has housed families since February. Chambers said the average vacancy rate so far has been 80 per cent. But right now they are at capacity, and she believes the facility won’t be enough to fill the shortage of traditional housing.”Sometimes we have families staying here for a couple months, which is good. We get to form a deeper connection and relationship with them and help them with some of the life skills and navigation of other services, but it also holds up space for more families to come in,” she said. Chambers said CYFN receives funding for the facility from the Yukon government and Indigenous Services Canada, which CYFN has a 20-year funding agreement with.CYFN is now looking to construct a second building as part of phase two of this project, which would include a daycare and several floors of transitional housing. With files from Cali McTavish
Whitehorse housing facility for women and families dedicated to late Ta’an Kwäch’än leader
