Project to spotlight Aboriginal people in the province

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A book focusing on the successes and talents of Aboriginal people in Alberta is slated to be released in 2005 during the Alberta Legacy Celebration for Alberta's 100 birthday.

The book entitled Great Aboriginal Albertans will highlight two groups of Aboriginal people that have lived and achieved during the past 100 years. The first group will have received a recognition award, as in a military honor, achievement award, or the Order of Canada. The second group will include the unsung heroes that work in the communities to make Alberta society a better place.

Dr. Cora Voyageur, a sociology professor at the University of Calgary, is spearheading the project. She said she would like to educate the rest of Alberta and the rest of the country on the positive contributions that Aboriginal people have made.

"We've done all kinds of wonderful things. I thought that this would be a great opportunity to profile these things and to tie it into the 2005 celebrations."

She said her message is that we live in a society that knows very little about Aboriginal people.

"There is always bad press about Aboriginal people, so I wanted there to be good press about us. I want to hear about the high profile, successful and unsung heroes in our communities. What they've done, how they've done it and how they've persevered. That kind of thing. It seems to me that as Aboriginal people we are kind of brought in with our feathers and beads to dance for people and to make them bannock and, other than that, we are pretty much invisible."

She said it made her think that people needed to know that there are a lot of Aboriginal people that are making contributions to Canadian Society that nobody hears about.

"I want Aboriginal people to feel proud about being Aboriginal and to be proud of who their ancestors were and, on the other side, I want mainstream society to realize that yes we are a part of this society, we are part of the social fabric and that we are making a contribution."

An estimated 90 per cent of Voyageurs students are non-Aboriginal, and one of the things she asks her students to do is to write a paper on a contemporary Aboriginal person who has made a contribution to Canadian Society. What she found with most of her students was that they did not know many Aboriginal people that did.

"So I was finding that I would have 10 papers on Ethel Blondin Andrew or 10 papers on Tom Jackson. People who are high profile, who society got to know."

As a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta, Voyageur believes that the book could be used as a resource in public libraries, in schools and perhaps one day even be part of the school curriculum.

"I think understanding comes with knowledge," she said.

With a grant from the Heritage Community Foundation and Alberta Aboriginal Department of Indian Affairs, Voyageur and two graduate students are using two methods to gather information for the book.

Last summer the group began surfing for information on the Internet and in August of this year they mailed out a form to 180 agencies requesting the submission of names, short profile stories, and photos of the individuals who people thought should be in the book.

"I thought by making a general call to Alberta agencies, that people could nominate their uncle, grandmother, or whoever, and I wanted to do it over the period from 1905 to 2005. So it could be historical people, people that have passed on or it could be people that are working today. I'm hoping that people will respond to this,"

The deadline to submit material for the book is Feb. 15, 2003.

"We will go through and see who've got, and select the people that will go into the book for 2005, and then keep the ones who are not going into the book for perhaps a second book, or we will put them onto a Web site that can be accessible to anybody with a computer. I think that this is my way of making a contribution to the curriculum in Alberta," she sai.