Founder of the NWT Native Court Workers Association, former Yellowknife city councillor and member of the NWT Human Rights Commission passed away this week at the age of 71.
Gail Cyr and son Jesse Wheeler. (Photo courtesy Jesse Wheeler via Facebook)
Gail Cyr was known for her unwavering bravery fighting for Indigenous people in the North, and her life’s work was recognized nationally in 2022, when she was invested into the Order of Canada.
Cyr passed away on Tuesday, her son Jesse Wheeler posted to social media. She was 71.
“Thank you for your kind words and your sharing of stories,” Wheeler stated. “She led an incredibly full life. She leaves this place much better than she found it.
Gail Cyr, on the right, works with an unidentified woman in 1983. (Photo courtesy of NWT Archives/Arthur Boutilier fonds)
“That is all we can ask of a person. She did it tenfold. One-hundred fold.”
Cyr is originally from Nelson House, MB. A survivor of the Sixties Scoop, Gail was one of seven siblings all apprehended from her Cree parents.
In a 2022 profile in UpHere Magazine, Cyr stated: “There were a lot of rough times, and there were a lot of lonely times.”
The racism and sexism she recalled after moving to Winnipeg, led her to move to Yellowknife in 1974.
Cyr wrote a series of columns for Northern News Services in recent years, one detailed her early experiences in her new home of Yellowknife — on the Range.
“I started work at the Gold Range behind the bar pouring drinks as I had at the Spaghetti Factory in Winnipeg, with the one exception that hot pants and high heels were required as hostess wear,” she wrote in her column.
“I made it to the floor from bartending. I loved it. We walked miles every night carrying a tray of 16 of the largest draft glasses in Canada, perhaps 14 ounces – not like the wimpy glasses from down south – and ashtrays, change and a walled folder for bills.”
Cyr later was a coordinator with the Indian Brotherhood of the NWT, and was the first executive director of the NWT Native Court Workers Association.
Gail Cyr, a St. John Ambulance volunteer, at the 2011 visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. (Photo courtesy of NWT Archives/Arthur Boutilier fonds)
She served on Yellowknife city council, worked for the territorial government and was a special advisor on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
She also enjoyed live performances, producing costumes for the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre and performing with her son, Jesse.
Cyr was the former executive director of the Native Women’s Association and up until her passing, was on the NWT Human Rights Commission.
Charles Dent currently chairs the commission. He recalls first meeting Cyr at one of the first Folk on the Rocks festivals in the 1980s when Cyr was with St. John Ambulance and he was a volunteer firefighter.
Later on, when the pair were on Yellowknife City Council in the 1980s, with Cyr being the only Indigenous councillor. Dent said Cyr impressed by doing all the required reading and really made an effort to make good decisions to help the city develop.
Then, when Cyr joined the Human Rights Commission, Dent said she translated her personal experiences into leadership.
“She brought her … understanding and empathy that goes with having experienced the discrimination she personally went through during the Sixties Scoop,” he said.
“She was never afraid to talk about her experiences, never afraid to talk about how that affected her and others like her that you know had experienced the same sorts of things.
“She was courageous, because she was willing to share her experience. She tried to help people empathize with what people have gone through, and help along our path to reconciliation.
“As we developed the Commission, we developed our reconciliation strategy, she was key to helping us set that up, and I’m gonna miss her. We’re gonna miss her.”
CKLB will update this story when Cyr’s funeral arrangements are known.
“You will be told you are ugly or ‘too beautiful to be Indigenous!’ If you were fostered into a white home, you will be told to your parents were drinkers, and you will be told to ignore any pull to your family you lost.”
– Gail Cyr, on growing up in a non-Indigenous community
Gail Cyr as a teenager. (Photo courtesy of Cyr family via Facebook)
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