Sarah Carter - Compelled to Act: Histories of Womens Activism in Western Canada

Lillian Shirt, 2017. Colin Way Photography, Edmonton.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Lillian Shirt, who was born on the Alberta Saddle Lake Cree First Nation in 1940 and who passed away in Edmonton in 2017. She was an activist for many causes, beginning in the summer of 1969 when she set up her grandmothers tipi in Edmonton outside of the City Hall and later on the grounds of the Alberta Legislature Building to protest discrimination in housing. She had been evicted and no landlord would rent to this Cree, single mother. Her activism that summer was the catalyst for the creation of a provincial plan for welfare housing.

Lillian did not stop there. It would take many pages to list all of her activities since that summer. That same year she helped to establish the Alberta Native Peoples Defense Fund to provide legal aid to Indigenous men and women. She took part in the 1969 Alcatraz Island occupation by Native Americans. For five years, she lived in the Kootenay Plains at the Smallboy Camp, founded by Chief Robert Smallboy to draw attention to the conditions of Indigenous urban and reserve people. There she helped establish the Robert Smallboy School. Many of her activities from the sixties through to the new millennium related to the welfare and education of both mothers and children, and they included the Nekawe Daycare, established in 1972, where the first language was Cree. She was an organizer of the Sacred Circle program offered at Prince Charles School, Edmonton, where elementary students still receive Cree language instruction and where the needs of urban Indigenous students are addressed. Along with her sister, the late Jenny Margetts, Lillian helped to found the organization Indian Rights for Indian Women that fought for decades for equal rights for First Nations women to end their discrimination under the Indian Act. She was a supporter of the Nechi Institute in St. Albert, Alberta, that changes lives based on compassion. She was still organizing and planning until she passed away in the summer of 2017, beloved in the memory of her six children, thirty-one grandchildren, and thirty-five great-grandchildren.

The story of Lillians 1969 conversation with John Lennon, and her possible role in inspiring the song Imagine was first described by historian Corinne George in her masters thesis. Lennon said that he was writing down the words on a pillow case. It was not until she heard the song Imagine over the radio some years later that Lillian remembered the interview and giving permission to John Lennon to use the words of her Cree grandmother.

As interesting as this story is to many, its significance is minor compared to Lillians long and productive career as an activist for Indigenous people in Alberta and Canada. We were privileged that Lillian Shirt was Elder at the 2016 conference History of Womens Political and Social Activism in the Canadian West at the University of Alberta. She gave the opening blessing, was present at Corinne Georges paper on the activism of her and other Indigenous women in Alberta, and was a valuable participant in many sessions. In between she could be found deep in conversation with the conference delegates, always the educator.

Notes

Provinces Plan for Welfare Funding, Edmonton Journal, 7 July 1969, 4.

.

Ritchie Yorke, Lennon and Ono bring message for youth to Canada, Globe and Mail, 27 May 1969, 13.

Quoted in George, 78.

Acknowledgements

We live and work on Treaty 6 and Mtis territory and the unceded territory of Qualicum First Nations and we respect the privilege to do so.

First, our sincere thanks to our collegial, convivial, dedicated, and professional contributors. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with all of you. We are very pleased to showcase this range of work by such talented historians at various stages of career.

Many others have helped to bring this book together. Melanie Marvin assisted with the search for photos. Gretchen Albers provided excellent copyediting, and Heather Green and Konstantin Tebenev developed the first version of the bibliography. The book is supported by grants from the Alberta Heritage Resources Foundation and the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences Awards to Scholarly Publications Program. Many thanks to everyone at the University of Manitoba Press, including David Carr, Jill McConkey, Glenn Bergen, David Larsen, and our meticulous copyeditor Barbara Romanik. Thanks, as well, to indexer Adrian Mather.

The books genesis was a conference in October 2016 at the University of Alberta, History of Womens Political and Social Activism in the Canadian West. Claire Thomson, PhD student in history at the University of Alberta and Melanie Marvin (now administrative assistant with Computing Science) provided valuable assistance as co-organizers of the conference. We would like to thank everyone who helped with this event; there were many, and our apologies as we will likely leave people out: the thirty-four presenters and session chairs; Kathleen Weiss, director of the performance of Wendy Lills Fighting Days; Nadien Chu, Zoe Glassman, Carmen Nieuwenhuis, and Christopher Bullough, who were the actors in Fighting Days. Thanks to Wendy Lill for permission to have her play read. Student volunteers were Emily Kaliel and Inez Lightning. Thanks to Sarah Amato and Monique McFarlane for their photography exhibit, Dishing it Out.