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Article: Leaving the bitterness and pain behind.
- Article from:
- Wind Speaker
- Article date:
- March 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Like other winners of this year's National Aboriginal Achievement Awards, Gladys Taylor Cook (Heritage and Spirituality) has found that she, and her life's work, has suddenly become highly visible. Forty-five years ago, as a single mother taking various laundry jobs to make ends meet, her situation was the exact opposite.
"Every job I had, I was invisible," Cook recalls of the many years spent loading washers, unloading dryers, folding and pressing laundry at the residential school, and later, at the hospital in Portage la Prairie, Man.
It's not that she felt this kind of work was beneath her. Rather, it was the systemic and systematic racism she ...