Trailblazing Indigenous women
Years of research has led to growing list of notable Canadians
The first Indigenous female dentist. Lawyer. Doctor.
The quest to document and celebrate these trailblazing Indigenous women started as a school assignment for Sally Simpson but has continued to grow long after she scored the perfect grade on her project.
It was 2011, and after her daughter left home, Simpson gave up a six-figure salary, a house in downtown Toronto and an 80-hour-a-week job in event marketing to go back to school.
While studying at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, she took a course on Indigenous women and was tasked with coming up with a creative way to honour them.
“I’m sitting there going, ‘I’m going to fail that assignment,’” Simpson recalled, noting she’s not very crafty.
Simpson, who now lives and works in Hamilton, drove home that day and decided she would write biographies and create a collage of 10 Indigenous women who were born in Canada and were the first to pave the way in various roles and professions.
She figured it would be easy to find a list of this information, but that turned out not to be the case. Even so, she still wanted to forge ahead with the project.
“I just assumed that this wouldn’t take long at all,” she said. “Well, it took me over two years to find that dentist.”
The story of that dentist — Dr. Mary Jane McCallum — is one of the fascinating stories Simpson said she discovered through her research.
McCallum, a Cree woman, started working as a dental assistant in 1973 before being sent back to school to become a dental
nurse, a dental therapist and earning her doctorate in dental medicine in 1990. She would be flown in to northern First Nations and Indigenous communities in Canada as part of a mobile dental unit, Simpson said.
In December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed McCallum an Independent senator to represent Manitoba.
Simpson graduated almost five years ago, but her list is still growing. It has now reached No. 164 and includes the first Canadian Indigenous women to become an elected chief of a First Nation, a flight attendant and to be depicted on a Canadian stamp.
New additions mostly find Simpson through word of mouth or she stumbles across them, like the time she went to an awards ceremony for something unrelated and learned 1992 was the first time an Indigenous group, which included a woman, was invited to go to the World Culinary Olympics. They took home the grand gold medal.
She hopes the list continues to grow and can one day be displayed on a website to make it more accessible.
For Simpson, the whole purpose of the list, which she distributes by email for now, is about honouring and acknowledging Indigenous female firsts.
“I want to be proud to celebrate, but I can’t celebrate something I don’t know about,” she said. “All people can benefit from knowing how amazing Indigenous females are.
“They’re the fabric of our society and they deserve to be acknowledged and held up for celebration.”