Fort Providence
Fort Providence is a hamlet in the South Slave Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. Located west of Great Slave Lake, it has all-weather road connections by way of the Yellowknife Highway branch off the Mackenzie Highway, and the Deh Cho Bridge opened November 30, 2012, near Fort Providence over the Mackenzie. The bridge replaced the ice bridge and ferry, enabling year-round crossing of the river.
Fort Providence hosts the annual Mackenzie Days celebrations in August each year.
History
Fort Providence was founded in the 1860s as a Catholic mission site. By 1868, the Hudson's Bay Company, which previously has a trading post at Big Island at the source of the MacKenzie River, moved the post to the location of the mission site. From that moment, the settlement was known as Fort Providence. In 1867, the Grey Nuns opened a boarding school and an orphanage in the settlement. Instruction languages were English and French, and most of the nuns originated from Quebec.Demographics
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Fort Providence had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of. With a land area of, it had a population density of in 2021.In 2016, the majority of its population, 620, were Indigenous people, made up of 590 First Nations, Dene people, and 30 Métis.