- A-5618
- Item
- [ca. 1967]
Head and shoulders image of Dr. Howard Adams, College of Education.
Bio/Historical Note: Dr. Howard Adams was born 8 September 1921 in St. Louis, Saskatchewan, the son of Olive Elizabeth McDougall, a French Métis mother and William Robert Adams, an English Métis (Anglo-Metis) father. He was the maternal great grandson of Louis Riel's lieutenant Maxime Lepine who fought in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. In 1940, he completed high school and joined the RCMP as a constable, a position he held until 1944. Dr. Adams became the first Métis in Canada to gain his PhD after studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. That same year he returned to Canada and took up a position in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan and became a prominent Métis activist, contributing regularly to newspapers and magazines and appearing on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio shows. Dr. Adams published his first book, The Education of Canadians 1800–1867: The Roots of Separatism, in 1968. Another book, Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View, published in 1975, thrust him into the national and international limelight. In 1969,he was elected president of the Metis Association of Saskatchewan. Dr. Adams' intellectual influences included Malcolm X whom he saw lecture at Berkeley, and the general radical environment of that institution during the 1960s. In 1995, he published Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization, unleashing a scathing attack on the effects that racism, Euro-centrism, and neo-colonialism have had on Aboriginal people. Howard Adams died 8 September 2001 In Vancouver on his 80th birthday.