Mi’kmaq teacher Elsie Basque was a revered role model – The Globe and Mail

May 08, 2016

One of Canada’s oldest residential school survivors, Elsie Basque became not only the first Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia to earn a teaching certificate, but a passionate advocate for the healing power of education.

“She was a lady of determination,” Daniel Paul, a Mi’kmaq elder and author of We Were Not the Savages, said. “She fought long and hard for First Nations people.”

Ms. Basque, who died at her home in Saulnierville, N.S., on April 11 at the age of 99, was sent to Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in 1930. Her father, Joe Charles, believed she would receive a better education there than at the one-room school house she attended in the small community of Hectanooga, in Digby County, N.S.

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