100 More Canadian Heroines

by Merna Forster

  The plantation included an impressive quay, a forge, a cobblestone street, and a large slate-roofed warehouse on the waterfront. The holdings varied with the years, but in 1675 she had five boats and a crew of twenty-five men. Artifacts discovered in the mansion where Lady Sara lived included a silver thimble and silver pins, exquisite decorative dishes, and expensive ceramics. Ferryland was considered “the pleasantest place in the whole island.”[3]

  Lady Sara died in 1683 and locals believe she was buried east of Poole Plantation. Her role in Newfoundland’s history is highlighted on the Heritage Newfoundland website, where it is noted that the Kirke family are much underrated players on the stage of Canadian history. The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance recognizes her as the first and foremost woman entrepreneur in North America through the Sara Kirke Award for Woman Entrepreneurship. This award is presented annually to “celebrate innovation, entrepreneurship and create positive role models for women.”[4]

  Quote:

  “Dread Sovereign: It is without doubt that your Sacred Majesty hath been informed of the loyal services my husband Sir David Kirke did (as his duty) to our royal father of happy memory, who in part of recompence made him one of the Lords Proprietors and Governor of this Land.”

  — Lady Sara’s letter to King Charles II, 1660.[5]

  Muriel Kitagawa, 1943–44.

  Photo by Ed Kitagawa, with permission Roy Miki

  Betrayed

  Muriel Kitagawa

  1912–1974

  When Canada imprisoned its own citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she refused to hide her outrage.

  Muriel Kitagawa was twenty-nine when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and her world began to crumble. “War came to tear out the roots of our lives and we were washed down helter skelter on the roaring flood,”[1] she wrote. Muriel, a passionate journalist and activist, openly protested the racist pressures that resulted in all Japanese Canadians being branded enemy aliens and potential threats to national security.

  Tsukiye Muriel Fujiwara was born in Vancouver in 1912, a second-generation Japanese Canadian (Nisei). During her childhood, the Fujiwaras moved frequently as her parents struggled to support their family. When they lived in Sidney on Vancouver Island, Muriel’s father worked in a mill while his wife made dresses. Muriel remembered they “were so poor it did not seem possible to become any poorer and still retain … self-respect and independence.”[2] She was ten years old when the family split up for several years: her mother worked as a live-in housekeeper in Vancouver while Muriel and two of her siblings lived in the Oriental Home in Victoria. The family reunited in 1924.

  Muriel was troubled by the racial discrimination she sensed, but was enthusiastic about school. Her English teacher encouraged her to develop her writing. She attended the University of British Columbia for a year before dropping out because of financial problems. In 1933, Muriel married Ed Kitagawa, a banker and the star of the famous Asahi baseball team.

  Muriel helped develop the short-lived The New Age, the first regular journal for Nisei. By 1939 she was a regular contributor to a Japanese-Canadian community newspaper called The New Canadian. She wrote about a wide range of topics — from arranged marriages to liberation of Nisei women— as well as short stories, poems, and historical vignettes. Prolific and provocative, Muriel was an outspoken advocate for her community during and after the Second World War.

  When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Muriel had two small children and had been bedridden for months because of a difficult pregnancy. Her twins arrived in early January 1942. As Japanese Canadians were uprooted during the Second World War, Muriel wrote long letters to her brother, Wes Fujiwara, chronicling the courage these people showed as they struggled to survive harsh and discriminatory policies. Twenty-one-thousand Japanese Canadians faced expulsion from their homes, dispersal across the country, seizure of property and belongings, internment, family seperations, even deportation.

  During the war, Muriel’s younger sister, Kay, and her mother were in Japan; government regulations prohibited them from returning to Canada. To avoid a concentration camp, her brother, Doug, signed up to go to the internment camp near Schreiber, Ontario, in April of 1942. Muriel, her husband, and four children were among the fortunate few to receive a special permit to relocate to Toronto. The Kitagawas boarded a train on June 1, 1942.

  Muriel contributed articles and served as managing editor for Nisei Affairs in Toronto, continuing to defend the innocence of Japanese Canadians and affirm their loyalty to Canada. She also vociferously expressed her views in letters to government officials, as well as in public lectures. “You, who deal in lifeless figures, files, and statistics could never imagine the depth of hurt and outrage dealt out to those of us who love this land,” she wrote to the Custodian of Japanese Properties. “It is because we are Canadians that we protest the violation of our birthright.”[3]

  Ed and Muriel Kitagawa with children Shirley, Carol, and twins Jon and Ellen, 1942.

  Photo by Ed Kitagawa, with permission Roy Miki

  Following the war, Muriel called the deportation order of Japanese nationals a human rights violation and expressed her sense of betrayal at the federal government’s failure to compensate people for destroying their lives. After 1949 she focused on other things in her life, though the bitterness remained. That same year, Japanese Canadians were allowed to return to the West Coast and vote in provincial elections, but the Kitagawas had nothing to go back to. Muriel lived the rest of her life in Toronto.

  In 1985, Roy Miki published a collection of Muriel’s letters and some other writings. Her protests against the forced dispersal and internment of Japanese Canadians inspired many people voice their feelings about the tragic events. Randy Enomoto, onetime president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, said the movement for redress began with her work in the 1940s.[4] Muriel’s writing jolted many people into awareness of this history, including author Joy Kogawa who wrote the novel Obasan, and Robin Engleman, who composed a musical tribute to the internees.

  When Brian Mulroney gave a speech in 2008 on the twentieth anniversary of the federal government’s official apology to the Japanese community, he referred to Muriel. Quoting from her writings, Mulroney acknowledged Muriel’s contributions to her country: “For her life, and the lives of other Japanese Canadians in wartime, Canada can be grateful.”[5]

  Quote:

  “Who is the Custodian of my freeborn rights, if not the government of my native land? … God! God! Were my soul ‘so dead’ I could not thus agonize for the land betrayed!”[6]

  Chief Elsie Knott.

  Courtesy of Rita Rose

  The Chief

  Elsie Knott

  1922–1995

  Elected as the first female Indian chief in Canada under the Indian Act, she led the way for other First Nations women to become more politically active.

  When Elsie Knott pulled up to your door in a hearse, she wasn’t there to take you to a funeral — she was giving you a ride to school. Elsie only completed grade eight at the Mud Lake Indian Reserve School; high school was never suggested, and there was no way to get there anyway. Elsie’s converted hearse was the first step toward establishing the Knott Bus Service, which enabled local children to continue their education off the reserve. For thirty-one years, Elsie drove the school bus.

  Elsie Taylor grew up in a family of seven on the Mud Lake Reserve, on a peninsula northwest of Peterborough, Ontario. She only spoke Ojibway when she started attending the reserve school administered by the Department of Indian Affairs, where anyone “caught talking Indian”[1] had their name written on the blackboard along with a capital X. When she was just fifteen, her parents arranged for her to marry Cecil Knott, a man from the reserve who was twelve years her senior.

  By twenty, Elsie was living in poverty with her three children; her tuberculosis-afflicted husband could not support the family. Desperate to improve their living conditions, Elsie struggled to earn money b
y driving the school bus, picking berries, providing bait to fishermen, sewing pyjamas and quilts, working as a chambermaid, doing laundry, and cooking.

  After the Indian Act was amended in September 1951, women were finally allowed to become officially involved in band politics. Elsie, who believed that many changes should be made on her reserve, agreed to run for chief. She won in 1952 and became Chief Knott, leader of the 500 Mississaugas of Mud Lake Indian Band (now known as Curve Lake First Nation). She was thirty-one, eager to work with her five councillors to help the people on her reserve lead better lives.

  Elsie served as chief from 1952 to 1962, and from 1970 to 1976. She gradually overcame her fear of public speaking. As she gained confidence in her role, she became more outspoken and adopted more radical ideas. Chief Knott successfully negotiated with the government for funding to improve services on the reserve. Forty-five houses were built, roads were upgraded, a daycare was constructed, new wells were dug, and more social services were provided.

  Chief Knott organized community activities and tried to create greater awareness of First Nations culture, both on the reserve and in neighbouring areas. She revived the powwow, opened it to outsiders, and used the proceeds for Christmas hampers. She also organized Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, baseball teams, dances, and fish fries. She brought back traditional drumming and singing, and taught weekly Ojibway language classes. Elsie translated fourteen Christmas carols into Ojibway and helped host an Aboriginal hockey tournament involving sixty reserves. She encouraged children from the reserve to succeed in school even when others called them names and threw rocks at the school bus.

  Elsie was also active in political activities at various levels. She served in the Union of Ontario Indians and was on the board of directors of the National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations). The once mild-mannered girl expressed her opposition to the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy by publicly burning a copy and dancing on the ashes.

  Chief Elsie Knott was a respected leader who made significant achievements in her community and earned recognition across Canada. She inspired many young people on her reserve to follow their dreams, including Judge Tim Whetung, who thanked her for driving him to school day after day. In 1975, International Women’s Year, she was named one of twenty-five outstanding women in Ontario.

  Quote:

  “Nobody ever talked to me about a career. Women just got married.”[2]

  Captain Molly Kool.

  Courtesy of Jonnie-Anne Carlisle

  Captain Kool

  Molly Kool

  1916–2009

  At twenty-three, she became North America’s first female sea captain — and just the second in the world.

  When Molly Kool qualified as a sea captain in 1939, it was considered so amazing that she was flown to New York to be interviewed on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Not only was it thought curious that a woman planned to command a vessel, but also that she was so beautiful that one observer compared her to Marilyn Monroe.[1] Another wrote, “Her eyebrows are shaped and arched, her lips lightly rouged, her blonde hair up in feminine curls. That’s Miss Molly Kool ashore … but in her barge … she knows no fear.”[2]

  For a New Brunswick girl who had grown up by the sea, the choice of profession was obvious. It was her childhood dream. Myrtle Kool (she detested her birthname and legally changed it to Molly) was born in Alma, a small fishing village on the Bay of Fundy. From the time she was eight, Molly spent her summers on the water with her father, a Dutch sailor. She loved joining him on his sixty-four-ton scow as they hauled cargo along the bay.

  During her schooldays, Molly excelled at mathematics, geography, and history. She loved poems about the sea. After high school, she worked as a full-time seaman on her father’s schooner, the Jean K (named after her oldest sister). Eager to become his first-mate, she applied to the Merchant Marine School in Saint John. Though she was initially refused admission, Molly persevered and eventually earned a mate’s certificate.

  She obtained a coastal master’s certificate from the Merchant Marine Institute in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, after waiting three years for permission to take the necessary exams.[3] (The Canadian Shipping Act was later modified to show that both genders could be accepted as shipmasters.) The newly minted Captain Kool was now qualified to command her own ship.

  When her father became ill, Molly took over the Jean K. For five years Molly served as captain, transporting lumber, gypsum, and other goods in the Bay of Fundy — famous for treacherous tides — and the Gulf of Maine. The tenacious young woman survived the challenges of life on the Atlantic coast without the aid of radar or modern equipment. She steered the vessel with a chart and compass to guide her.

  Despite initial opposition from male seafarers, Captain Kool earned the respect and admiration of all who met her. She coped with near shipwrecks, being dumped in the icy Atlantic and having to swim to safety, and close encounters with whales. When a Norwegian skipper tried to steal her berth in Moncton, the fearless Captain Kool threatened him with some salty language, a belaying pin, and legal action; she had to leap to the wharf when his steel-hulled freighter crashed into her scow.

  Captain Kool’s career ended abruptly in 1944 when a gas explosion and fire destroyed much of the Jean K. Though Molly initially planned to return to the sea, she fell in love with and married Ray Blaisdell. They settled in Maine.

  When Molly died in 2009, her death was widely covered in both Canada and the United States — including the New York Times. She received praise from her contemporaries for having “the interior toughness of a hard-driving sea captain.”[4] Throughout her life Molly retained her fondness for Alma, and was proud to attend the unveiling of a plaque erected there in her honour. After Molly’s death, friends and family scattered her ashes in the Bay of Fundy. It was her final wish to have a captain’s burial at sea.

  The Captain Molly Kool Heritage Centre, a reconstruction of her modest childhood home, was developed in Fundy National Park as a memorial to the first woman sea captain in North America.

  Quote:

  “You can call me captain from now on.”[5]

  The exiled lovers and a servant on the Island of Demons.

  Les Vrais Robinsons, 1863

  Castaway

  Marguerite de la Rocque

  1500s, exact dates unknown

  A real-life Robinson Crusoe, she became a famous sixteenth-century heroine.

  Several hundred years before Daniel Defoe published his classic novel Robinson Crusoe, a young French noblewoman was cruelly abandoned on a remote island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence called Île des Démons. The courageous tale of Marguerite de la Rocque has inspired countless novels that romanticize the few accurate historical accounts.[1]

  Marguerite de la Rocque was presumably born in France. She was co-seigneuress of Pontpoint along with Jean-François de la Rocque, a close relative who was probably her brother or uncle. She also had land in Périgord and Languedoc in southern France.

  In 1542, Marguerite was bound for Canada. It was a time when a voyage from France to the New World meant adventure and unknown perils. La Rocque had convinced the spirited young lady to accompany him on an expedition to establish a colony in Canada. He hoped to recoup his dwindling fortune by discovering diamonds and gold.

  Though the king of France, François I, had named La Rocque as lieutenant-general in Canada and provided a large grant, he still had problems funding the expedition. He borrowed money, sold some of his property, and finally resorted to piracy on the high seas. There is also speculation that he persuaded Marguerite to contribute some of her wealth.

  On April 16, 1542, the adventurers sailed from La Rochelle on three ships, carrying crew and a group of colonists comprised of ladies and gentlemen as well as some hardened criminals who had been forced to come along. The latter included thieves, murderers, and one assassin.

  The ships sailed into what is now St. John’s, Newfoundland, on June 8. Here they met up with explorer Jacques C
artier. But after leaving the city, trouble erupted as the ships proceeded to navigate the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It seems that La Rocque was enraged to discover that Marguerite had a lover onboard, and decided to leave her on an uninhabited island near the coast of Labrador as punishment. While the details of the incident are unclear, it seems that Marguerite, her lover, and a servant woman named Damienne were all abandoned on an island bearing the frightening name of Island of Demons.

  La Rocque left the threesome with some guns and ammunition, food, clothing, and a copy of the New Testament. Some suggest that the ruthless adventurer was pleased to have an excuse to rid himself of Marguerite to avoid sharing his property or his expected riches.

  The castaways managed to make a shelter on the rocky, inhospitable island, and by supplementing their provisions with edible plants and wild game, they survived the first harsh winter. About eight months after their arrival, however, Marguerite’s lover apparently died, just before the birth of their baby. Shortly thereafter the servant also died. Sadly, Marguerite couldn’t adequately nourish the infant and soon she had to bury her child as well.

  Alone on the desolate isle for another year or so, the bereaved young woman somehow found the will to endure. It seems she still had enough ammunition to be able to shoot marauding wildlife, including a bear that was “as white as an egg.”[2] After nearly two and a half years on the Island of Demons, Marguerite spotted some ships and lit a bonfire on the beach. A French vessel rescued the emaciated castaway, clad in tattered clothes, and carried her back to France in the fall of 1544. Little is known of her fate, though it seems she later became a teacher.