Poet, author and teacher Lee Maracle has died in Surrey, British Columbia, aged 71.
The award-winning writer and esteemed mentor has gained worldwide attention for her powerful writing and long-standing efforts to address Indigenous oppression in Canada.
Tributes pour in to Maracle’s social media page, honoring her life’s work and tireless energy to guide other Indigenous writers.
Family members have confirmed that Maracle died at Surrey Memorial Hospital in early November 11.
Sid Bobb says his mother was a lot of things: “a wonderful warrior and a loving love” who dedicated her life to helping others lift themselves out of poverty and inequality.
Maracle works included Ravensong, Bobbi Lee: Indian rebel, An Indigenous Perspective on Sociology and Feminism and My conversations with Canadians.
A supportive but critical “aunt”
Award-winning Ontario author Waubgeshig Rice said it was a huge and heartbreaking loss that Maracle, a supportive but critical “aunt” who helped guide him as a young writer, is now gone.
Rice said he read Maracle’s work as a teenager and young writer, then met her at a read in her thirties and said she never missed any of her launches from books.
“She’s been there every step of my literary journey,” Rice said. “I don’t think she got the credit she deserved in the broader field of Canadian literature. I think it was because she was an aboriginal woman.
“I hope everyone can look back on her legacy and see how revolutionary she was.”
Maracle has won numerous literary awards for his works and novel Celia’s song has been shortlisted for the Neustadt International Literature Prize 2020, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. Previous Canadian nominees include Nobel Laureate for Literature Alice Munro and Rohinton Mistry, who won the Neustadt in 2012.
Maracle “demanded integrity”
Prior to his rise to college, Maracle grew up on the North Shore of Vancouver, where Bobb said there were “hard times” for his mother – a member of the Stó: lō Nation and daughter of a Métis mother and a Coast Salish father.
Maracle, a former University of Toronto professor and senior in residence, had recently returned to British Columbia, where she had accepted a position at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey and started teaching in September, according to her family.
But her daughters posted on social media that she had health issues and was hospitalized earlier this month.
Maracle, a mother of four, was also a loving grandmother and ardent gardener, according to Bobb.
“She was a great person with integrity and demanded integrity wherever she went,” he said.
Maracle was the granddaughter of Tsleil-Waututh chef Dan George, an artist and writer who rose to fame as an actor and was Oscar nominated for his role opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little big man in 1970.
Bobb says his mother fought for many of the same things his grandfather often talked about.
“Dan George, his ‘daddy’, my great-grandfather, said if you live in Salish territory then you are a Salish citizen and you are either a good citizen or a bad citizen. It really shook me that our concept of citizenship is so much grander than the Indian Act and some of the current conversations.
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