Gloria Cranmer Webster (born July 4, 1931) is a Canadian

First Nations First Nations or first peoples may refer to: * Indigenous peoples, for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area. Indigenous groups *First Nations is commonly used to describe some Indigenous groups including: **First Natio ...

activist, museum curator and writer of Kwakwaka'wakw descent.

Biography

The daughter of Dan Cranmer, a chief of the Kwakwaka'wakw, she was born Gloria Cranmer in

Alert Bay Alert Bay is a village on Cormorant Island, near the town of Port McNeill on northeast Vancouver Island, in the Regional District of Mount Waddington, British Columbia, Canada. Demographics In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statis ...

, British Columbia. She is a great-granddaughter of ethnologist George Hunt. She moved to

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, British Columbia, when she was 14 and attended high school there. She graduated in anthropology from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

in 1956, the first indigenous person to be admitted to that university. She worked as a counsellor at Oakalla Prison in British Columbia for two years. She then worked two years for the

John Howard Society The John Howard Society of Canada is a Canadian non-profit organization that seeks to develop understanding and effective responses to the problem of crime and prison reform. It is named after John Howard, a philanthropist and early English priso ...

. While she was there, she met John Webster. They married and she moved to Saskatchewan; the couple had a daughter in Regina. After 18 months, the family moved to

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

, where she worked as a counsellor at the

YWCA The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) is a nonprofit organization with a focus on empowerment, leadership, and rights of women, young women, and girls in more than 100 countries. The World office is currently based in Geneva, Swi ...

. The couple had two sons and Webster left that job to raise her family. She returned to work as a counsellor at the Vancouver Indian Centre. Then, in 1971, she was hired as assistant curator for the

Museum of Anthropology at UBC The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is renowned for its displays of world arts and cultures, in particular works by First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. As well as ...

. Webster was a driving force behind the establishment of the U’Mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay, which opened in 1980, and served as its curator for a number of years. She helped retrieve cultural treasures confiscated from her people by Canadian authorities during raids on potlatches during the 1920s. Webster worked with a linguist from UBC to develop a written

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

for the Kwak'wala language. She also wrote books that are used to teach that language. She was narrator for a 1973 documentary film ''The Potlatch: A Strict Law Bids us Dance''.

Awards and honours

In 2017, she was named an Officer in the

Order of Canada The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit. To coincide with the cen ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Webster, Gloria Cranmer 1931 births Living people University of British Columbia alumni Canadian curators Officers of the Order of Canada Kwakwaka'wakw people First Nations women writers First Nations activists Writers from British Columbia 20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers 20th-century Canadian women writers 21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers 21st-century Canadian women writers 20th-century First Nations writers 21st-century First Nations writers Canadian women non-fiction writers Canadian women curators