Alvin Finkel

I first met Doreen Wabasca in the summer of 2017 at her apartment building when I was doing research and gathering photos for the annual calendar of the Alberta Labour History Institute( ALHI).

Our 2018 calendar theme was“ Indigenous Peoples and the Building of Alberta.” I had become ALHI president in 2016, two years after retiring as a history professor at Athabasca University. It was rewarding, although almost full-time, volunteer work.

Other ALHI members had interviewed Doreen earlier that year, and I posed a few additional questions to her. The earlier interview focused on Doreen’ s construction work and family research. In our conversation, Doreen revealed fascinating details about the Indigenous community research she was doing in her retirement.

Doreen may have lacked formal education in construction, but she had much field experience. She was born in Grouard in 1940 to Cree-speaking parents, and her family raised livestock in the summer and worked winter trap lines. Both parents, needing to work outside the home to make ends meet, placed Doreen and her sister in a residential school. During her six-and-a-half years there, she was forbidden to speak Cree, to wear moccasins at school, or to do any crafts. She witnessed many children experiencing abuse from staff, including a nun physically abusing her sister. Refusing to return to school when she turned 15, Doreen joined her

father on construction sites and in logging camps.“ When Dad worked construction, I worked there too because no man would hire me. But he’ s my dad, so they let us work. The men didn’ t like it, but they gonna fight Dad?”

Arriving in Edmonton in the early 1970s, newly divorced, Doreen sought construction work to support her three children. She noted to me,“ I had three strikes: I was a woman, a Native, and I wasn’ t educated.” Despite her experience, she was repeatedly rejected for construction jobs due to lack of credentials. But that wouldn’ t stop her from eventually becoming the first woman and the first Indigenous person to serve as a City of Edmonton road worker, jackhammering pavement and laying asphalt while listening to daily misogynist and racial insults. Eight months later she made history once again, becoming the first Indigenous person and first woman to be a construction“ foreman” for the city.

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