Maria Campbell
Maria Campbell is a Métis elder of Cree, French and Scottish ancestry. She is an activist and community worker, author, playwright, screenwriter and film director, as well as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
She was born on April 26, 1940, in Saskatchewan, and grew up on government land. She was the eldest of a very poor family of eight children, whom she looked after after after the death of her mother. She married when she was fifteen and moved to Vancouver, where she lived in extreme poverty, before returning to Saskatchewan in her twenties.
A committed activist, in 1963 she founded the first halfway house for women and an emergency center for women and children in Edmonton. She published her autobiography Halfbreeed in 1973. Her play Flight (1986) was the first all-Aboriginal theatrical production in Canada. She has received numerous aboriginal awards and distinctions (Honorary Chief of the Black Lake First Nations, Order of the Sash) and government honors (National Aboriginal Achievement Award, Officer of the Order of Canada).
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