Historian awarded Order of Canada

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Always passionate about history, which she made her life's work, Olive Dickason has had that work recognized by being made a member of the Order of Canada. She will be formally named to the Order of Canada, Canada' highest civilian honor, at an investiture ceremony in Ottawa on Feb. 15. Officially, the honor is being bestowed upon her for her work for Canada's heritage.

"I don't know what factors go into the selection," Dickason said. "But I am accepting it on the understanding that it's a tribute to my work in Native history."

The 75-year-old former history professor made headlines in 1985 when she refused mandatory retirement from the University of Alberta. After a legal struggle, she was reinstated to her professorship, and she stayed on until 1992, finally retiring at 72 years of age. Her struggle ended in disappointment as the higher courts, to which the institution appealed earlier decisions in Dickason's favor, ruled against her.

Dicakson's specialty was and is Native history, although she had to battle to get into the field. She came to post-graduate studies late, after a 24-year career as a journalist and raising a family, and intended to take Indian history, as she called it then. The University of Ottawa, though, which had accepted her as a graduate student, did not acknowledge that Indians had any history, and suggested that she take anthropology instead.

"I was lucky," she explained. "A Belgian fellow, who didn't know very much about Native people, but knew a lot about discrimination, took up my cause, and the university eventually admitted me." She went on to earn her doctorate in the late '70s at the age of 57.

Dickason grew up in Winnipeg, then moved with her parents to a then-isolated reserve on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg at Manigotogan. When she could, she trekked back to Manitoba's capital to seek her fortune, which she found, in a way, while she was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.

Father Athol Murray, the famous guiding light of Notre Dame college at Wilcox, Sask., took the young woman with the Grade 10 education to the school and encouraged her to complete her high school and to take her BA. She did so, working through a program in which the University of Ottawa granted the degree for work done at Notre Dame.

"Those were the days when jobs were looking for people, instead of people looking for jobs," Dickason said. "I went straight into journalism."

"After my family had grown up, I was able to return to university," she said. "I quit the Globe, and was hired on as an information officer at the National Gallery," she continued. "It was just ideal for me."

Her doctoral thesis, titled The Myth of the Savage, was eventually published, and signaled the academic continuation of Dickason's career as a writer. She had a very important work of scholarship published in 1992 in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. The book is now accepted as a textbook in Native studies across Canada, a field of which Dickason is one of the founders.

"Native history is moving along, but it isn't there yet," she said. "I really do think that my work has been significant at getting the field to where it is now."

Dickason continues to be active in the field, and has plans that would daunt many a scholar at 30. When she finishes her immediate task of revising Canada's First Nations for a new edition, she intends to start on her long-term project.

"I'd like to do another study, this one a comparative study of first contacts in America, including Canada, the U.S. and Mexico," she said. "There's been some work done in the area, but it's a vast field and a major detailed study has not emerged."