My Journey Here — Judith Moses

It was the pandemic that convinced Judith Moses that living in St. Andrews was the right move for her and her husband, Peter Lyman.

Peter was born in St. Andrews, and the couple had a home there they used each summer. But when lock-down forced everyone into new circumstances, Judith, Peter and their grown son sought refuge there.

“Then I asked myself, ‘why aren’t we living here?’ We were living in Toronto,” said Judith.

And so Judith Moses, retired career civil servant, former deputy prolocutor of General Synod, chair of the board of governors of St. Stephen’s University, and a member of the Delaware Nation (her patrilineage) of the Six Nations of the Grand River in southwestern Ontario, is a parishioner in the Parish of St. Andrews.

But how she got there is a journey that took her from the Ontario reserve to some of the highest echelons of power in Canada.

EARLY LIFE
“My first memory is being in St. Peter’s Anglican Church on the Six Nations Reserve,” said Judith. “There were five Anglican churches there. This was the centre of our social life on the reserve.”

Her grandparents lived down the driveway of their farm, and she could often be found there with her librarian/teacher grandmother reading to her.

Farming was in the family, with her grandfather an agronomist and president of the local plowing association. Her great-grandfather was a shopkeeper. 

Judith’s mother was mostly schooled off-reserve, and while she did housework for wealthy Americans, she eventually became a nurse.

“She was very articulate, a mover and shaker, a can-do person,” she said. “I guess I am her daughter!”

Her father was a dairy farmer, but when pasteurization was introduced, he couldn’t afford to make the change. He got a job at a Buffalo, NY auto plant, while his wife continued to run the farm. Eventually the family moved to Fort Erie, Ont. 

At St. Paul’s in Fort Erie, the family immersed itself in church life.

“We had lots of visits from the priest,” she said. “I went to Sunday school. We went to church, Junior Auxiliary and got all our badges. I taught Sunday school and sang in the choir.

“My childhood was unexceptional in many ways, but we never called Fort Erie home. We went home [to Six Nations] every weekend.”

By all accounts the family achieved a good level of success. All of which caused Judith to muse, “If we hadn’t been interfered with, what would we have become?”

The interference she referenced is, of course, residential schools. Her grandfather was a day student who helped at home on the farm, but even so, the experience left its mark. 

“My grandmother forbade him to ever talk about it,” she said. 

But he was deaf in one ear from being beaten by nuns.

“I got him to talk a bit, and he would always cry,” she said. “His experiences were traumatic.”

“BEING INDIAN”
Coming from a modern reserve and an educated family, and not looking the part, Judith successfully straddled two cultures.

“Being Indian was not a negative experience for me. I did not experience discrimination,” she said. “My brothers and sister did. They looked more indigenous that I did.”

In fact, Judith is considered 87 per cent native, with an Irish great-great-grandmother in the mix — a mix she assumes gave her a unique look among her siblings. 

After high school, Judith, the oldest, attended the University of Guelph, where she served as the vice-president of the student union. With accelerated study, she graduated at the age of 20 in 1971, and took a job in Ottawa with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, overseeing summer students.

“It was a tense time and a tense time to be in government,” she said. “My parents were ashamed. Indian Affairs was considered shameful.”

She got a promotion to a full-time HR role in the department, and after a crisis of conscience, decided to remain in government and work for change from within. 

Through her work and travel, Judith came to know many reserves across Canada, their prominent family names, and the conditions under which people lived.

“Compared to Six Nations, it was appalling,” she said, adding those eye-openers further solidified her desire to embrace her culture and work towards improving life for indigenous Canadians.

While she loved learning about how government worked, she learned early on that she was there to serve all Canadians, not just the indigenous population.

IN THE CIVIL SERVICE
Judith was chosen for an exchange program at the Oxford Centre for Management Studies in the UK, and worked in Whitehall for the Department of Transport and Environment.

She was tasked with the role of helping break down barriers in the Civil Service Commission.

“I was there to help make changes they couldn’t make themselves,” she said, adding some of her suggestions were to hold meetings around a coffee table and tea rather than in the traditional board room, and loosening the dress code from shirts and ties to turtlenecks. 

She also pushed for scientists to be recruited into the civil service. 

“They called me The Colonial,” she said. “They used me to front-end some changes. I was 25 years old.”

After 15 months she was called back to a new position at Indian Affairs — special assistant to the minister and the first woman in that role.

During this time, the federal government’s White Paper on Indian Policy, which advocated for the loss of all Indian status, had been released and was rejected by the indigenous population. It was a tumultuous time to work for Indian Affairs. 

“I learned to build bridges between indigenous and non-indigenous,” she said. “I could step into either side and see clearly. But there was a lot of animosity. It was a tough job.

“The minister was one of the most hated men in Canada at the time.”

It was such a hotbed that the reality of residential schools took a back seat to other issues.

“It was just not in the top 10 to be addressed,” said Judith. “We knew they were horrible, but there were so many other crises. It’s maybe something I’ll always kick myself for.”

Around this time, she met her future husband, Peter, who was the chief of staff at Indian and Northern Affairs.

BRANCHING OUT
When an election brought a new minister, Judith decided on a move to the foreign service. She wasn’t there long when she was tasked with laying the groundwork for a Canadian delegation to visit and present at the United Nations in New York City.

As the group of union leaders, entrepreneurs and officials from Ottawa arrived, the government of Joe Clark fell. The government officials quickly flew back to Canada, and she, at the age of 28, was left to address the UN. 

“I read my notes, and heard myself being translated into Mandarin and other languages,” she said. “Then I quickly shepherded the delegation back to Canada.”

She eventually returned to Indian Affairs as director general, an executive promotion.

Part of the job was to organize an annual meeting of the provincial ministers responsible for Indian affairs. 

“I persuaded all those ministers to invite their indigenous organizations,” she said. “The climate we were in, it was important for dialogue to occur at the highest levels. The Indian Nations sat there as equals to the ministers.”

Judith’s career continued in various government departments, including the Privy Council,  where she worked under Pierre Trudeau, John Turner and Brian Mulroney. She helped handle the set-up of the Canadian Space Agency, and oversaw the set-up of ACOA, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

From there she became director general of Youth Affairs under Jean Charest. She studied the high school drop-out rate in the country, finding it at a shocking 33 per cent. 

“The labour market was paying the price for this drop-out rate,” said Judith.

That led to the launch of the national Stay In School program. It was highly successful, and she remembers the New Brunswick minister responsible asking for and getting a list of every week’s drop-outs, after which he would call each parent personally.

Her work continued in the labour market, where she studied the steel and forestry sectors, developed buy-out packages for aging workers and set up 30 industrial sector councils across the country.

From there she went to the Public Service Commission as a deputy minister. 

“I was on the job a week when I realized I’d have to lay off 300 people,” she said. 

Most were French language teachers within militant unions.

“I had to negotiate in French, and they’d correct my French in the negotiations,” she said. 

From there, in 1999, she moved the Agriculture and Agrifood Canada as senior assistant deputy minister. It was a tough time for farmers, who were driving their tractors to Ottawa in protest. 

One of the most memorable files she handled was the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ont. 

“When the first person died, my blood ran cold,” she said, adding she quickly began researching and drawing conclusions.

“I was 100 per cent sure it was from agriculture,” she said.

Her job was to work with the province to find out what had happened and how to stop it. 

“What I didn’t know in the first 48 hours was, where was the water going? Should food be recalled? I just didn’t know what was happening.

“I lost a lot of sleep on that job.”

Judith had a tremendous responsibility, in charge of all animal husbandry and crop growing in Canada, farm-aid, pesticides and so on.

TIME FOR A CHANGE
On her 50th birthday, when she was called away from her party to deal with a demanding minister, she started to think about what life would be like outside of government.

She was up for a promotion to deputy minister, but her husband’s career was taking him to Toronto. Was this the right time to walk away?

“I was tired,” she said. “There is such a thing as hitting a wall. I was a year or two from retirement, so I went.”

In Toronto, she admits to being “lost,” but took on a few contracts and studies for government and did consulting work. Then she took an offer she couldn’t refuse, vice-president of the Ontario office of the Institute on Governance.

From there she worked in Botswana and then in Iraq, where she was tasked with advising the new president and prime minister on the set up of a new regime.

“It was a very dangerous place at the time,” she said, adding she realized the advice offered was never going to work due to the entrenched habits of life under a dictator. 

From there, she and a business partner set up a government relations firm. She took a turn to politics, and ran, unsuccessfully, as a Liberal candidate in the federal riding of York Simcoe. She ran the next year in the provincial riding of Toronto St. Paul, losing by 27 votes.

More consulting work came, including studies on youth suicide in the North and indigenous health in Northern Ontario, and even one for PWRDF, now known as Alongside Hope.

As her work life waned, her volunteer life grew, with stints on many boards, including Ballet Canada, Historica Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, where she served a four-year term as deputy prolocutor.

She has been heavily involved in the development of the Indigenous church within the ACC, including its constitution. She also served as chair of The Vision Keepers Anglican Indigenous Forum and the Jubilee Commission. She currently serves as the chair of the SSU board of governors.

PERSONAL LIFE
Judith and Peter have three grown sons. Matthew, 43, works in the medical devices field in a senior position. Nathaniel, 39, is a lawyer in Vancouver. Sebastian, 36, lives in Berlin and works as the creative director of an advertising firm. They also raised a niece, Melissa.

Because of the archaic federal rule, now repealed, that saw indigenous females lose their status once married to a non-native, Judith refused to get married. She and Peter finally married in 2010, though they had been together as a family unit for decades. 

“It was a blast having all our kids there, watching their faces,” she said.

Peter still works at his firm, Nordicity, and teaches at York University, commuting weekly. He is 82, and Judith is 75.

Her parents retired back to the family home in Six Nations, enjoying good American pensions. They have since passed on.

Despite Judith’s phenomenal success as a public servant, her siblings, sadly, did not enjoy the same path. All became alcoholics, and all have passed. 

“There is still a lot of discrimination, a lot of trauma when you’re part of a society that the government sought to wipe out, even without your parents going to residential school,” she said.

“I think one of the reasons I do what I do is for them. They got the wrong end of the stick, and things came my way for a reason.”

PHOTO CAPTIONS:
1. Judith Moses, right, with Hope and the Rev. Caleb Twinamatsiko at a recent Orange Shirt Day in Charlotte County.
2. Judith with parents Bob and Lee Moses, and children Matthew, Nathaniel and Sebastian at Disney World 1991.
3. The Moses-Lyman family: Nathaniel, Sebastian, Judith, Matthew and Peter.
4. Judith, front row far right, in Gaborone, Botswana, as an advisor to government on its labour market skills development strategy to diversify from its diamond economy.
All photos courtesy of Judith Moses.