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magazine / so06
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September/October 2006 issue |
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Grey Nuns across Canada
When four Grey Nuns set out from Montréal by canoe on
April 23, 1844, for the Red River Settlement — now
Winnipeg — it was front-page news.
"This departure marks a remarkable date in the history of
Canada," the Montréal newspaper La Minerve reported. Sisters
Valade, Lagrave, Lafrance and Coutlée were the first nuns in the
Canadian West and the forerunners of hundreds of Quebec nuns
who fanned out across the continent to build schools and hospitals
for an emerging nation.
"There was no agency providing health care or education.
These women were it," says Elizabeth Smyth, associate professor at
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.
Within the decade, other missionary nuns arrived in Canada
from the United States and Europe, including the Sisters of Charity
(no relation to the Montréal order), who came from New York
to
Halifax, and the Loretto Sisters, who came from Ireland to Toronto.
Nuns did everything from treating typhus victims to giving piano
lessons.
“One of the big untold stories of Canadian history,” says
Smyth, “is the role of these communities in providing culture.”
They included remarkable women, such as Esther Pariseau of
the Sisters of Providence, who led five nuns to the Pacific
Northwest in 1856, built 29 hospitals and schools and founded a
health-care network that survives today. She supervised construction,
wielding a hammer and saw. She even sculpted most of the
interior wood mouldings for the buildings. She is honoured as a
founder of Washington State with a statue in National Statuary
Hall in Washington, D.C.
— Marian Scott
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