Charlotte Winters-Fost, grandmother of Burton Winters, named 2020's Indigenous Advocate

A retired teacher from Hopedale who spoke out passionately about the delayed search for a grandson who perished on sea ice in 2012 and who helped found one of Newfoundland and Labrador's pre-eminent Indigenous groups is the first recipient of a new award for advocacy. 

Charlotte Winters-Fost, 66, was honoured as 2020's advocate by First Voice Urban Indigenous Coalition. She was nominated for more 40 years of efforts to advance reconciliation. 

"I was just floored, dumbfounded, excited — and I even cried," Winters-Fost said with a laugh.

She played an instrumental role in the establishment of the St. John's Native Friendship Centre — the forerunner of the non-profit organization First Light — in 1983. The centre encouraged cross-cultural contact in an urban environment and helped Indigenous people adjust to the city.

"The hope was that what we would offer was a place people could meet and just get to know each other," she said.

Through the decades, the centre has offered women's retreats and family camps, and has served as an information hub for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents. 

"I would like to see people come and get to know us through learning about our history as it occurred, not as painted in the colonial paintbrush," she said.

40 years of advocacy

Winters-Fost recalled her childhood in an online acceptance speech Thursday.

The 1950s were "a great time to be a kid growing up in a northern Inuit village," she recalled. "The outdoors was our playground."

Winters-Fost moved to St. John's in the 1970s to pursue a degree at Memorial University. There, she encountered roadblocks and discrimination that later informed her advocacy work.

"It was a good time and a good place back then," she said, but her experiences were sometimes marred by racial commentary, which she says taught her assertiveness.

"I'm better able to respond to overt acts of racism," she said. "For example, if somebody called me names, I can come back with a few choice descriptive ones as well."

Winters-Fost found a deeper challenge lay in rooting out systemic, often subliminal racism — what's been, for her, a lifelong career.

"If somebody has a disdain for you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or snubs you — I mean, how do you react to that?" she said.

"It's taken me a long time to embrace my heritage and stand up and be proud of who I am."

She was a vocal critic of the province's emergency response after Burton Winters's death, which garnered national attention. 

Winters, 14, died after he went snowmobiling on the sea ice outside Makkovik in 2012. The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre waited two days to send air support to help find him.

The Liberal government said in February that an inquiry into search and rescue responses — which has been promised since the party took power in 2015, and which was formally announced in 2018 — is forthcoming. 

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