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Victory taken from election defeat of Aboriginal candidate

Article Origin

Author

By Shari Narine Sweetgrass Contributing Editor EDMONTON

Volume

20

Issue

12

Year

2013

As Karen Pheasant’s supporters sat around tables and booths at Glen’s Sports Grill and Pub waiting for Edmonton School Board results to be flashed across the large TV screen on Oct. 21, campaign advisor Lewis Cardinal was getting the results on his Smart phone. It was to a subdued crowd that he showed the bar graphs that consistently placed Pheasant fourth out of four candidates in Ward C.

By the end of the night, Pheasant had garnered a respectable 21 per cent of the vote but it wasn’t enough to defeat Oliver Chubb, who won with 28 per cent of the support and garnered 3,876 of the votes. The ward proved to be the closest for EPS with all four of the candidates scoring in the 20 percentage points for support (Susan Ketteringham at 27 per cent and Tina Jardine at 23.6 per cent).

“I put it on Facebook that we’re at a victory party… because we achieved victory. Not only as a marginalized society member, not only as a First Nations person, but just a common person. My dad was a hard-working man, my mom was a nurse. We weren’t middle class by any means, which is generally the status quo type that become school board people so this was a really strong community-based,” said Pheasant.

Cardinal says Pheasant faced a difficult campaign as she had both limited financial and human resources, and little experience among her campaign-team. But she made a difference with her door-knocking.

“People even took down signs after they had talked to her, signs they had on their lawns (for other candidates). That’s the effect she had,” said Cardinal.

He holds that out of the candidates seeking the seat, which saw no incumbent in the race, Pheasant was the only one with Edmonton Public Schools experience, as well as a masters degree and working on her Ph.D.

Pheasants says Ward C was huge and “every demographic of our city is in there.” She thought she had connected with the affluent and middle class people, who were looking for someone educated to sit at the board table, as well as those who lived in the Prince Charles and Inglewood areas, who wanted someone who understood their lives. Pheasant was a single mother of two by the time she graduated high school.

Pheasant likens her run for the school board to the pow wow circuit.

“I’m very grateful for my pow wow life. I have danced against the best dancers there are in North America. I remember this one time I was at this world class champion, my late adopted mom (said), ‘It’s just another pow wow, just dance like you always do….’ I know what I’m here for, I know what is guiding my work.”
Even in losing, Cardinal says there are other victories to be taken both from Pheasant’s campaign as well as the campaigns run by Aboriginal candidates for Edmonton city council, Métis Sean Amato in Ward 1, who garnered 10 per cent of the popular vote and placed fourth out of six candidates, and Taz Bouchier in Ward 10 who took one per cent of the popular vote, placing 11 out of 15 candidates.

“I think that Edmonton has a very dynamic Aboriginal population,” said Cardinal, who earlier this year announced his intention to run again as the federal NDP candidate in Edmonton Centre. “There’s a lot of Aboriginal involvement and when our people start to see our people stepping into these things, other people are saying, ‘You know what? I want to do that too.’ And that’s how you make change. It doesn’t happen right away, but it’s going to happen more frequently. It’s only a matter of time when we see more Aboriginal people on all of these councils and even in the mayor’s chair.”

Don Iverson won in a landslide victory and will take over from retiring Stephen Mandel as Edmonton’s mayor. Cardinal is confident that Iverson will “continue to move forward on the stuff (Aboriginal organizations) have created with the city.”

 

Photo caption: Waiting for election results: candidate Karen Pheasant (second from right) with (from left) Christine Solomon, Aretha Greatrix, and Lewis Cardinal, who were on Pheasant’s team since she announced last April she would be seeking a seat on Edmonton Public School Board.