Adeline Webber
Adeline Webber is of Inland Tlingit ancestry and is a member of the Teslin Tlingit Nation.1) Adeline and her three sisters attended the Baptist mission school in Whitehorse. Their older brother died in 1942 while he was attending the Chooutla residential school in Carcross, and another brother was sent to a residential school in Alberta and did not return home until he was sixteen.2)
Adeline is one of the original members of the Yukon Indian Women’s Association (now Yukon Aboriginal Women’s Council) and served as president in 1975/76. She sat on the National Native Association of Canada and Indian Rights for Indian Women boards. She advocated for women’s rights to status and was a mentor for those around her. In 2004, she was a founder of the Whitehorse Aboriginal Women’s Circle (WAWC). She also led a project to publish Finding Our Faces, a book of photographs from the Whitehorse Indian Mission School. For this and other work, Adeline received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Assembly of First Nations, Yukon Region.3)
Adeline and husband Bill Webber were founding members of the Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians in 1972. In 1980, YANSI amalgamated with Yukon Native brotherhood to become the Council for Yukon Indians and many people have forgotten YANSI’s history of speaking for non-status people and its work in housing education, justice, and health. In 2022, the Webbers joined Shirley Adamson, Margaret Commodore, and Victor Mitander to form the WAWC ‘s Elders Advisory Committee overseeing a project funded by the Community Development Fund to document the significant work of the Association.4)
In 2021, Adeline became chair of the Chooutla Working Group with co-chair Judy Gingell. A working plan was prepared to reach out to First Nations and others who have histories, stories, information, and photos to shed light on those who did not return from the Yukon residential schools. The first two years of the project planed to focus on Chooutla Residential School and then the group would research other residential schools in the Yukon. Yukon residential schools operated at different times and were run by different groups, and not all of them received federal funding.5)
In 2022, Adeline was among forty Indigenous Canadians who travelled to Italy. They petitioned Pope Francis to come and talk to Canadian survivors and apologize for the decades of harm that resulted from the church’s role in creating and sustaining residential schools.6)
Adeline was the Yukon’s district director for the Public Service Commission of Canada before becoming the territory’s administrator in 2018. In May 2023, she was appointed to a five-year term as the Yukon Commissioner.7)