People

Wooden boats crewed by colourful voyageurs meet crowds of HBC employees, Métis, and First Nations on the bank below an expansive wooden fort. First Nations tipis also crown the nearby hills.

The Company and the Combination: Collective Bargaining at the River’s Edge

Tom Long

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.

Around fifty women gathered in front of a wooden building. Included in the crowd are young children, smiling mothers, and older women. They are dressed in simple but comfortable-looking clothes, with some women holding babies.

Making Home: The Role of Homemakers’ Clubs in Life on Reserve

Shayne Giles

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.

A photograph of items from Larry Svenson's life, including photographs and pins.

There are Far More Kind People in the World Than We Think

Terrence (Tess) Adams

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.

A group of workers standing outside the A-Channel headquarters, holding a sign that says "Scab TV"

The Labour Dispute Will Be Televised

John Vandenbeld

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.”

Maud Bowman: The leader who kickstarted the Art Gallery of Alberta

Danielle Siemens

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.

A daguerrotype of an older woman, a boy, and a young man.

Lessons of loss and perseverance from Jane Klyne McDonald

Catherine C. Cole

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.

Waltzing With the Angels: The Metis Ironworkers Who Built Edmonton’s Downtown

Alvin Finkel

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.

Roads of Misery: Following an Afro-Indigenous Family from Oklahoma to Edmonton (And Back Again)

Dr. Russell Cobb

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.