When Sunwapta Broadcasting first produced local television in Edmonton in 1954, CFRN aimed daytime programs at the homemaker audience. Laura Banks was the popular face of this programming from 1955-1968, under the stage name Laura Lindsay. Decades after her death, she remains well-loved by women who tuned in for her sewing and cooking demonstrations and celebrity interviews.
The Alberta Penitentiary operated on Edmonton’s River Lot 20 from 1906 – 1920, where Clarke Stadium is today. It was the first federal prison in Alberta. One constant in prisoners’ lives was unpaid hard labour, from mining coal to farming potatoes.
In 1932, Edmonton had the best women’s basketball team in the world: the Edmonton Commercial Graduates. But it looked like they’d have to miss a charity game that May in Calgary – they’d never be able to get there in time after work. Until, that is, the Grads’ coach rallied supporters to strap some seats into the back of two little aircraft and make history.
In 1853, a group of voyageurs shipping furs from Fort Edmonton put down their oars in solidarity with one of their crew members. It was an early murmuring of organized labour in the West: not quite a strike, not quite a mutiny, but very much a show of strength and unity.
Women like Emma Minde joined Homemakers’ Clubs to overcome isolation by doing work like sewing, canning, and charity drives together. Indian Affairs required its approval to start these clubs though, and used them to monitor members’ activities.
How do you calculate the hole left behind when a loved one dies? In this story, Terrence Adams sorts through the legacy of their uncle, Larry Svenson. Svenson worked for the Government of Alberta, using health data to ask big questions like whether it was possible to predict the peak of flu season.
An inside look at the 2003-2004 strike at A-Channel Edmonton. “The strike dragged on through the fall and into the winter,” writes John Vandenbeld. “I both wanted it to end and feared its conclusion, knowing that I’d have to work with these people again.”
In the early 1920s, a resolute woman named Maud Bowman set out to start the Edmonton Museum of Arts – today’s Art Gallery of Alberta. Bowman was a somewhat unconventional model of a female museum leader. Her work is even more remarkable given the sexism she faced.
During the early days of the Covid pandemic, I thought of my Métis great-great-great-grandmother, and the loss of three of her young children to scarlet fever in Edmonton in May 1845.
The people who did the most dangerous jobs constructing the skyscrapers in downtown Edmonton in the 1960s and 1970s were almost all Metis ironworkers. That included the CN Tower.
As the train pulled into the station at North Portal, Saskatchewan, Sarah Atkins had no idea if she would be admitted into Canada. Her daughter and son-in-law, Naoma Atkins Hooks and Sam Hooks, had made it across the border and on to Edmonton.
NOTE: this article contains historical but outdated and offensive language related to mental illness and neurodiversity. Leilani Muir was born…