Category Archives: Participant Bio

Rev. David Nobu-tsune Murata

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Scott

Reverend David Murata was born in Japan in the late 1950s and moved to the downtown eastside of Vancouver with his family in 1968, where “the blunt head of racism” was his first push towards politicization. He followed in the … Continue reading →

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Don Weitz

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Scott

Don Weitz was born into a wealthy white Jewish family in 1930. He grew up in the northeastern United States. As a young man, his family had him incarcerated in an asylum for fifteen months, where we was tagged with … Continue reading →

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Ariel Harper

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Scott

Ariel Harper was born in Maryland in 1955 to a librarian activist mother, and has lived for much of her adult life in Quebec and Nova Scotia. As a folk singer and an artist, she has been heavily involved in … Continue reading →

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Elsie Dean

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Scott

Elsie Dean was born in 1924 into a poor white family in northern Saskatchewan, where she lived on a subsistence farm with her parents and seven siblings. Her mother was staunchly political and fought without shame for relief payments for … Continue reading →

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Doreen Spence

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Scott

Doreen Spence, a woman of the Cree nation, was born in 1937 in northern Alberta, near the Good Fish Lake Reserve. Raised primarily by her grandparents, she moved to Calgary at eighteen after winning a scholarship to attend a small … Continue reading →

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Madeleine Parent

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Scott

Madeleine Parent was born into a white middle-class francophone family in Montreal in 1918. She became active in Canada’s first student movement in a struggle for bursaries at McGill University in the years before the Second World War. During the … Continue reading →

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William Paterson

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Scott

William Paterson was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 1926, but spent most of the first 20 years of his life in London, England. He moved to Calgary, Alberta in 1949. He has been a trade unionist since the age … Continue reading →

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