Gloria Cranmer Webster, VHS 1949,

Celebrated First Nations Activist

By King Lee, VHS 1958

From her Alert Bay village on Vancouver Island’s east coast, to Rideau Hall in Ottawa where she received the Order of Canada from Governor General Julie Payette in 2017, Gloria Cranmer Webster lived a life full of advocacy, dedication, and action.

She was born July 4, 1933, in Alert Bay, one of nine children born to Kwakwaka’wakw chief Dan Cranmer and his wife Agnes. She attended what was then called the Indian Day School and at age 11, lied about her age to get a job at the local cannery.

Chief Dan and his wife realized early in Gloria’s life that she was destined for greatness and allowed her to move away to attend high school. That meant they had to surrender her custody to the state.

At 14, she travelled by steamship to Victoria and enrolled in Grade 9 at Vic High. She described her initial impression of Vic High: “Going to the school for the first time was truly scary, as the social worker and I arrived when classes were changing. There were 1,100 students, and I was coming from a dinky little school where I was in one of two classrooms with maybe, 30 kids. I was the only native student at Vic High and became best friends with the only black girl. Her name was Bernice and we became known as “Bern and Glow.”

She described her first Vic High year as “pretty rough” and looked forward to Christmases and summers back home in Alert Bay each year. Gloria’s parents celebrated her graduation from Vic High in 1949 with a huge feast in Alert Bay.

Gloria became the first Indigenous person to enroll at the University of British Columbia and the first to graduate in 1956 with a degree in anthropology. She earned her way through university by working as a deckhand and at a hospital, but it was working at the UBC Museum, later renamed the Museum of Anthropology, that inspired Gloria’s path in life. She also worked at the Oakalla Penitentiary in New Westminster for two years and at the John Howard Society for two years. It was at the JHS that she met her future husband, John Webster.

Gloria and John moved back to Vancouver from Regina, where John had been posted for 18 months by the JHS, and she worked as a counsellor at the YMCA at what was then known as the Vancouver Indian Centre.

In 1971, she joined UBC’s Department of Anthropology to teach, and to support the development of museum studies and the museum’s assistant curator.

In 1921 at an Alert Bay potlatch ceremony hosted by her father, the federal government had confiscated masks, regalia and other treasures. Gloria was asked to help in efforts to repatriate what became known as the Potlatch Collection.

Gloria returned to her Alert Bay roots in 1975 and continued her commitment to her Kwakwaka’wakw people and the repatriation of the Potlatch Collection. Her efforts drew worldwide attention and she was credited with inspiring an international movement.

Gloria’s battle for the return of treasured pieces came to a successful end in 1979 when the federal government began to return items on the condition that a proper museum facility was available to house the artifacts. She is a founding curator of the U’mista Cultural Society in Alert Bay, which was incorporated under the B.C. Societies Act, on March 22, 1974. In November of 1980, the U’mista Cultural Society Museum was opened in Alert Bay with artifacts from the 1921 Potlatch Collection on display.

Pieces of that collection are still being sought and brought home. Some have gone as far as the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Myrna Cranmer, who has been collecting information about Gloria, called her aunt an “amazing person.” Not only did Gloria repatriate her people’s history, but she also collaborated with Jay Powell to reclaim the Kwakwaka’wakw alphabet, language and audio recordings.

Her fierce advocacy was said to be so bright that it lit up Alert Bay.

Gloria died on April 19, 2023, at Port Hardy Hospital.

Read more about Gloria here.

YouTube video The Potlatch Ceremony and Traditions.  Video clips, interviews with Gloria.