From island adversity to a champion of indigenous people

Behind that statement lies the remarkable life story of Kathleen Jamieson, née Nicolson, the great majority of which has been written in her adopted Canada though she has never lost connections with her native island.

This extraordinary story has continued into another generation with two of Kathleen’s daughters working at the cutting edge of cancer research at the University of California in San Diego, while maintaining their own Hebridean connections.

Professor Catriona Jamieson, director of the Sanford Stem Cell Institute at the university, said this week: “We are so proud of our mom. She just kept doing things! The family has always said that the resilience genes come from the Hebrides”.

For Kathleen, resilience means writing, working and campaigning in her 90th year. She is still involved with a range of organisations which exist to advance the interests of indigenous people, who continue to be severely disadvantaged on many counts, including health and education.

Speaking from her home in Vancouver, Kathleen Jamieson said she is not a great believer in honours but would accept this one because “it was indigenous women I had worked with for many years” who nominated her for the King Charles III Medal, for outstanding service to country and community.

KATHLEEN GREW up in Stornoway in hard times. Her grandfather, Angus Nicolson from Ranish, was an Iolaire survivor.

Like many families from Lochs, the family had moved to the Battery area of Stornoway and then made their home at 23 Seaforth Road. Her father, also Angus, drowned in the Second World War.

Their mother was left a widow on a pension of £3 a week and Kathleen speaks with great emphasis on the part her maternal grandmother, from Fivepenny in Ness, played in their upbringing. “We all owe everything to my grandmother, Mairead Macleod”, she says.

In the face of poverty, even before the tragedy of war, Mairead had worked in service, worked at the herring, worked at the peats … always worked; then worked to hold together a family and open up opportunities to children who had lost their father in war.

Kathleen adopted the same ethos. From the age of 13 she worked in Woolworth’s to help the family’s threadbare finances - “I was very proud of that” she recalls. At the Nicolson Institute, she discovered a great talent for art which was to be her passport to Edinburgh University, with the help of a bursary and her teacher.

“I really wanted to be an artist”, she says. “That was my dream. I was very grateful to Mr Chalmers, the art teacher in the Nicolson, who was instrumental in securing funding for my next steps. He found this programme at Edinburgh University which included a one year scholarship to work in a studio”. Between that and a Macaulay (Rhodesia) Bursary, she says: “I was quite well off”.

When Kathleen graduated with First Class Honours in 1959, a Gazette report concentrated on the Fine Art element of her degree, since this really was a “first” for a Nicolson pupil to achieve. However, Kathleen’s degree also included Philosophy and English. She soon concluded that it would be difficult to make a living in Fine Art.

While at university in Edinburgh, she met and would soon marry a Shetlander, Eric Jamieson, who qualified as a mining engineer. Kathleen secured a “wonderful job” at the National Library of Scotland as a researcher which would later stand her in good stead. But with the mines closing in Scotland, Eric started to look abroad.

The immediate result was that they spent six years in southern Chile before being kicked out when President Allende was elected on a commitment to get rid of the “gringos” with no exceptions made! They returned briefly to Lewis until Eric found work in Canada, initially in Alberta, at a place called Crow’s Nest Pass with “nine months of deep snow”.

By now with three daughters, the family settled in Ottawa with Eric working for the government while Kathleen returned to academia as a lecturer in social anthropology at Carleton University. “That is how my career started to evolve”, she says.

Since arriving in Canada, she had been “surprised by the amount of discrimination there was against indigenous people. It was only when I began to dig deeper that I found this was enshrined in law”.

In particular, the Indian Act of 1876 had created appallingly discriminatory terms for women who married outside the reservation. They and their children were banned thereafter from returning, even in death. The Act was designed to assimilate Indigenous peoples and strip women of cultural identity and community ties.

The theory was that by joining white society they had elevated themselves and connections with their own people should be broken. No such prohibition was placed upon men.

Kathleen determined to write her thesis on the subject and this took her into more than five decades of campaigning for the rights of indigenous people. “The indigenous women”, she recalls, “were very accepting of me. They were always extremely kind. It was a relaxed, non-hierarchical environment whereas Canada, like the UK, could be classist and a bit misogynistic”.

An Advisory Council on the Status of Women had been established by the Canadian government in the early 1970s, as the feminist movement grew, and it commissioned Kathleen to write a book. This was where the research skills which she had developed while working at the National Library of Scotland came in handy on her CV.

“Indian Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus” was published in 1978 and was well reviewed but not well received by defenders of the status quo who remained resistant to change and reluctant to admit that Canada had a lot to answer for in the treatment of its indigenous people.

Kathleen’s book stated bluntly: “To be born poor, an Indian and a female is to be a member of the most disadvantaged minority in Canada today, a citizen minus. It is to be victimised and utterly powerless and to be, by government decree, without legal recourse of any kind”.

Kathleen says: “We got the law changed” but other elements of disadvantage for the indigenous peoples persisted. She travelled all over Canada helping to build organisations and lobby for further reforms as well as continuing her academic work.

In 1981, Kathleen and her husband – who has since passed away – moved to Vancouver and she quickly became immersed in working with the indigenous peoples. She has continued to work as a research consultant analysing policies. and programmes for Aboriginal early childhood development and care, as well as encouraging community development initiatives.

As if this was not enough as the years rolled by, she also became a prominent campaigner for the rights of older people, arguing that these rights have not evolved at the same pace as the medical advances which have led to greater longevity – an analysis equally borne out in the Hebrides!

Last year, Kathleen had the opportunity to a United Nations hearing in New York. This campaign is ongoing as Canada has not signed up to a UN Convention on the Rights of Older Persons – a state of affairs which she has every intention of helping to correct.

Pat Macleod, from Leurbost, has been a friend since she and Kathleen met on their first day at the Nicolson Institute 77 years ago. Both women testify to the enduring importance of that friendship which has helped Kathleen remain in regular touch with Lewis as well as providing a source of mutual support in difficult times.

KATHLEEN AND Eric had three daughters, one of whom, Barbara, passed away last year. The other two are in San Diego, pursuing these extraordinary careers.

During her medical training, Catriona spent part of her elective year at the Langabhat practice in Lochs – an experience which she describes as “pivotal” to all that followed.

It has been quite a career. Its highest profile on an international scale involves the interface between space and cancer research. Since I am most unlikely to do it justice in my own words, I quote an extract from an interview she gave to a scientific journal.

“I think the surprise is how illuminating space is. I didn’t know how different things would be in space, that it would be an accelerant for understanding essential human biology, like normal stem cell ageing under conditions of stress, or cancer evolution under conditions of stress. It recapitulates stress in a way that compresses the time frame. It’s like the theory of relativity, you get this compression of time so you’re able to see these things faster.

“This is the first time space has ever been used in the development of a drug for cancer. Period. Full stop. That is unique. Now we can ask: ‘Could we make drugs more effectively, actually, in space?’.”

For those who are sufficiently intrigued, there is plenty more to be found simply by googling Catriona Jamieson and you will also find her described, more colloquially, as “the scientist sending tumours into space”.

The medically-minded will also find plenty on-line about Catriona’s sister, Christina, who graduated in Boston and is now Associate Professor in San Diego at the University’s Department of Urology Cancer Centre.

We can only imagine what the granny from Ness – “to whom we all owe everything” – would have made of the achievements that have followed.

Her example, so lovingly recalled, surely inspired the trajectory for Kathleen’s own life’s work.