Richard Finnie

Richard Finnie [r]: Author, film director and Arctic explorer, who spent the last 25 years of his life making films for Bechtel [e]

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Richard Sterling Finnie

Other names  | * Richard Finnie

* Klondike Dick

Born  | 1906
Dawson City
Died  | 1987-02-02 (aged 81)
Belvedere, California
Occupation  | author, film director and Arctic explorer

Richard Finnie was a Canadian author, film director and Arctic explorer.[1]

He was born in Dawson City, Yukon, in 1906.[1] His father, Oswald Sterling Finnie, was a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Mining.[2][3] From 1921 to 1931 he was the Director of the Department's Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch.

As part of the crew of CGS Arctic, in 1928, he produced his first film - an account of its voyage to the high arctic.[4]

He produced multiple films about the North, and wrote several books,[4] In 1942, when American corporation Bechtel got a contract to construct the Alaska Highway, Vilhjalmur Stefansson recommended Bechtel's book Canada Moves North to the President of Bechtel, as “the best general book about Northern Canada.” Bechtel hired Finnie, and he worked for the firm for 25 years, producing 60 in-house documentaries.

Finnie's life and work has been the subject of scholarly analysis, as in the 1996 paper "Visions of a Northern Nation: Richard Finnie's Views of Natives and Development in Canada's 'Last Frontier'".[5]

## References[edit]

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Finnie, Richard Sterling, 1906-1987, University of Dartmouth. Retrieved on 2021-11-26. “He made numerous expeditions to the Canadian north which lead to his recognition as an authority on the history and geography of the Arctic and northern Canada.”
2. ↑ Terry Cook. "Some of the Books are Worn Out": The Klondike Gold Rush and Records Conservation, Archivaria, 1986. Retrieved on 2024-01-02. “Oswald Sterling Finnie is an important figure in northern administration. After his Yukon career, he became Chief Mining Inspector of the Department of the Interlor and thus second-in-command in the large Mining Lands and Yukon Branch.”
3. ↑ Charles Arnold. Treaty declined, Tusaayaksat Magazine, Spring 2018. Retrieved on 2024-01-02. “Once Treaty 11 came into effect, the government was obliged to send officials north each year to pay the annuities and to conduct business relating to it. For some years this task fell to Oswald Sterling Finnie, who was the director of the government's Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch, from 1921 to 1931.”
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Obituary: Richard Sterling Finnie, 1906-1987, University of Calgary. Retrieved on 2021-11-26.
5. ↑ Peter Geller (Spring, 1996). "Visions of a Northern Nation: Richard Finnie's Views of Natives and Development in Canada's 'Last Frontier'". Cinema and Nation 8 (1): 18-43. Retrieved on 2021-12-10.