I had one last journey to make. I knew that I couldn't consider my travels or my interviews complete without a trip back to the North to calk to LORNA BELL, a wonderful woman who's involvement in literacy has spanned more than a decade.
Ten months had passed since my last venture north. As the plane began its decent into High Level I thought how much I was looking forward to being able to "see the sky" and talk again to the good people I had previously met. Joanne Snyder was at the airport to greet me. The airport looked quite different without the snow and icy windows but Joanne's smile was warm and familiar. We drove to Fairview College to find Lorna who was attending the Chinchagua Further Education Council Anniversary celebration there.
There were lots of familiar faces. Someone offered me a chair as I talked to a number of the tutors I had interviewed months before. Lorna smiled at me from across the room. It had been 3 years since I saw her last but Lorna is someone you don't easily forget.
An hour later Lorna and I were in her car travelling east to Ft. Vermilion. It was mid-October; the night was dear with cold and I watched as the Northern Lights began to ripple across the sky. When Joanne first moved to the North she said to me once that the Northern Lights had seemed to her like a "Navahoe blanket cloaking the sky". Leaning forward to get a better look I asked Larna what had first triggered her interest in literacy.
"The fact that a grown person couldn't read was as big a shock to me as it was to everyone else," Lorna said, hardly seeming to notice the activity in the sky. "When we moved into our house in Ft. Vermilion 2 years after we came up north (which is now 31 years ago) my husband hired a really wonderful older Native man whose name was Isadore to come and build a fence around the property. The chap would come in for tea or lunch and he'd sit with my pre-school son and look at comic books with him. One day my son leaned up against Isadore's knee and asked, 'Will you read to me?' Isadore just looked at him and said simply, 'I can't read'. It was like someone hit me over the head with a 2 X 4."
"I made a promise that I would find a way to help Isadore learn to read but he died before I had the chance. I guess that was kind of the beginning to all the work I've done in literacy."
When I mentioned to Loma that she is often referred to as "the founder of literacy in the North" she immediately said, "That's not true Deborah and I want to dispel that notion right now."
"There was a remarkable woman who worked in this community for years," Lorna reminisced. "Her name is RACHEL CLARK. She was married to a Native fellow and was the secretary of The Voice of Native Women. She and I were part of a larger group which helped to establish the first Adult Education Centre in Ft. Vermilion. It was a satellite campus of the Alberta Vocational Centre in Slave Lake."
"Unfortunately the mandate of adult upgrading didn't include basic literacy. Then about a year later, the provincial government started to encourage the idea of Further Education Councils. We thought, 'Now this might be a way we can get something going for literacy', so roughly the same group of people helped to form the first Further Education Council with a clear priority for adult literacy."