Hon. Yvonne Boyer rose pursuant to notice of November 24, 2021:

That she will call the attention of the Senate to the positive contributions and impacts that Métis, Inuit, and First Nations have made to Canada, and the world.

She said: Honourable senators, I rise today in this chamber to speak to my inquiry on the positive contributions Indigenous peoples have made to Canada and the world.

In introducing this inquiry, my hope is to provide information that may not be widely known but demonstrates and celebrates the strengths of Métis, First Nations and Inuit peoples and their contributions to building the nation.

As you are aware, in this place, I often speak of my Indigenous sisters. Forced sterilization, cerebral palsy, the murdered and missing, residential school abuse and the physical and sexual abuse of Indigenous women and girls have all been discussed in this chamber. Although these are real issues, and unsettling ones, we cannot neglect to talk of the resilience and strengths of our Indigenous sisters, of how they manage to thrive despite a colonial system that has caused immeasurable harms. In recognizing these achievements, we show that they are so much more than the injustices. We show the beauty, strength, brilliance and love.

In talking about some particularly brilliant women who are Métis, First Nations and Inuit, I want to honour all Indigenous women. I hope this is the first of many tributes in this chamber to their resilience and to who we are as Indigenous women and indeed as Indigenous people.

Today, I want to remember and to honour Gail Guthrie Valaskakis. As I began thinking about celebrating Indigenous women, almost instantly Gail’s beautiful face appeared before me, laughing, smiling and shining with its gentle exuberance as if, for a moment, her life force and lovely energy returned from the spirit world.

Gail Guthrie Valaskakis was born on May 8, 1939, to Miriam Van Buskirk and Benedict Guthrie at Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Wisconsin. That’s approximately 300 kilometres south of Thunder Bay as the crow flies.

She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, completed a master’s degree at Cornell University and then a PhD at McGill University. She was the leading authority on northern and Indigenous media and communications in Canada. She consistently raised the profile of Indigenous media and communications in university and government circles, and she helped this medium gain critical academic recognition, policy support and resources.

I must interject here with a little story about her research and how seriously she took it. As she was a storyteller, here is a story she shared with me about her northern research and life.

In the late 1960s, she began her fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation studying the impacts the satellite system would have on the people of Canada’s North. This work took her to the eastern Arctic, where she studied the role and usefulness of communication technologies and became a leading authority on northern and Indigenous media and communications in Canada.

During this time, Gail travelled frequently to the High Arctic. When in the region, she often stayed with the family of a dear Inuk named Killiktee. During week-long snowstorms that forced her into confinement, she had to develop great personal fortitude and display extreme patience in order to come up with ways to entertain herself and not annoy her host family.

Once the whiteout conditions finally gave way to blue skies, Gail was able to spend time outdoors and participate in seasonal Inuit customs. On one occasion during a spring thaw, she accompanied Killiktee as they went about hunting seals out on the open ice by snowmobile and with harpoons. They ventured many miles from Killiktee’s home, with Gail perched snugly on the back of his snowmobile. Over the years, Killiktee had become an expert rider, deftly jumping from ice floe to ice floe during the springtime in daring moves that enabled him to cross vast distances of melting ice in search of seals. On one particularly steep and treacherous floe jump, Gail’s grip around Killiktee’s waist loosened, she fell off and went through the ice. However, rather than scream in horror, Gail proceeded to laugh hysterically, which was her way of dealing with this terrifying situation.

Her reaction greatly impressed Killiktee, as he had not expected Gail to behave so unexpectedly, turning what could have been a panic-stricken situation into one in which laughter prevailed. Killiktee was able to pull her out of the ice and bring her back to his home, where he had her change clothes and wrapped her in thick blankets. I remember her saying that she had never felt so cold in her life and that it took her a week to warm up. But in retelling the tale over the years, she often credited that unusual reaction to what many would consider a stressful event with forging the enduring trust that enabled her friendship with Killiktee to prosper for the decade that followed.

As you can see, Gail’s impressive collaborative and innovative approach to research, evaluation and policy development was groundbreaking. It was adopted by fellow community-based researchers who today acknowledge her as the innovator. Today, we see community-based research as a normal approach, but Gail was pioneering in her work, which was especially important in its applicability to working with Indigenous peoples in Canada. It is quite possible the phrase “Laughter is the best medicine” was coined here.

Gail was also a founding member of the boards of the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal, the Native North American Studies Institute and Manitou College — the first Indigenous post-secondary institution in Eastern Canada. She worked hard as a founding board member and was critical in establishing a halfway house north of Montreal and moving Waseskun House into a full-fledged healing lodge for men. She wrote a report for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples entitled The Role and Future of Aboriginal Communications and received an Indspire Award in the category of Media and Communication.

For 30 years, Gail taught in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University where she established the Native Education Centre and participated in the creation of the Inter-University Joint Doctoral Program in Communications. Her expertise has been recognized internationally, and she has lectured in China, Russia, Israel, the United States and at universities across Canada.

In 1998, she left Concordia and her position of dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to write a book called Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture, and to join the Aboriginal Healing Foundation as director of research. It was at that time we developed our friendship, and my life changed forever because of it.

Now I would like you to really meet the person Gail was. Gail was my dear friend and sister, and we spent many, many hours and days together. We were hired at the same time at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation here in Ottawa. The year was 1999. The foundation was a trust fund that had been set up by the federal government to fund Indigenous communities and organizations that were addressing their own healing needs resulting from the physical and sexual abuse by the priests and nuns at residential schools throughout Canada.

The foundation was operated and run by Indigenous people and most, if not all, were survivors or generational survivors of the schools. Gail was hired as the director of research and I was the director of programs. Our chemistry was perfect.

Gail shared many special gifts with me. One was her ability to write and speak with alarming clarity. Her words could be so crystal clear that you had to pinch yourself, having been completely engulfed in her world.

Yet her accomplishments in her lifetime were enormous and are of the stature of the world’s greatest heroines. But her greatest gift was her capacity to share the world she grew up in; I truly feel as if I grew up alongside Gail.

You see, Gail was a blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty raised on an Indian reservation in Lac Du Flambeau — not exactly the stereotype, and an issue we could both certainly relate to. Here are two personal vignettes she gifted me:

“Gail the whale” she shouted, raising her voice above the giggles. “Hey Pig Nose! Where is your brother Egg Head now?: Whoever said that blondes have more fun never went to an Indian school.”

And the second:

The field behind Simpsons Electric Company was a grassy no man’s land continually claimed in the movement of small battalions of school children with roving alliances. I sensed the fever of contagion rise on my neck, knowing I was exposed to the next shot, “Hey Chomoqamon, white girl, where are you going so fast?” Caught in the vortex of a borderzone windstorm, I felt fat and sluggish, barely able to produce the usual lethal stare, the corrupt smile, the corrosive word. The sudden slap to the head was a trophy – NOT a call to war. Tomorrow I might be walking with them teasing someone else. My position rose and fell, depending on whether I answered the questions of white teachers who were drawn to me like magnets, hit a softball hard enough to make first base, smoked a whole reed cigarette without coughing, stayed beyond the lines of fire in other people’s fights or slithered through a hundred other tests of childhood that emerged each day to move the measure of who I was in Indian country.

The Lac Du Flambeau Indian Reservation was Gail’s heart and soul. She spoke of her grandparents’ deep connections to the land that was passed down to her and her brother Greg. She heard the stories of the battles of Strawberry Island and the spirits of Medicine Rock and the mysteries of the shaman, Anewabe. Gail’s father taught her with photographs and artifacts of his life and his ancestors’ lives full of outpost traders, lumber barons and government administrators. She lived in the past and the present while holding a tenacious grasp of the heritage descended from her father’s namesake Kinistano, who signed the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe, allocating land to the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa.

Though she moved around for education and for love, Gail never really left Lac du Flambeau because her spirit and her heart was always there. She never lost her passion for her people and her home, to which she returned often, right up to the end of her life.

A serious and diligent scholar, but also a person so full of life and laughter, private but outgoing, elegant but entirely without pretense. If you had Gail on your team, you knew you were going to get things done. And you knew you were going to have a lot of fun doing them.

Indeed, she lived her life as her father predicted — on the border of Indian country — walking with a moccasin on one foot and a shoe on the other. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis passed away in Ottawa on July 19, 2007. She is loved deeply and missed by many who remember her as a colleague, a mentor, a scholar and a friend.

And she remains with us in spirit, as an Indigenous role model and an inspiration. I know she is smiling, knowing I shared her stories with you in the Senate of Canada.

Thank you, marsee, meegwetch.

(On motion of Senator Martin, debate adjourned.)

(At 7:15 p.m., the Senate was continued until tomorrow at 2 p.m.)