Dickason, Olive P.

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1993
OLIVE PATRICIA DICKASON
to be Doctor of Letters

The word that comes to mind to best describe Olive Dickason is "courage." She had the courage, first of all, to change careers at mid-life, abandoning a highly successful career in journalism in which she worked for some of Canada's best newspapers, at one point as women's editor of The Globe and Mail and another as chief of information services for the National Gallery of Canada. She left it all behind and went back to university. Her interest was in history, especially the history of Canada's Native People, and she wanted to acquire the credentials to write and to teach at the university level.

Embarking on an academic career required courage of a different sort, at a time when the number of women in the professoriate was small, and the door was only half open. It was typical of her pluck, however, that she seized the role of the underdog with alacrity. Her master's thesis, later published, studied the relations between the Micmacs and the French at Louisbourg, after which she embarked on the larger topic of the Myth of the Savage and the Beginning of French Colonialism in the Americas. With a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa, she finally got the chance to do what she wanted to do when she was hired by the University of Alberta to teach courses in Canadian Native History and the History of French Canada.

Olive Patricia Dickason then rapidly became one of Canada's leading publishing scholars in the field of Native History. Her monumental Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples is the latest of her four published books, and if we may judge from the fact that you can find it in every bookstore in Fredericton, it must surely be a Canadian bestseller. Along with it, she has two dozen articles, numerous reviews and review articles, and an enviable list of papers presented at learned conferences.

But Olive Dickason had reason again to summon her courage in her remarkable second career. For after scarcely ten years at the University of Alberta, she was told that it was time to retire. Declaring that age was irrelevant, and that she was only getting started, she challenged the university's mandatory retirement policy clear up to the Supreme Court of Canada. Whether she won or lost seems relatively insignificant when you realize that she continued to teach at Alberta during the seven years of her court challenge, and she produced more scholarship in those seven years than many others have done in a lifetime.

Two years ago, Olive Dickason briefly visited our campus to deliver some fascinating lectures on Canada's Founding People; today it is our great pleasure to welcome her back. Like the Native People whom she so much reveres, and whose history she has been determined to tell as simply and as honestly as she can, Olive Dickason personifies the patience, the persistence, and the dignity of the Native tradition. With pride in her own Metis roots, Olive Dickason has shown that no obstacle need stand between the determined individual and the fulfilment of her dreams.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3