Yellowknife and Northwest Territories

Yellowknife is the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories and has a population of approximately 20,000. It is located on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, and is about 400 kilometres or 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Yellowknife and its surrounding water bodies were named after the local Yellowknives Dene First Nation, who made tools from regional copper deposits. Of the eleven official languages of the Northwest Territories, five are spoken in significant numbers in Yellowknife including Dene, Suline, Dogrib, South and North Slavey, English, and French. This makes the current population very ethnically mixed. In the Dogrib language, the city is known as Somba K'e ("where the money is").

Yellowknife was first settled in 1935, after gold was found in the area; Yellowknife soon become the centre of economic activity in the Northwest Territories and became the capital of the Northwest Territories in 1967.

As gold production began to decrease, Yellowknife shifted from being a mining town to a centre of government services. However, with the recent discovery of diamonds north of Yellowknife, this tide has begun to reverse.

Yellowknife offers unrivalled opportunities for investment, tourism, business development and employment. The abundance of minerals, oil and gas in the NWT has had a dramatic economic impact on Yellowknife. Since the discovery of diamonds in 1991, there are now operating diamond mines in the Territory making Yellowknife the “Diamond Capital of Canada”.

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