The calm in their storm

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This article was published 16/06/2018 (2892 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You’d think there would be a photo of Tamara Boyce wrapped in a star blanket from grateful Lake Manitoba First Nation evacuees after the devastating 2011 flood. Maybe there is, but no one knows, and it seemed Boyce didn’t have one.

The blanket, the honour of it, was described as a highlight of Boyce’s life in her obituary this spring. She died on April 11 after a 17-month battle with cancer. She was 57.

In 2011, the Lake Manitoba First Nation recognized her for helping its people who were displaced by the flood; she had been the emergency social services lead. The lifelong Manitoba civil servant was the guest of honour at a ceremony where she was presented with the blanket.

The event was practically the first thing evacuees did as a community once they got home. They weathered the wait better, thanks in large part to Boyce. Some evacuees, it’s worth noting, are still out of their homes seven years later.

Lake Manitoba female elders conceived the idea. The red, blue, yellow and white colours were selected for their traditional symbolism to represent the four directions. The eight-point star represented the people — elders, adults, youth and children — who recognized Boyce’s hard-driving work ethic and innate humility.

The ceremony at the band hall was attended by a couple of hundred former evacuees.

The biggest problem was getting the guest of honour away from her desk to make the trip for it, chuckled Indigenous political adviser and elder Garry McLean, who was on the Lake Manitoba council at the time.

“The only way I could get her there was to tell her we had a gift for her. A star blanket is given to people for going above and beyond the call of duty and she did that. What people need to know is it was the grandmothers who suggested the star blanket,” McLean said.

Boyce handled the files for hundreds of people who were out of their homes for most of that summer, on top of her regular duties as a regional comptroller with the province.

Lake Manitoba was one of several Interlake First Nations flooded after the province diverted historic high level of flood water from the Assiniboine River into Lake Manitoba.

“She was awesome, right from when we started working with her. She co-ordinated the payments for all the people: meals, expenses, everything,” McLean said.

McLean didn’t know of a photograph of Boyce with the blanket, either. She wasn’t big on recognition, the former councillor said.

Boyce’s common-law husband Kelly Gorzen agreed.

“Tami was an extremely modest person. She completed an amazing volume of work, moving from one task to the next with little fanfare,” Gorzen said.

“The star blanket was special to her, the ceremony, the honour of receipt and the sense of recognition from the First Nation was something she was very proud of.”

Although armed with just a high school diploma, Boyce had a mind for numbers and computers. That, along with her people skills, saw her promoted time and again in the provincial civil service where she worked all her adult life.

Lloyd Searcy is a retired assistant deputy minister of health — and the boss who says Boyce made him look good some 25 years ago. To him, Boyce was key to preparing the budget book for his department. “When the minister’s defending his budget in the legislature, he has to have the answers at his fingertips,” Searcy said. “(Boyce)was a very large part of it.”

Boyce’s obituary noted she made her final goodbyes to family by her bedside with the same quality of fierce determination she’d lived her life by. “I was so saddened to see it (the obituary). It’s unfair when they go young,” Searcy said from his home in Kelowna, B.C.

Born the second-youngest of 10 siblings in Rivers to Phyllis and James Smale, Boyce attended grade school in Winnipeg. The family moved to St. Andrews when her dad retired from the army. She considered Selkirk her home.

For Boyce, the best memories were the little things: the countless family celebrations, the feasts she cooked with her sisters and the brood of nephews and nieces she adored. Animals loved her.

Gorzen recalled how much she contributed to his business conferences — as secretary-treasurer of Local 979, he is the head of the Teamsters in Manitoba — simply because Boyce could relate to people from all walks of life.

“She could disarm people with a single look,” he said. “She could be that crazy girl in pyjamas cooking over a cookstove at Riding Mountain for the kids and myself. She could be dressed up and elite, and be down in the trenches like a girl from the farm. She could make that transition in the blink of an eye.”

Daughter Krysten Boyce, who was out of the country at the time of the ceremony, inherited the blanket and believed somewhere, someone must have taken a photograph of her mom with it because it was such an honour. “I bet you there must be one.”

Photograph or not, the blanket itself is now an heirloom for her only child, described as the sun in her mother’s life.

“It’s something I will cherish,” Krysten said. “She was just so humbled by it.”

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca