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About Gloria Cranmer Webster
- Gloria Cranmer Webster (born July 4, 1931) is a Canadian First Nations activist, museum curator and writer of Kwakwaka'wakw descent. The daughter of Dan Cranmer, a chief of the Kwakwaka'wakw, she was born Gloria Cranmer in Alert Bay, British Columbia.
- She is a great-granddaughter of ethnologist George Hunt.
- She moved to Victoria, British Columbia, when she was 14 and attended high school there.
- She graduated in anthropology from the University of British Columbia in 1956, the first indigenous person to be admitted to that university.
- She worked as a counsellor at Oakalla Prison in British Columbia for two years.
- She then worked two years for the John Howard Society.
- While she was there, she met John Webster.
- They married and she moved to Saskatchewan; the couple had a daughter in Regina.
- After 18 months, the family moved to Vancouver, where she worked as a counsellor at the YWCA.
- The couple had two sons and Webster left that job to raise her family.
- She returned to work as a counsellor at the Vancouver Indian Centre.
- Then, in 1971, she was hired as assistant curator for the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.Webster was a driving force behind the establishment of the U’Mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay, which opened in 1980, and served as its curator for a number of years.
- She helped retrieve cultural treasures confiscated from her people by Canadian authorities during raids on potlatches during the 1920s.Webster worked with a linguist from UBC to develop a written orthography for the Kwak'wala language.
- She also wrote books that are used to teach that language.She was narrator for a 1973 documentary film The Potlatch: A Strict Law Bids us Dance.In 2017, she was named an Officer in the Order of Canada.
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