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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Sandra Dolan has had the kind of career most journalists can only look on with admiration and a touch of envy.

Sandra Dolan of Fort Smith has had a fascinating and varied career as a journalist and writer. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"I think that I've had the most perfect career that anybody could possibly, possibly have," she said recently over tea in her Fort Smith log home.

When asked about the highlight of her career – which included Expo 67 in Montreal, opening doors for women at the CBC and launching a Northern business – Dolan goes in a different direction.

The 71-year-old said she most enjoyed working as communications co-ordinator for the visit by Pope John Paul II to Fort Simpson in 1987.

"I thought that was the most challenging thing," she said, noting she was solely responsible for, among other things, finding places for visiting media members to stay and writing news releases.

"If you're good, you're good. If you're bad, you're bad," she said. "I think that's a wonderful thing."

Dolan also liked the fact she was working for a Dene organizing committee, and was the only non-aboriginal on the team.

"I was able to help inform journalists from all over the world about the Dene and their aspirations, not only in providing background material but places for them to see and people to interview," she said. "The day the Pope landed was magical. It was cool and raining a bit, but when the plane was landing the sun came out and a huge rainbow arced the sky. His message was one of support for native rights. I felt grateful to have been part of this most positive experience."

Dolan began her journalism career in 1964 when she was hired at 19 as a reporter with The Montreal Gazette in her hometown.

"I always wanted to be a reporter," she recalled. "That's all I ever wanted to be."

At the time, she was studying history at McGill University.

Dolan said she got the reporting job because the managing editor had hired his daughter, who was her classmate at McGill, to do reviews and he didn't want her to be the only female in the newsroom.

With the Gazette, the bilingual Dolan covered many major stories in Quebec, including the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis and Expo 67.

In fact, she had an on-site bureau at Expo 67 and filed a story every day from the famed world's fair.

"It was like a dream," she recalled. "You met people from all over the world."

Over the years, she also worked at The Winnipeg Tribune, again at The Montreal Gazette, and at the CBC in Montreal and Edmonton.

In the late '60s, Dolan was among the first women to work in a CBC newsroom in Canada.

"I don't know if I thought of myself as a trailblazer. I was just very pushy," she said, adding she didn't really take '"no" for an answer.

At the CBC in Edmonton, Dolan travelled on assignment to Yellowknife in 1978.

"I really loved Yellowknife. I just thought it was cool. I think the same way now," she said, noting she had never before been in the NWT. "The North was so free."

In 1979, she moved to a position with CBC Radio in Yellowknife.

"I really wanted to experience more things," she said. "I wanted to see the North. I wanted to go out in the bush. There were just tons of things I wanted to do and I could see that I could do it."

Over the years in Yellowknife, Dolan worked as the first trainer at Native Communications, co-founded the video company PIDO Production Ltd. and did freelance work.

She also took in and helped raise seven children.

When some of those children were teenagers, they began drinking and an addictions worker advised her to move out of Yellowknife.

"So I looked around for a community and I came here," Dolan said of Fort Smith, where she moved in about 1989.

After arriving in Fort Smith, she built a house in nearby Fort Fitzgerald, Alta., and lived there for 10 years, beginning with no power or telephones.

"You want to know if you're capable of living off the grid," she said.

Afterward, she lived again in Yellowknife and Hay River, before returning to Fort Smith in 2004.

There, she has done various freelance jobs, including writing several history books. The most recent was 'Wooden Boats and Iron People', a history of Fort Smith. She is currently writing a history of Smith's Landing First Nation.

Dolan said she has always been interested in history, and probably would have become an historian if she hadn't left her studies at McGill to become a reporter.

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