From residential school to honoured indigenous leader
Among her achievements, Sophie Pierre has mentored aboriginal entrepreneurs
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
As a little girl, Sophie Pierre could see her home across the St. Mary River, but she couldn’t go there. She was in Canada’s residential boarding school system for 10 months a year, like it or not, with kids from Alberta, the Okanagan and the Shuswap regions.
After that school was closed in 1970, it stood empty for 20 years. It loomed as an indelible reminder of pain, failure and abandonment by those whose good intentions had laid waste to generations of indigenous people’s children. Yet, 47 years later, her five-year-old granddaughter, Samantha, cut the ribbon to officially open a fourstar resort hotel where her greatgrandmother had sadly turned Sophie over to the residential school sisters at the St. Eugene Mission near Cranbrook.
The journey from then to now has been a long, astonishing and uplifting road for the woman who was born Sophie Mae Eustace of the Ktunaxa First Nation in 1951.
When she was three, in 1954, her grandfather called a meeting. People needed to think about who should be his successor as chief. She couldn’t have imagined it would be her. Or that she would be elected chief of the St. Mary’s Band for 30 years, spend 25 years on the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Tribal Council she helped to found, and serve as chief commissioner of the B.C. Treaty Commission charged with resolving contentious landclaims issues. She once called all parties to the lethargic process together and said bluntly: “If we can’t do this, it’s about time we faced the obvious — it isn’t going to happen, so shut ’ er down.”
After residential school, she attended public high school in Cranbrook. She wanted to be an airline hostess and travel the world. Instead, she dropped out at 17 to get married. Five years later, separated and with two children, she finished high school, moved to Victoria, earned a business administration diploma from Camosun College, then returned to Cranbrook to work in the St. Mary’s band administration as a secretary and then as band manager.
Her plan was to follow up college with university studies in commerce. But life got in the way. Instead, after a career of service, she now has two honorary doctorates, was appointed to the Order of B.C. in 1994 and to the Order of Canada in 2016, and has a sheaf of awards for business acumen and leadership in mentoring young aboriginal entrepreneurs.