The Alberta Labour History Institute collects, preserves, and disseminates the stories of Alberta’s working people and their organizations. This website includes full transcripts, podcasts, and profiles of our interviewees. It also includes videos, booklets, themed essays, annual calendars, and a link to a book created by ALHI. To learn more about us, visit About.
TRIBUTE TO MURIEL STANLEY VENNE, 1937-2024
“The thing I was trying to change was to have people see my family and my people with love and caring. I really wanted people to be equal—with no hierarchy—just the right to be who you are and for women to be respectable.”
That guiding principle led Muriel Stanley Venne, Metis matriarch, to become a fiery and effective advocate for Indigenous rights, anti-racism, feminism, workers’ rights, and multiculturalism. Her passage at age 87 on December 17, 2024 robs many organizations, including the Alberta Labour History Institute, of a legendary member and treasured activist. Among her many legacies is Esquao, the Institute for the Advancement of Indigenous Women, which she founded in 1994 to demand dignified treatment by society of Indigenous women and to make sure that Indigenous women were well aware of their rights.
ALHI INTERVIEW WITH MURIEL STANLEY VENNE
Stanley Venne started life as Muriel Esther Kopp, the twin sister of Wesley Kopp. They were the first two of ten children born to Metis parents who farmed near the hamlet of Whitford in Lamont County, Alberta. There were only three other Metis families in a community where most everyone else was Ukrainian. Muriel and her siblings integrated well with the Ukrainian community and she had many friends as she attended local schools. But a move to Edmonton in the middle of grade eight to join her family which had moved a year earlier made her feel different and friendless in her new school environment. She was unable to complete high school after she contracted tuberculosis at age 15 and spent a year in a sanatorium recovering. She married Indigenous pipe insulator Albert Venne when she was 17 and raised four children. After enduring years of violence and threats, Muriel divorced her husband, only revealing the abuse that she experienced many years afterwards when she was campaigning to expose and end the violence which Indigenous women experienced in Canada.
Determined to make something of herself and be a good role model for her children, she made use of a credit union line of credit and weekend work at Garneau Studios to study in the Faculty of Education for three years. But just as tuberculosis prevented her from completing high school, poverty forced her to drop out of her degree program a year before completion and find steady work. She was hired by the Metis Association of Alberta and she took the initiative there to establish and become the first executive director of Native Outreach, a government-sponsored program to provide job training for Indigenous people and to find them employment. During her 10 years as director, she found that most companies and most unions of the 1960s and early 1970s were infested with prejudice against Indigenous people and unwilling to hire them. But the tough-talking Muriel persuaded the Labourers Union leader that she would only provide him with well-selected potential trainees and successfully made the same case to Syncrude regarding oilsands hires.
Determined to pressure employers to hire more Native workers at all levels, Muriel later accepted a position as community relations director for Bechtel Canada as it built the Alsands project. She served as coordinator for the Metis Settlement Carpentry Training Program. Later she became project manager for the Western Aboriginal Development Alliance, developing “Stronger Together,” an Aboriginal Strategic Initiatives Project focused on imparting skills and attitudes to Indigenous people that would sharpen their work skills and self-confidence at work within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous settings.
Her lobbying of Premier Peter Lougheed for greater human rights protections for Indigenous people led to his appointing her as one of the first seven members of Alberta’s fledgling Human Rights Commission in 1973. Though re-appointed in 1976, she left the Commission a year later frustrated that it had been given too little power to remediate wrongs against individuals facing discrimination because of their race or gender. In a Conservative-dominated province, she became an active member of the Alberta New Democratic Party and a frequent, though always unsuccessful, provincial and federal candidate for that party.
Active in the movement in the 1970s to restore Indian status to status women who “married out,” a right that since 1869 the federal government only provided for status Indian men, Muriel was a constant champion of Indigenous women’s rights to live without fear and to participate as men’s equals in the labour force. Doreen Wabasca, the first Indigenous person and also the first woman to serve as construction “foreman” for the City of Edmonton, demonstrates the effectiveness of Muriel’s efforts. Doreen was an experienced construction worker when the city promoted her to foreman but she faced extensive insubordination, racism, and sexism from her employees, who were all male and non-Indigenous. Doreen responded with surface toughness to their efforts to dislodge her from her position but says in an ALHI interview that she was only able to stay in the position for several years because each evening she would call or visit Muriel, who provided her with compassion for her tears but also encouragement to stand her ground.
In the 1990s, through her work with Esquao, Muriel became known nationally and internationally for her campaign to make known the hugely disproportionate number of Indigenous women among the missing and murdered women in Canada and the lax efforts of the police to either find their murderers or provide protection for vulnerable women, particularly sex workers. Her tireless campaigning resulted in such awards as the Alberta Human Rights Award in 1998, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Justice and Human Rights in 2004, induction into the Order of Canada in 2005, the Governor General’s Award and the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, as well as Queen’s Commemoration Medals in 2002 and 2019. In 2017 a government building in Edmonton was named the Muriel Stanley Venne Provincial Centre and in 2019 she became a member of the Alberta Order of Excellence.
But Esquao not only called for better treatment of Indigenous women. It also celebrated the achievements of Indigenous women with an annual Esquao Awards ceremony. Muriel was frustrated by the number of times that various award-granting organizations passed over her recommendations to recognize exceptional Indigenous women and the Esquao Awards were her answer.
Muriel played a major role in many other Indigenous organizations other than those already mentioned. In the 1980s she was vice-president of the Canadian National Friendship Centres. She chaired the board of governors of the Aboriginal Commission on Human Rights and Justice in the early 1990s, which focused on advocacy, research, and public education related to Indigenous rights in Alberta. It was while she chaired that commission that she recognized the need for a separate advocacy organization for Indigenous women, which led to Esquao’s founding. From 2008 to 2012 she was vice-president of the Métis Nation of Alberta.
The supercharged Muriel was also active privately in promoting the careers of several boxers at the Square Circle Boxing Gym where she worked out. That excess of energy and determination to promote Indigenous achievements also led her to join ALHI in 2012 where she led our efforts to interview Indigenous workers and attack the stereotype of Indigenous people that suggests that most of them are on welfare rather than in the labour force. Her efforts included her persuading seven surviving Metis ironworkers to do two lengthy interviews that led to our producing the video, “Waltzing with the Angels,” celebrating the Metis workers who had done the most dangerous jobs in building Edmonton’s downtown skyscrapers, including the CN Tower, but who had never received any recognition for their contribution. In ALHI, as in all of her work, Muriel made a point of involving everyone at meetings and at events to talk about their personal experiences. She was always compassionate, forward-looking, and positive. Even as her health failed in her early eighties, she continued to be active in several organizations and to be interviewed by media regarding the ongoing struggles of Indigenous people for equality.
It is difficult to summarize the legacy of this amazing woman. While other battered, impoverished Indigenous women understandably are crushed by the prejudices and the inequalities of Canadian society, Muriel Stanley Venne turned her vulnerabilities into a lifetime of determined fighting to improve the position of Indigenous women, men, and children, and indeed to fight for the human rights of everyone. Alberta, to require that benefits provided for sick leave apply as well to maternity leave.