Margaret Commodore, a residential school survivor, became a respected Yukon MLA

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Margaret Commodore was a whirlwind of energy throughout her long, remarkable life. Trailblazing a political path in the Yukon, most notably as the first Indigenous person to serve as justice minister anywhere in Canada, she never let up in anything she set her mind to, breaking numerous gender and racial barriers along the way.

As a girl, she had attempted weekend escapes from residential school by scrambling down knotted sheets from an upper-floor window; as a young woman, she folded linen at a First Nations tuberculosis hospital with such speed and wizardry that people stopped to watch, and she plated runs and struck out batters as an all-star softball player.

Undeterred by her dearth of formal schooling, Ms. Commodore left a footprint in the Yukon few can match. She worked long hours as a certified practical nurse, her reliability in the operating room so valued that cabs were often dispatched to her softball games to take her to Whitehorse General Hospital to help with unexpected surgeries. She was a prominent leader of the Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians, which she helped form, while fighting for years to get her own status back. Her abilities led to an appointment as a full-time justice of the peace. She excelled at the job, quickly becoming one of the Yukon’s senior JPs, and eventually, executive secretary to the Yukon Judicial Council. She followed this with 14 years as a high-profile elected member of the territorial legislature, including six years in cabinet marked by numerous groundbreaking initiatives to improve the lot of the territory’s Indigenous people.

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Yet, during all this time, a dark chapter from Ms. Commodore’s early life lay buried, cloaked in denial. For many years, she had looked back on her eight years in residential school almost with equanimity. But in her late 50s, she sensed something was wrong. As she grappled with a tide of rising, unexplained anger, the long-hidden truth emerged, triggered by a chance viewing of paintings by Métis artist Jim Logan.

“Every one reminded me of residential school,” she recounted. “I went back to the office, turned my chair to the wall, and I started crying. The tears flowed for a very long time. That’s when I realized that what happened to me was not normal. I had been in denial.” The nightmares came flooding back. During her time at residential school, she had been sexually abused.

After intensive therapy, Ms. Commodore, who died June 1 at the age of 93, was ready to tell her painful story in public as the first witness to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Vancouver in 2013. She wept repeatedly, particularly when she apologized to her daughters on either side of her, who were hearing their mother’s revelations for the first time. They were also in tears. “You keep it hidden for so long. You don’t deal with it. Because I was taken away to residential school, no one had ever taught me to be a parent.”

Her final words were overwhelming. “I have been able to forgive just about everyone in my life. I have not been able to forgive my abuser. I can’t do it. I was such a little girl when I went there, and he took so much away from me.”

She concluded: “I won’t apologize for my tears, because I deserve them.” As Ms. Commodore slowly left the stage, those present reacted with whoops and prolonged applause.

Margaret Muriel Commodore was born Oct. 9, 1932, in Chilliwack, in B.C.’s Fraser Valley. Her father, Andy Commodore, was a member of the nearby Soowahlie First Nation of the Stó:lō people. Her mother was Theresa Prest, whose own mother was Kwakiutl and whose father was descended from a pioneer family still commemorated by Chilliwack’s Prest Road. With work being hard to come by during the Depression, the growing family moved around a lot, as Andy shopped his skill as a boom man, corralling logs into huge booms for towing to sawmills.

Young Margaret, the second of nine siblings, spent most of her childhood confined to the notorious Alberni Residential School on Vancouver Island, later discovered to have been one of the worst schools for abuse.

But for many years, as detailed in John Lutz’s biography Her Many Lives and Names, Ms. Commodore’s most painful memories were of regimentation, separation from her family, even at Christmas, and being strapped constantly for her many violations of the rules. “You stand there with your hands out, and you repeat to yourself, ‘You’re not going to make me cry.’ And they couldn’t, in the end,” she remembered.

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She also recalled making lifelong friendships, and best of all, she discovered a love for softball and was good at it. Taller than the other kids, she wound up as pitcher, a position she continued to play competitively until hanging up her spikes for the last time at the age of 55.

At 14, she managed to enroll in Grade 9 at a public high school in Hope, but it didn’t take. After years in residential school, she couldn’t cope with a normal classroom. Shortly after her 15th birthday, she dropped out to work at the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital for Indigenous patients with tuberculosis. Ms. Commodore worked at the hospital off and on over the next 18 years. She was there as part of the extraordinary rescue effort that saved all 150 patients, many of whom had to be carried out, when a fire consumed most of the hospital in 1948. Despite her youth, she was recruited by Chilliwack’s women’s softball team, becoming one of the first Indigenous women to play organized ball in the Fraser Valley.

A bad first marriage left her a single mother struggling to raise two daughters amid extreme poverty. It also cost Ms. Commodore her cherished Indian status because her husband was not Indigenous. Regaining her status was one of the causes of her life, and she was heavily involved in the prolonged and ultimately successful fight to remove the long-standing, iniquitous law that removed status and reserve privileges from Indigenous women if they married someone non-Indigenous.

A hospital administrator who saw something in the young go-getter turned her life around by encouraging her to try practical nursing. With only a Grade 8 education, she buckled down and graduated in 1963 as one of B.C.’s few Indigenous nurses. Her first position was at the Coqualeetza hospital, wearing the same style of nursing uniform she had cleaned and pressed so many times as a hospital laundry worker.

Two years later, Ms. Commodore moved to the Yukon, returning to a place she had fallen for during a short stay in the 1950s. With its large Indigenous population, the Yukon galvanized her innate activism, abetted by the fact she was now financially secure.

She married Bobby Joe, a heavy equipment operator from the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. However, Ms. Commodore remained a non-status Indian, since her husband had given up his status. The couple broke up after nearly 20 years of marriage.

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In 1972, she was among a First Nations group who formed the Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians. “We weren’t accepted by Indians. We weren’t accepted by Indian Affairs, and we weren’t white, so we were ignored,” Ms. Commodore observed. She was elected the association’s first paid vice-president. Two years later, she and other women from across the Yukon organized the Yukon Indian Women’s Council that established Kaushee’s Place, a transition house for women fleeing abusive partners. At the same time, she continued to press for restoration of full rights to Non-Status Indians. The hard-fought national campaign succeeded in 1985 and Ms. Commodore finally had her status restored after losing it for more than 30 years.

Her upward trajectory continued with her appointment as a justice of the peace. On the bench, Ms. Commodore was a model of understanding, dispensing “soft justice” to Indigenous offenders guilty of minor infractions she said would rarely have attracted police attention if committed by a non-Indigenous person. She promoted a diversion program allowing them to avoid a record by accepting counselling and doing community work.

In 1982, she decided she had more to do and ran for the legislature as the NDP candidate in Whitehorse North Centre. With future federal NDP leader and Yukoner Audrey McLaughlin working on her campaign, the rookie candidate won the riding by unseating a Conservative cabinet minister. Three years later, the NDP became government under premier Tony Penikett, a transformative result that ended years of dominance by the territory’s mining and business-oriented elite.

Four members of the NDP government’s original eight members were Indigenous. A by-election added a fifth Indigenous member to the government’s ranks. Ms. Commodore was named minister of health and human resources, the first Indigenous woman to serve in a cabinet in Canada.

As minister, she expanded vital services to women in need and launched a popular child-care program that included residential space at the newly expanded Yukon College (now Yukon University) for Indigenous women with children, allowing many to further their education for the first time.

The NDP was re-elected in 1985, leading to Ms. Commodore’s landmark appointment as justice minister. She worked closely with the RCMP, as she had as justice of the peace, to promote alternative sentencing for Indigenous offenders. Indigenous cultural programs became a mainstay at the Whitehorse Correctional Centre, and inmates were able to use a sweat lodge. “If there is one thing I am really pleased about it is the development of Aboriginal justice in the Yukon,” she reflected on her time as justice minister.

Her renown led to an appearance on CBC’s Front Page Challenge, where she learned that the father of panelist Allan Fotheringham had been business manager at the Coqualeetza Hospital at the same time as Ms. Commodore was working in the laundry room.

Mr. Penikett said she did well as justice minister. “Her instincts were about fairness, about an ordinary sense of justice, not legal technicalities,” he said. “She was a practical person who wanted to see people treated fairly.”

Although Ms. Commodore managed to retain her seat, the NDP lost power in 1992. She did not run again. She left the Yukon in 1998 to spend her final years close to the Soowahlie Reserve where she had grown up. Because of residential school, she had lost much of her original culture, her daughter Sheila said. “She was yearning to learn more, spend more time at the long houses, trying to reconnect back to her Stó:lō culture.”

Sheila added that her mother had no need to apologize for her parenting. “She was a loving, strong, and fiercely devoted mother who always put her family first and taught us the value of kindness, resilience, and unconditional love.”

In 2024, Ms. Commodore was awarded a Yukon 125 medal to recognize her contribution to the territory as it celebrated its 125^th anniversary.

She leaves her sisters Sharon Miranda and Betsy Commodore; brother Barry Commodore; daughters, Trace Joe-Caley, Jackie Joe and Sheila Joe; seven grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and her second husband, Bobby Joe.

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