Local writer, activist Don Marks dies

Posted: 9:00 AM CST Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016 Last Modified: 10:33 AM CST Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 | Updates

Don Marks, a local writer, television producer, political activist and passionate advocate on aboriginal issues, whose columns have been featured in the Free Press, died early Saturday morning.

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Don Marks, a local writer, television producer, political activist and passionate advocate on aboriginal issues, whose columns have been featured in the Free Press, died early Saturday morning.

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Don Marks, a local writer, television producer, political activist and passionate advocate on aboriginal issues, whose columns have been featured in the Free Press, died early Saturday morning.

He was 62.

A close friend, Ken Macdonald, said Marks had been at the Health Sciences Centre awaiting a hoped for trip to Toronto where he was to be evaluated for a liver transplant when he died at about 6:30 a.m. following an emergency procedure the night before.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES
Don Marks — KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Don Marks

Marks was often assumed to be aboriginal by birth, and while he wasn’t, he experienced some of the same challenges many First Nation’s youth do growing up in Winnipeg.

For a time, as a kid, he lived on the streets of the North End, before being adopted by an indigenous family, two events that had a defining influence on his life and his life’s work.

He detailed that wide-ranging work on his Wikipedia page, beginning in the mid-1970s as a local coordinator of a program that assisted young Americans who moved to Canada to avoid being drafted into the U.S. military and fighting in Vietnam.

He would run unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in the 1977 provincial election and, by the 1980s he was working as a weekend news and sports announcer at a local station owned by the man who had recruited him to run for the Liberals, then leader Izzy Asper.

But Marks was a restless man, driven by a sense of social justice, his creativity and a need to find a way to make a living.

He would become a partner in a First Nations-centered production company that launched both news and variety programming, Over the years that followed he would be the recipient of several awards and nominations for work that ranged from indigenous focused variety programming, to a video meant to combat solvent abuse in aboriginal communities, to an examination of racism in Canada. Along the way he won a 1993 Manitoba Human Rights Achievement Award.

Late in life he wrote and directed a documentary that reflected on a happy time in his boyhood, when he played for CPAC, a team from the North End that had the unlikely distinction of winning the 1965 Canadian little league baseball championship. He titled it. “Behind in the Count.”

The iconic Canadian indigenous leader Elijah Harper summed up who Don Marks was to him, and many others, in these words:

“I don’t view him as a white person. As a matter of fact, I view him as a brother, like you do when you get to know a person and become comfortable talking with him.”

Marks didn’t want a conventional funeral service, Macdonald said, but there will be a gathering at a later date to celebrate his life.

Gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca