Dr. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 1939-2007

I learned this morning to my sorrow that Gail Valaskakis, a friend and a founder of Aboriginal broadcasting in Canada. died last week of cancer.

Gail was the daughter of a Chippewa father and a Dutch-American mother, born in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. She attended a federal Indian school, then earned her masters degree in theatre arts from Cornell University, where she met and married Kimon Valaskakis, an economics professor from the Université de Montreal. She moved to Canada in 1966, and taught at Kahnawake for a year before becoming a lecturer in communication arts at Loyola College.

In the late 1960s the Arctic was essentially a television-free zone. Gail began to study the impact that the introduction of programming from “outside” had on indigenous languages, societies and cultures. Over the next twenty years, she became the world’s leading authority on impact of intercultural broadcasting. She spent literally months travelling to tiny, remote arctic hamlets from Nain in Labrador to Paulatuk in the Wester Arctic, talking to elders, teacher, kids, land claims fieldworkers, always watching and recording the way that broadcasting was changing a way of life, but also that way that the emerging Inuit politicians were beginning to use media as a tool for cultural preservation, community development, and advancing a Land Claims agenda. Her work shaped the findings of the watershed Therrien report, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, and many other key pieces of federal policy.

Gail was no ivory tower academic. Her analyses, studies, and publications provided the scholarly foundation for a major movement in Canadian media that eventually resulted in the world’s largest Aboriginal television network, a world-class group of award-winning film-makers and broadcasters. But Gail put her time and energy and money and love into dozens of practical, real world projects…Montreal’s Friendship Centre, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, Aboriginal mental health support, a network to support Aboriginal women in science, the promotion of health research on reserves.

She was honoured and recognized throughout her career; appointed dean of the faculty of arts and science at Concordia in 1992 (one of the very few female deans in Canada), recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Award (broadcast on CBC and APTN, one network she helped to transform and one network she helped to create), invited to lecture in China, Russia, Israel, the U.S. and at universities across Canada.

She was funny and she was kind, and I know of at least two women who might not have made it through a difficult phase of their doctoral studies without her encouragement and unfailing support.

The real value of a person isn’t in what they say, or how they’re eulogized, but in what they actually did, what they created, what they changed or what they built. Gail helped build a movement, a body of knowledge, and a revolutionary new application of broadcasting and satellite technology as a tool for social development instead of assimilation.

She was loved and admired by those of us lucky enough to have known her, and she will be missed.