Michèle Audette

It was July 20, 1971, on a train heading for Schefferville.

On board, an Innu woman went into labour. On that train, at the time, the cars were segregated. She was flown to the hospital in Wabush, Labrador.

That is how Michèle Audette arrived.

Her mother was Evelyne St-Onge. She was Innu, from Uashat mak Mani-Utenam. Her father, Gilles Audette, was a Quebecer from Montreal.

Michèle grew up among three worlds: Innu, French, English. In Schefferville, she spent time on the rivers and lakes with her Innu family.

But the law was unjust. Indian women who married white men were excluded from their band.

Yet Evelyne told her daughter that she had always been Innu, even if the law did not recognize it. And she fought. In 1974, she helped found Quebec Native Women.

She also kept repeating one sentence to Michèle:

After her parents separated, from eleven to fourteen, Michèle lived with her mother in a tent in summer, in basements or sheds in winter. She finished high school in Montreal, at her father's.

In Montreal, she found a place that mattered a great deal: the Native Friendship Centre. She studied visual arts at UQAM, then art education at Concordia.

In her twenties, she learned a simple thing. The laws, including the Indian Act, were made in Ottawa.

At twenty-seven, she was elected president of Quebec Native Women, the organization her mother had helped found. As a young president, she appeared before the Senate Human Rights Committee on the Indian Act.

In 2004, she joined the Quebec government, as associate deputy minister at the Secrétariat à la condition féminine.

In 2010, she walked, on foot, from Wendake to Ottawa. Before a group of senators, she was denied her eagle feathers.

In 2012, she took the helm of the Native Women's Association of Canada.

Then came another task. She was one of the five commissioners of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Over two years, the commissioners heard more than 2,300 people: families, survivors, experts, Knowledge Keepers.

On June 3, 2019, the final report was delivered. It contained 231 calls for justice.

From 2019, at Université Laval, she advised the institution on reconciliation and Indigenous education.

On July 29, 2021, Michèle Audette was appointed to the Senate. The woman whom senators had once denied her eagle feathers was now a senator herself.

She took her oath in Innu. It was a first.

In the Senate, she sits on the committees on Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights and Official Languages. There she has pointed out the absence of Indigenous languages from a bill on official languages.

She says she is proud of both her sides. The Innu side, welcoming, generous, full of humour. And the Quebecois side.

That Innu way of welcoming with generosity, which is her own, echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing.

What remains is the image of a child born on a moving train. She has never stopped moving forward.