The church in Fort Good Hope, a community north of us, is a National Historic Site and has its own wikipedia page.
I had a chance to visit it recently and take these photos of its beautifully painted interior.
It was built by Father Émile Petitot (1838-1916), a French missionary, cartographer, ethnoligist, geographer and linguist. He was an amazing character, one of those adventurers of old who forsook Western society and set off into the unexplored unknown, learned and mastered indigenous languages, visited and mapped never before traveled areas, built communities and amazing churches in them, established agriculture in places that had never known it and generally lived a fuller life than anyone today could know. He seems to me like the kind of person whose cumulative life-long first-person experience (if, at the end of time, gods and aliens can go back and relive anyone’s life) would be a tourist attraction for time travelers.
Unfortunately, so the local priest told me, the church is terribly insulated and almost impossible to heat so it almost never gets used. At least the cold and disuse helps to preserve the beautiful interior.
