Miriam Green Ellis - Travels and Tales of Miriam Green Ellis

For my sisters, Louise and Agnes

PREFACE

Brains should be used if available

I DISCOVERED MIRIAM GREEN ELLIS (18791964) serendipitously about five years ago when I was collecting information about Oblate missionary mile Grouard. I happened on the photograph shed taken of Bishop Grouard in the Edmonton train station in June 1922, when both were departing for the North; Grouard to Fort Chipewyan and Ellis to Aklavik. Finding out that an Alberta newspaper woman had journeyed to Aklavik by train and river steamer in 1922 fired my imagination. This accidental discovery led me to the twenty-one boxes of the Miriam Green Ellis Collection, bequeathed by the writer to the University of Albertas Special Collections Librarypublished articles in magazines and newspapers, typescripts, speeches, clippings, keepsakes, photo albums, and coloured glass slides. The more I rummaged and probed in this archive, the more intrigued and, yes, hooked I became. As well as inviting a move beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries to explore writing embedded in the day-to-day challenges of travel reporting and the practical considerations of copy deadline and readership, the exercise continues to show me what unanticipated directions await in the archives.

When I contacted British Columbiabased historian Marjory Lang, author of Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 18801945 , she wrote almost immediately to say how excited she was to hear that someone is doing more work on this fantastic woman (Lang, email). Her adjective prompted me to tabulate what made Miriam Green Ellis (MGE) fantastic. Following the newspaper and manuscript trail she left behind discloses the way we were as westerners and Canadians in the early decades of the twentieth century. Her composed pictures of prairie life offer vivid, idiosyncratic impressions, reflections of a past and a culture that continue to inform our understanding. The fact that she struck out for Aklavik on her ownthat is, without the endorsement of her editor Frank Oliver of the Edmonton Bulletin testifies to her curiosity about changing conditions and modes of transport, her interest in the unknown territory with its pioneering oil industry, and her eagerness to see for herself. Remarkably too, the trip illustrates her entrepreneurial spirit; she took a financial risk her publisher was unwilling to take, and parlayed it into a not-inconsiderable advance in her career, both through the sales of articles and lectures and through the publicity that established her in a much wider sphere. Here was a person who made her own way when the industry was unwilling to create this kind of space for a woman. Her lifelong commitment to the Canadian Womens Press Club (CWPC) reveals remarkable professional and personal loyalties, connecting her to the tradition of pioneering women journalists: Kathleen Kit Coleman, co-founder and first president of the CWPC ; Nellie McClung, suffragist, social activist, politician, and fiction writer; Violet McNaughton, founder of the Saskatchewan Women Grain Growers; and E. Cora Hind, whom Ellis succeeded as Western Canadas premier agricultural journalist. Her tribute to these forerunners and contemporaries, delivered as a talk, Pathfinders , at the 1956 CWPC Triennial in Edmonton, indicates the breadth of this network of press women and MGE s zest and sense of belonging. These qualities of independence, loyalty, and pluck only intensify her appeal.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot. A Recipe for Remembrance. To Jane Stewart from the Edmonton Womens Press Club. 10 June 1922. [BPSC]

It remains a mystery why the MGE Collection has sat relatively undisturbed for four decades, with the exception of the scholarship of Susan Jackel, Lisa LaFramboise, Marjory Lang, and Kay Rex. MGE s experience as a cub reporter on dailies in Prince Albert, Regina, and Edmonton, and her a quarter centurys affiliation with the Montreal-based weekly Family Herald and Weekly Star as its western editor, affirm her lasting appeal. She brings a varied and always highly coloured perspective to her writing. Respecting the freedom of the press and identifying the place of the individual in local society, she combines the best features of both metropolitan dailies and rural weeklies, as Paul Voisey describes them in High River and the Times . Though not included in the contingent of now-forgotten newspaperwomen whom Jean Marie Lutes studies in Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 18801930 , MGE resembles her American counterparts, whose bodies, circulated through the pages of the papers that employed them, became emblems of publicity, being identified with and through the process of making public their images and their words (Lutes 6).