In this blog post I will give a short summary of the women chosen by our members for their challenge this year. As the year progresses I will add to it as they are presented. If you have missed a meeting and would like to see who has chosen whom you can check back here.
Pioneering Woment of BC and Yukon
Cath
M. Wylie Blanchet (Capi) 1891-1961
Born in Lachine, Quebec she was a tomboy and avid seeker of the natural world. She considered studying archaeology at university but married Geoffrey Blanchet and they had 4 children before his poor health left him unable to work. With a settlement from his employer they bought a car and traveled west. Settling on Vancouver Island in an older house near what is now the Swartz Bay ferry terminal. Geoffrey died under mysteries circumstances, his clothes and wallet were found on board their boat and the swim ladder was down so it was assumed he had a heart attack while swimming.
Capi was now the sole support for her family of 5 children and she supported them by writing freelance articles for a variety of magazines and renting out their home, called Little House, to a family from Washington State every summer for 15 years. She packed up the children and sometimes the dog on their boat, Caprice, a 25 foot long gas boat and they spend the whole summer travelling up the BC coast and exploring secluded coves and meeting the inhabitants.
Capi kept a journal of their trips and considered the travel a continuation of the education of the children. She kept the boat and motor in good repair and navigated dangerous tides and currents in unpredictable waters. When the children were grown up she was encouraged to put her journal stories into book form and so wrote her book, The Curve of Time, as if it happened all one trip while in reality it happened over many summers. The title of the book comes from some writings she had on board the Caprice, by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize winning playwright and poet, who considered time as a curve where if you are standing at the top of the curve in the present you can simultaneously view the past and the future.
The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet
Lena
Susan (Moir) Allison 1845-1937
Born in Sri Lanka, the youngest of 3 children, her family were tea plantation owners until her father died when she was 4. The family moved back to England and Susan attended school in London where she learned Greek, Latin and French and would later add Chinook Jargon to her languages. At 15 the family moved to Hope, BC with her step-father. Later she and her mother opened a school in Hope. It was a busy centre at the time with trading, mining and road building going on.
At 23 she married John Fall Allison and set out that evening with a pack train to the Similkamean. It was the first time a woman rode through the rough trail that later became Allison Pass. They made their home near present day Princeton by the river and lived there and also in Sunnyside, which is present day West Kelowna, with the 14 children they had together. The small log cabin they build there still stands at Quail's Gate Winery.
Through many of her stories she would document her life as a pioneer settler in the Similamean and Okanagan valleys. She wrote a series of articles about her early life in Princeton and about the Indian legends that were told to her directly from her Native friends. These writings caught the attention of the editor of the Vancouver Daily Province in the late 1920's and he was eager to preserve these memories of the pioneer settlers. After her 80th birthday, at the urging of this editor, she began to write about her recollections. They appeared in the paper in 13 issues. They are also presented in a book:
A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia - The Recollection of Susan Allison, edited by Margaret A. Ormsby.
Brigitte
Mary John Sr. 1913-2004
Mary was born at Lheidli, near Prince George, in Saik'uz(Stoney Creek Village). She was a member of the Tack clan, whose crests are cariboo and ruffled grouse. She survived the 1918 flu epidemic and at only 5 years old took care of her ailing mother. At 8 she was sent to residential school in Fort St. James and then moved to another residential school which she attended until she was 14. At 16 she married Lazare John and they had 12 children together.
In 1942 she helped found the local chapter of BC Homemakers Association, the association was intended by the Department of Indian affairs to teach homemaking skills to native women. Mary and other women turned in to a vehicle for political action. In the 1950's she founded the Welfare Committee which worked to place aboriginal children in aboriginal foster homes in or near their own community. In 1980 she established the Stoney Creek Elder's Society, they built a Potlatch House and campground, and provided the impetus for social change and political action.
She was very concerned with the preservation of her culture and language and was one of the founders of the Yinka Dene Language Institute. From 1992 till her death she worked tirelessly to document her dying language. Mary received many honors later in life, including a Membership in the Order of Canada and the Queen's Jubilee Medal. In 2008 the Vanderhoof Public Library opened the Mary John Collection, a collection of 800 books on First Nations topics created in her honor.
Judith
Sophie Morigeau 1836-1916
A remarkable and unusual woman, she lived life on her own terms. Born of a Metis mother and fur trader father she married at 16 but walked away from her husband and ran a pack train business in BC, Montana and Washington. She was apparently run out of Golden for bootlegging. Later in life, having been robbed by her current partners, Sophie quit the pack train and bought a ranch in south east BC, becoming one of the few women landowners of her time.
After an accident where she lost and eye she took to wearing a patch and later on bright green glasses. When she broke a rib which protruded out of her body, legend is that she amputated it herself and hung it in her cabin with a pink bow. It is also said that some of Sophie's men friends disappeared under strange circumstances when they didn't leave as requested.
In general, Sophie is described as friendly, assertive capable and independent. A feminist way ahead of her time.
Jeanette
Daphne Odjig 1919-2016
Daphne was born on the Wiikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario to a decendent of a Potawatomi chief and an English mother. She contracted rheumatic fever at 13 and had to leave school. Her paternal grandfather, a stone carver, sketcher and painter, gave her artistic instruction while she was at home. She moved to Toronto following the death's of her mother and grandfather and worked in factories and in her spare time explored art galleries. She taught herself to paint by ovserving and copying works of the masters.
In 1964 she attended the annual Wiikwemikong Pow Wow and was deeply inspried by the proud cultural display. At this time she chose to redirect her artistic work from a traditional realistic style to a style that celebrated the traditions of her people. Her break through into the art world happened when she recieved critical acclain for pen and in drawings about the Chemawawin Cree being displaced from their land to make way for a dam.
In 1971 she helped establish the first Indigenous owned and run art gallery called the New Warehouse Gallery, the first Candadian gallery exclusively representing First Nations art. Her 8x27 foot canvas, The Indian in Transition, is considerded by many to be her masterwork.
Sandie
Isabella Mainville Ross 1808-1885
Isabella, a Metis woman, was the first female registered landowner in BC. In 1822 she married Charles Ross, a boatman for the Hudson's Bay Company. They moved around BC to a variety of trading forts for the company. In 1843 they moved to Fort Victoria as Charles was promoted to Chief Trader for the HBC. He died suddenly leaving Isabella with nine children.
With money left to her in Charles will Isabella purched 99 acres of land in Victoria. This made her the first female landowner and likely the first Indigenous person to own land in BC. Isabella named her property Fowl Bay Farm after the area's waterfowl. Her children attended school while she worked the land and sold livestock and farm produce. Though she couldn't read or write she spoke French, Ojibway and English.
A tall handsome stone at Ross Bay Cemetery bears Isabella's name on the very land where she raised her family and ran her farm.
