Editor of Them Days magazine, oral historian, author, embroiderer and exhibition organizer, born in Cartwright (Labrador) in 1941 – in 2006 in St. John’s (Newfoundland).
Doris Jean Martin Saunders was born on June 6, 1941, in Cartwright (Labrador); she was the second of six children. She is of Inuit, Innu, and European descent. She is the great-great-granddaughter of author Lydia Campbell and the niece of authors Margaret Baikie and Elizabeth Goudie. Doris Saunders grew up surrounded by her father’s stories; in addition to being a talented storyteller, he was a trapper and fisherman by trade. As a teenager, Doris Saunders moved to Happy Valley-Goose Bay (Labrador) on a scholarship for her last year of high school, but did not finish the year. She obtained her high school diploma in 1967, after attending night school.
She learned embroidery at school and later became a renowned embroiderer. Many of her works are part of the collection of The Rooms, Newfoundland and Labrador’s leading museum and cultural centre, located in St. John’s. Her work was also featured in the exhibition SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, curated by art historian Heather Igloliorte in 2018. The exhibition brought together works by Nunatsiavut artists, who had long been overlooked on the Inuit art scene.
Doris Saunders is best known for her pivotal role in the creation and editorial leadership of Them Days magazine. In 1975, she was hired by the Labrador Heritage Society to lead a project aiming to publish testimonials collected by retired trapper Isaac Rich from members of the communities of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Rigolet, and North West River. However, it soon became clear that a single book would not do justice to all the material collected. Following a collaboration between the Labrador Heritage Society and the Old Timers League, a seniors’ association, the project evolved into a quarterly magazine, Them Days, whose mission is to preserve the oral history of Labrador. Doris Saunders served as editor of the magazine for almost 30 years, while also contributing to it as a researcher, interviewer, editor, writer, and photographer. She learned how to take and develop photographs as part of her involvement with the magazine. Over the years, Doris Saunders also worked on the photographs held in Them Days’ archives with the help of her daughter Gillian Saunders, who joined the team in 1987. They worked together to identify the people portrayed in the photographs and to correct some of the terms used in the original captions. Over the years, Doris Saunders recorded thousands of hours of interviews about the history and lives of Labrador residents; she also transcribed these interviews, taking care to preserve the Labradorian idiolect. Although Them Days is primarily an English-language publication, the magazine is also notable for its inclusion of stories published in Inuttitut—and more rarely in Innu-aimun—and translated into English. The magazine has published stories by Labradorians of all origins, with a strong emphasis on Inuit and Innu stories and artistic productions. The magazine’s role as a space for self-representation is thus widely recognized, making it a central cultural institution in Labrador, despite recurring financial challenges.
In the 1980s, Them Days’ diversified its mandate to include activities such as publishing books in collaboration with publishing houses, editing information booklets, and organizing craft shows. In 1980, Doris Saunders, along with her long-time colleague and collaborator Judy McGrath, published an information booklet on Labrador and, the following year, a booklet entitled Labrador Pastimes: Toys, Games and Amusements, which accompanied an exhibition on Labrador toys presented at the Memorial University of Newfoundland art gallery. In 2000, Doris Saunders also wrote the foreword to a new edition of Lydia Campbell’s diary, published by Them Days and Killick Press. This diary, a first-hand account of an Inuk woman’s life in the 19th century, is a foundational text of Inuit literature written in Labrador.
In 1984, Them Days set up an archive to organize the documents amassed by its contributors. In addition to these collections, the Them Days Archive also includes personal archives bequeathed by Labradorians, reports, audio and video recordings, photographs, maps, and a reference library. It has been described as one of the most comprehensive collections of Labrador history. The archive is also home to Doris Saunders’ papers, which attest to her active career as an editor, lecturer, and letter-writer.
Doris Saunders retired as editor of Them Days in February 2003, though her work continued to be published there after her departure. She dedicated her career to documenting, preserving, and promoting the history and identity of the people of Labrador, exploring the complexity of their identity and culture and the depth of their history. She was committed to the preservation of this heritage and oral history, focusing on the individual stories of everyday life. Fighting against provincial and federal dynamics marginalizing Labrador’s Indigenous peoples—as well as Labradorians more broadly—she promoted their creativity and encouraged them to show solidarity with each other. She described Them Days as a quilt, made up of multiple identities, but whose common thread is the essence of Labradorian identity. Through her family ties and her work, she was also part of a line of authors who wrote about the lives of women of mixed origin in Labrador over the course of several generations. She stated her desire to continue the documentation work undertaken by her great-great-grandmother Lydia Campbell.
For her contribution to Them Days, Doris Saunders received several awards from the 1980s onwards. She was honoured by the Canadian Historical Association in 1981, and by the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council in 1993. She became a member of the Order of Canada in 1986, and in 1994, she received an honorary doctorate from Memorial University.
Doris Saunders’ Inuit identity was the subject of tensions throughout her life, mainly due to a geographical disagreement arising from the territorial agreements negotiated from 1970s to 2005 between the Labrador Inuit Association (LIA), the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Government of Canada. Inuit on her father’s side, she was born in Cartwright, south of the boundary of the land claims, while her paternal grandmother was from Bluff Head, a community further north, in a territory included in the land claims. When she applied for LIA membership, she was initially rejected due to her place of birth, then accepted in 1990. She was then elected to the board of directors, only to have her membership called into question and cancelled. She then became a member of the Labrador Metis Association, now the NunatuKavut Community Council.
Doris Saunders died of Alzheimer’s disease on May 28, 2006, in St. John’s. Them Days dedicated an issue to her memory, featuring several testimonials from her family and from magazine collaborators.