2020 Continuing Contribution Award

Professor Emerita and former Canadian Senator Lillian Dyck is a USask Alumna (Chemistry BA, Biochemistry Hons. and MSc, Biological Psychiatry PhD) who became a research scientist with Saskatchewan Health (1972-87) and joined USask’s faculty as an Adjunct Professor (Psychiatry, 1984) and its Neuropsychiatry Research Unit (1987-95). Promoted to full Professor (1996), she became Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (2002-5).

Having proved herself as a research scientist and graduate student counsellor, teacher, and administrator, she was increasingly recognized from 1997 on by awards and invitations, from Governments in Canada and abroad and from both mainstream (e.g. YWCA) and Indigenous organizations, as a role model and advocate for girls and women in science. Daughter of a Chinese father and Cree mother, Lillian made her activism into a second career when in 2005 she was called by Prime Minister Paul Martin to become both “the first First Nations woman and first Canadian-born person of Chinese descent” to be appointed to the Senate of Canada. She retired from USask in 2006 and from the Senate at age 75 on August 24, 2020.

During her 15 years in Ottawa, Senator Dyck served as Chair and Deputy Chair of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, worked on issues of Chinese Canadians, women in science and post-secondary education, and for the last 10 years, on MMIWG: the tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. She introduced Bill S-3 to remove sexism from the Indian Act that stripped status from First Nations women who married non-First Nations men (it became law in 2019). Another, Bill S-215, that would “make the fact that the victim of a violent crime is an indigenous woman an aggravating circumstance in sentencing,” was passed in the House (2015) but defeated in the Senate (2016). Ultimately Senator Dyck successfully proposed amendments to Bill C-75 that addressed the issues of MMIWG that concerned her.