Gladys Evelyn Taylor Cook OM (August 18, 1929 - May 9, 2009) was a Canadian Dakota elder and activist. Her Dakota names were Topah-hde-win [1] and Wakan-maniwin. [2]
Cook was a native of the Sioux Valley First Nation in Manitoba. At the age of 4, she was sent to a residential school in Elkhorn, Manitoba, [3] where she remained until she was 16. While there, she was forced to deny her heritage. [2] While there, she was raped four times, the first time in 1937. After leaving school she moved to Yankton, South Dakota, to work as a hospital housekeeper. At the end of the Second World War, she worked on a hospital ship ferrying wounded soldiers from Guam and Hawaii to San Diego, California. After her return to Yankton, she married a local, Cliff Cook, also Dakota, in 1950. [4] With him she had three children; he was alcoholic, and beat her and their children, so eventually she left him and moved to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. There, she worked at another residential school and cleaned local homes. [4] She left her children with family during this time. [5] Cook would become a leader in the Anglican Church. From 1978 until 1996, she coordinated the National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program in Portage la Prairie. She also educated people about the abuses which went on in residential schools and Native Christianity. [2] In 1991, she confronted her rapist at a school reunion, ultimately forgiving him. Cook died in Portage la Prairie. [5]
In her life, Gladys was involved in different activities and with different groups such as: The Crime, Alcohol and Drug Committee; the Youth Justice Committee, the Quest Group Home for Girls, the Women’s Correctional Centre, the Saint Norbert Foundation, the Agassiz Youth Centre. [6] She was a member of the Anglican Church and was always helping Indians who were abused at the residential schools. [3]
During her life Gladys won multiple awards including the Governor General's Award, [7] the Order of Manitoba, the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal, the Premier's Volunteer Service Award, the YM/YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, the Manitoba Medical Association Award for Health or Safety Promotion, the Order of Rupertsland and the National Aboriginal Achievement Award. [4]
Zitkala-Ša, also Zitkála-Šá, was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist. She was also known by her Anglicized and married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity, and the pull between the majority culture in which she was educated, and the Dakota culture into which she was born and raised. Her later books were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white English-speaking readership.
Portage la Prairie is a small city in the Central Plains Region of Manitoba, Canada. As of 2016, the population was 13,304 and the land area of the city was 24.68 square kilometres (9.53 sq mi).
The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000, mostly from disease.
Charles Edwin Greenlay was a politician in Manitoba, Canada. He served in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1943 to 1959, and was a cabinet minister in the governments of Stuart Garson and Douglas Campbell.
Freda Ahenakew was a Canadian author and academic of Cree descent. Ahenakew was considered a leader in Indigenous language preservation and literary heritage preservation in Canada. She was a sister-in-law to the political activist David Ahenakew.
Michael Geoffrey Peers was a Canadian Anglican bishop who served as Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada from 1986 to 2004.
The Long Plain First Nation is an Ojibway and Dakota First Nations band government in Manitoba, Canada.
Gladys Iola Tantaquidgeon was a Mohegan medicine woman, anthropologist, author, tribal council member, and elder based in Connecticut.
Yellowquill University College is Manitoba's first First Nations-controlled post-secondary institution. The First Nation-owned and -operated college was founded in October 1984, by the Dakota Ojibway Tribal Council.
The Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota is a federally recognized tribe of Yankton Western Dakota people, located in South Dakota. Their Dakota name is Ihaƞktoƞwaƞ Dakota Oyate, meaning "People of the End Village" which comes from the period when the tribe lived at the end of Spirit Lake just north of Mille Lacs Lake.
Robert Watson was an industrialist and political figure in Manitoba, Canada. He represented Marquette in the House of Commons of Canada from 1883 to 1892 as a Liberal and Portage la Prairie in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba as a Liberal from 1892 to 1899. Watson sat for Portage la Prairie division in the Senate of Canada from 1900 to 1929.
May Cecelia Gutteridge,, one of Canada's early and most celebrated social workers, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England, the youngest of four children of Ernest and Polly Symonds. Raised in a devout Christian home, she married Arthur Gutteridge, a school teacher, during WW2 on March 23, 1940, dressed in her Women's Royal Naval Service uniform. The couple had three children, Sonia, Michael and Lance. They immigrated to Canada settling in Prairie River, Saskatchewan, in 1955.
Edward Gamblin (1948–2010) was a Canadian country rock singer and songwriter, who was one of the most influential early stars of First Nations music.
We Were Children is a 2012 Canadian documentary film about the experiences of First Nations children in the Canadian Indian residential school system.
Marion Ironquill Meadmore is an Ojibwa-Cree Canadian activist and lawyer. Meadmore was the first woman of the First Nations to attain a law degree in Canada. She founded the first Indian and Métis Friendship Centre in Canada to assist Indigenous people who had relocated to urban areas with adjustments to their new communities. She edited the native newspaper The Prairie Call, bringing cultural events as well as socio-economic challenges into discussion for native communities. She was the only woman on the Temporary Committee of the National Indian Council, which would later become the Assembly of First Nations, and would become the secretary-treasurer of the organization when it was formalized. She was one of the women involved in the launch of the Kinew Housing project, to bring affordable, safe housing to indigenous urban dwellers and a founder of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada. She has received the Order of Canada as well as many other honors for her activism on behalf of indigenous people. She was a founder and currently serves on the National Indigenous Council of Elders.
Charon Virginia Asetoyer is a Comanche activist and women's health advocate. Asetoyer is one of the founders of the Native American Community Board (NACB) and the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC). President Clinton appointed her to the National Advisory Council for Health and Human Services (HHS). She has been awarded the Woman of Vision award by the Ms. Foundation and the United Nations Distinguished Services Award.
Margaret Bemister was a Canadian writer and educator.
Ma-Nee Chacaby is an Ojibwe-Cree writer and activist from Canada. She is most noted for her memoir, A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder.
We Know the Truth: Stories to Inspire Reconciliation is a Canadian television documentary film, which was broadcast by CBC Television on September 30, 2021, to mark the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. Hosted by Stephanie Cram of CBC Manitoba, the film profiles several survivors of the Indian residential school system, including Ernie Daniels, an activist who is working to convert the former residential school in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba into a national museum about the history of the residential schools.