Born: 7 December 1935, Canada
Died: 24 February 2007
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: Tseybayotl-t
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Pacheedaht activist Harriet Nahanee made headlines in 2006 when the septuagenarian was arrested by Vancouver police alongside white activist Betty Krawczyk. The women represented the common intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental concerns as they protested a highway expansion that would damage Eagleridge Bluffs land and ecosystems, in preparation for the 2010 Olympics. When the contractor went to court and secured an injunction ordering the protestors to leave, Nahanee and Krawczyk were jailed when they refused to comply. During her two weeks in the Surrey Pretrial Centre, she contracted pneumonia and was admitted to hospital upon her release. She would die within weeks of her release from pneumonia complicated by undiagnosed lung cancer, becoming a symbol of the fight for the preservation of the environment and the violations of First Nations Canadians’ rights by the government. As filmmaker and professor Gloria Mulcahy observed, “It is outrageous that a 71-year-old Aboriginal woman was arrested and put in jail—she was protecting our land, our animals, our air, and our capacity to survive … One of our important Elders and leaders has needlessly been killed—a 71-year-old woman who had the strength to protect and to not apologize for protecting what she understands is necessary for sustaining all life and it is Aboriginal Land that was being protected.”
Nahanee had been taken from her family at age five as part of the government Residential School System to assimilate First Nations children, aiming to erase Indigenous cultures by stealing their children and forcing them to unlearn their languages and customs. “Their idea was to civilize us and make us Christians, actually it was a process to take us away from the land,” she would later say. At the hearing where she was sentenced, the magistrate sentenced her to the jail term that led to her death because she “demonstrated no remorse and did not apologize for her conduct.”
Nahanee defied the injunction to return to Eagleridge Bluffs to say prayers and sing a death song for the creatures that would be lost, particularly a local species of frog. “When I asked her why especially the frogs she said that red footed frogs only live in wetlands and they signify life because that is where we all came from—the wetlands—and so the red footed frogs also signify life to humans, and that in the Pacheedacht belief when the last red footed frog dies all of humanity will also die,” Krawczyk said.