Remembering Irene Kelleher: New book showcases successes, struggles of first woman in B.C. of Indigenous heritage to be awarded a teaching certificate
Credit to Author: Aleesha Harris| Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 16:18:03 +0000
Invisible Generations: Living Between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley
By Jean Barman
Caitlin Press | $24.95 
Twenty-five years ago, Jean Barman was introduced to a woman who told her an incredible story. One of struggle. One of racism. One of family. And, above all, one of perseverance.
Introduced by a mutual acquaintance while Barman was teaching at the UBC Faculty of Education, the woman wished to share the story of her mixed-heritage family living in the Fraser Valley at a time when racial tensions simmered.
“’There’s nobody to write about us; it will be the first time to tell the story,’” Barman recalls her saying when they first met in person in the ’90s.
That woman was Irene Kelleher.
“Irene’s life was shadowed by the scorn attached to persons like herself of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent,” Barman further explains. “She wanted her family’s story to survive.”
A quarter century later, it’s time to tell it.
“It is only now, (when) attitudes have sufficiently moderated, that stories like those of Irene and her family and friends can be told without fear of being dismissed out of hand as irrelevant or unsuitable,” Barman explains of the timing of the release of her new book, titled Invisible Generations: Living Between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley.
The B.C. historian’s latest book tells the story of three generations of a family centred around the offspring of two unions of an Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men, including Kelleher’s parents, Julia and Cornelius Kelleher. Spanning regional destinations from Abbotsford to Usk (a small community near Terrace), their story takes readers through the struggles and successes of the family (and some of their friends) from 1921 through 1964.
Irene Kelleher.
“Their lives open up a window far too long closed to British Columbians and Canadians dismissed as ‘half-breeds,’ as lesser persons than ourselves by virtue of their distinctive mixed descent, and thereby relegated to the shadows of the past as opposed to being real persons whose everyday lives were filled with adventures, not unlike our own in the present day,” she explains.
The book, Barman says, also stresses the “critical importance” of access to education on a universal scale.
“It mattered not only to Irene, who instigated the story’s telling and became a career public school teacher, but also to her parents and their circle of friends of similar mixed descent whose only educational option was an Indian residential school taking for granted its control over students’ lives extending to marrying them off to each other, which it did at will,” Barman says.
Summarized by the author as “realistic, hard-hitting and heartwarming,” Invisible Generations shines a spotlight on Kelleher’s formidable career achievements. The Matsqui-based educator is recognized as being among the first women in B.C. of Indigenous heritage to be awarded a teaching certificate.
“Irene acquired a teacher’s certificate at a time it was almost wholly a white occupation, being the first or almost the first person of Indigenous descent to do so in B.C.,” Barman says. “The only jobs to be had were on the edges of the edge where no one else wanted to go and then, by her own choice, teaching Doukhobor children at a time their schools were being firebombed.”
Barman further details how it wasn’t until much later in her career, that Kelleher was “permitted back in the Fraser Valley” to teach in Abbotsford, a community which she served in as an educator from 1939-64. In sharing her story, the author hopes to inspire others to follow her example and to fearlessly pursue their dreams, career or otherwise.
“Irene Kelleher made her career on her own terms at a time it was difficult for any woman, much less one of mixed descent, to do so,” Barman says. “We each make our own way in the world as best we can, and so did Irene.”
Kelleher possessed an overwhelming amount of “decency and good will,” Barman says. It’s a trait she came to realize was a common vein throughout the Kelleher family, and the community of friends and family who shared in both the half-Indigenous descent — and the discrimination that often came with it.
The optimistic outlook had a lingering impact on the author. And, to this day, she says she cherishes her contact with Kelleher, who passed away in 2004, and has kept a part of the historic B.C. teacher to this day.
“My life is the better for the time Irene and I spent together, recalled for me each day by the presence on our shelves of her mother’s prized cups and saucers commemorating King George VI’s visit to Canada in 1939 and Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, which Irene one day insisted I have as a remembrance of her and her family,” Barman says.
But Barman also recalls how, despite her successes — and her courage in recounting her personal story — an element of dread surrounding her heritage and the perspective others’ harboured about it lingered within Kelleher.
“I was repeatedly surprised by the tinge of fear that never left Irene during our walks together near where she lives as to whether persons we met would greet here warmly as their one-time teacher or silently pass by,” Barman recalls. “As she asked me after one such encounter, ‘Do I look Indian? How Indian do I look?’”
It’s a memory of intolerance that Barman says still lingers around Kelleher’s story.
“Sadly, as I write in Invisible Generations, at the time I knew Irene, now a quarter of a century ago, I sought to get the UBC Faculty of Education or UBC itself to honour her as a lifelong teacher, there was no interest whatsoever in doing so,” she says. “If she had been wholly Indigenous I expect it would have different, but ‘half-breeds’ were even then suspect — as to some extent they still are.”
Perhaps that’s why, for Barman, the story of one brave woman, and her successes and struggles working in the B.C. education system, is such an important one to share. For Kelleher. For her family. And, for the rest of us, too.
“We each have stories to share about our families and ourselves from which others can learn,” Barman says. “I am hopeful Invisible Generations will encourage more of us to do so.”