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Carole Sabiston: Oct. 1, 1939 - Jan. 26, 2026

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It was an audacious move for a single mom and her four-year-old son, most especially in 1970: A year on the Spanish island of Ibiza, living on $2,000 in carefully scrimped savings and testing whether it was possible to make the jump from high-school art teacher to full-time artist. By the time Carole Sabiston returned home to Victoria, B.C., she was a rising star. She could even claim a well-known celebrity as a patron, British comedy actor Terry-Thomas, who commissioned Ms. Sabiston to make him a flamboyant robe and hosted her and her son at his Ibiza home. Ms. Sabiston died in hospital in Victoria on Jan. 26, age 86. The two children she and her late husband Jim Munro raised together were at her side. She leaves her son, Andrew Sabiston; stepdaughters, Andrea Skinner, Jenny Munro and Sheila Munro; and five grandchildren. Carole Slater was born in London, England on Oct. 1, 1939, to George and Doris Slater. The family immigrated to Canada when she was nine years old. The Slaters took ...
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Catherine Anne Galliford: Dec. 28, 1966 - Aug. 15, 2025

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There they are in their red serge, beaming happily in the photo taken by one of their dads on that hot day in late August 1991: Nine female graduates in a class of 32, fresh from the six-month Cadet Training Program in Regina and excited to be stepping into their careers as RCMP officers. Newly minted constable Catherine Galliford is in the photo, second from the left. Nobody knew it yet, but years of sexual harassment, assault and bullying within the RCMP lay ahead for some of these young officers. One would die by suicide. Some of the grads tried to stay in touch as the years passed. But it wasn’t until Ms. Galliford’s explosive CBC interview in 2011 alleging years of workplace abuse in the RCMP that they realized just how much they had in common. That interview was the spark that brought more than 3,000 RCMP officers forward to detail their own allegations of workplace harassment and sexual assault. “It struck such a chord in so many of us, because we were dealing with the exact sam...
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Betty Joreen Shiver Krawczyk: Aug. 4, 1928 - May 9, 2025

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When the friendly fellow from a small Vancouver Island logging company sold Betty Krawczyk a four-hectare remote property in Clayoquot Sound for her latest bold adventure, he assured her that the clearcut mountains surrounding her new homestead would soon be green with new growth. She took his word for it; what did a transplanted Louisiana girl know about clearcutting? But time passed and the forest didn’t return, Ms. Krawczyk recalled in a 1996 oral history she recorded for the Ecofeminist Story Web. The winter rains brought landslides, cutting savage trenches down the naked hillsides and destroying a creek near her homestead. Ms. Krawczyk was horrified but took comfort knowing that the B.C. New Democratic Party was now in power, having won the 1991 provincial election. Surely the NDP would stop the clearcutting, she thought. “I was in Mississippi visiting my mother when I received the newsletter from the Friends of Clayoquot saying no, the NDP would not be stopping the clearcuts,” Ms...
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Alison Acker: Oct. 8, 1928 - Nov. 17, 2024

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Courtesy of Charlene Simon The Raging Grannies couldn’t believe their luck when USS Texas, a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser, docked at CFB Esquimalt in Greater Victoria for a public open house in July 1992.  Pulling off comical protests to disrupt visits of American nuclear ships was something of a specialty for the colourful rabble-rousers, and this event was allowing them to walk right onto the ship, which was freshly back from the Persian Gulf and Operation Desert Storm. Plans for a surprise onboard tea party quickly took shape. Grannies newcomer Alison Acker set to work embroidering a tablecloth with the words “Tea Not Tomahawks.” She and the other Grannies boarded the ship in their usual gaudy finery that they wore to protests, then set up a tea service on deck and sent word to the captain that he was invited to tea. A furious captain and his officers in full dress uniform stormed down. Pointing at the tablecloth, the captain barked, “That is a political slogan!” Ms. A...
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Grace Eiko Thomson: Oct. 15, 1933 - July 11, 2024

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Grace Eiko Thomson was eight years old when the federal government came for her Vancouver family, ordering them to leave their home of 12 years and move to an abandoned mine site 100 kilometres west of Lillooet, B.C. Decades of simmering racism against Asian-Canadians had finally found an excuse for action in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ms. Thomson and her family — the youngest barely a month old when they had to move in 1942 — were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps three months after the bombing under the guise of protecting Canada from supposed Japanese turncoats. The internment would forever change the lives of Ms. Thomson and her family. Still a child, she had to become the go-between in all communications between the government and her parents, who weren’t fluent in English. Her father, who used to wear a suit and spats to work as a fish buyer, would be relegated to menial jobs from that point on. “I really feel that, of everything that happened, I am v...
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Helen Lucas: Aug. 25, 1931 - Nov. 27, 2023

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Early admirers of Helen Lucas’s art could scarcely have imagined that her sombre charcoal drawings would one day give way to joyful, giant flower paintings awash in colour. Her son-in-law Frank Simonetti didn’t even know she’d had a charcoal period until two York University PhD students staged a retrospective of Ms. Lucas’s works five years ago. That long-ago dramatic change in her art style marked the end of sorrow and the beginning of joy for her, according to her sister Mary Geatros. “Helen’s early works give you her sadness. She struggled to find her true self, and there were a lot of heartaches along the way,” Ms. Geatros says. “But her floral paintings of later years give the viewer the experience of being alive. She never, ever painted for the sake of painting. It was always personal for her.” Helen Billie Geatros was born Aug. 25, 1931, in Weyburn, Sask., the first of three girls born to Greek immigrants Eftihia and William Geatros. The family moved to Saskatoon weeks later, wh...
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Jiixa Gladys Minnie Vandal: May 19, 1938 - Sept. 2, 2023

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Haida Elder Jiixa Gladys Vandal was renowned on Haida Gwai’i and beyond, first for her bark and root weaving and then for her commitment to documenting her dialect while first-language speakers like her were still alive. But her much bigger gift to the world was her lifelong enthusiasm for sharing her knowledge and skills with anyone who wanted to learn from her, says Haida Elder Diane Brown (GwaaGanad). Ms. Brown was reminded of that recently while looking at a 1978 photo of Haida people in ceremony, in which only one of them wore a traditional hat of woven cedar bark. “Now, everyone’s got one,” Ms. Brown says. “That’s because of   Jiixa. Anyone who wanted to learn how to weave, all you had to do was bring your own bark and Jiixa would teach you. And she taught the Haida language to so many people.” She was born Gladys Minnie Hans on May 19, 1938 on Haida Gwai’i, to Kathleen and Isaac Hans. The youngest of 10 children, she grew up in Skidegate feeling pampered and loved, says dau...
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