Year: 2023
Location: Glenwood
Profile: Born on the Blood Reserve, Dan Fox was taken from his parents and forced to live in St. Mary Residential School from grades 1 to 12. The school was poorly funded and only able to hire poorly prepared and often unmotivated teachers. He remembers the nuns who ran his elementary school for their rigidity and their focus on physical punishment. After high school, Fox, an accomplished athlete, was hired at St. Mary’s as a high school counsellor and football and basketball coach, with most of his time allocated to athletic coaching. Sports, he notes, saved many Indigenous youth from crime and substance abuse. Later Fox found employment in Lethbridge as a community youth worker and Native liaison for the Catholic and public schools in the city. From 1989 to 2013 he was a counsellor at the on-reserve Kainai Correctional Centre, a minimum security facility that emphasized Indigenous culture in its programming for inmates. Afterwards he operated a bison ranch. Fox is proud of involving alienated youth in traditional ceremonies that governments attempted to destroy by stealing generations of young people and placing them in residential schools. That embrace of traditional ceremonies also allowed him to end his addiction to alcohol.
Keywords: Blood Reserve; Community youth worker; Counsellor; Indigenous ceremonies; Kainai Correctional Centre; Residential schools; St. Mary’s Residential School; Sports and Indigenous youth.
Transcript: Pages 12 to 18 of the following transcript provide the primary interview with Dan Fox: Download PDF
See also: Indigenous Labour in Alberta