‘You soon learn to work in the two cultures’: Sister Dorothy Bob, SSA

A B.C. Catholic reader and frequent letter writer reached out to us “with astonishment” over last week’s obituary of Sister Dorothy Bob, a Sister of St. Ann who died in Victoria at the age of 92.

Marianne Werner noted that Sister Dorothy Bob had discerned becoming a sister of St. Ann while she was at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. 

Yes, the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Werner wondered whether Sister Bob had ever been interviewed about her experiences at the school. “Working as a young woman cook at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, she must have seen and heard how students were treated there,” said Werner.

 For many, the Kamloops Indian Residential School has become the embodiment of cultural, if not literal, genocide, to the point that the federal government is thinking about making it a crime to “deny” the veracity of any allegation made by anyone about the school.

Yet, Sister Bob was “impressed sufficiently by the work of the Sisters to become a Sister of St. Ann herself,” notes Werner, and she went on to work in other residential schools.

Above, Sister Dorothy Bob in 1996, and at right in 1959. (B.C. Catholic files)

With a little research, it turns out there is more information about Sister Dorothy Bob’s upbringing. Born on the Fountain Reserve, now the Xaxli’p Band, near Lillooet, Dorothy Bob was an Interior Salish of the Lillooet tribe. 

She attended Kamloops Indian Residential School as a young girl but left after four years to care for her sick mother. She later worked as a cook at the school. Determined to complete her education, she undertook private study in Victoria, finishing Grades 5–10 in one year and then completing Grades 11 and 12 the following year at Camosun College.

She told The B.C. Catholic in 1990 that she recalled searching for a religious community but not knowing how to begin the process. “I kept looking for a community, but I did not know how to become a sister,” she said.

It was only when a Sister of St. Ann approached her and asked if she had ever wanted to be a sister that she took the next step.

“I said ‘yes,’ and that’s how it started,” she recalled, admitting to feeling “a small amount of fear” about the application process. With the guidance of a supportive sister and her trust in God, she overcame the hurdle and embraced her vocation. And so, in her early 20s, Sister Bob entered the Sisters of St. Ann, becoming the first Indigenous girl to do so in the congregation’s hundred-year presence in British Columbia.

She chose the name Sister Mary Juan Diego, after the Mexican saint who saw the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe and would become the patron saint of Indigenous peoples.

On Feb. 5, 1959, she received her habit in an investiture ceremony at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Victoria.

Sister Dorothy, front row right, in 1959 after her investiture.

She pursued child-care training at Camosun College so she could work with students at residential schools in Northern B.C. and the Southern Gulf Islands.

As the residential schools began closing, Sister Bob shifted her focus to pastoral care and Indigenous Christian leadership, serving in Lillooet, Williams Lake, and Westbank.

In the 1990s, Archbishop Adam Exner, OMI, invited her to work at the Kateri Native Centre in Vancouver, where she trained First Nations lay spiritual leaders.

In 1990, she was honoured for her missionary work. Here’s how it was reported in The B.C. Catholic:

“Sister Dorothy Bob, SSA, of the Diocese of Nelson, B.C., has won the Catholic Church Extension Society’s second annual Saint Joseph Award. Sister Dorothy, a Sister of St. Ann in Kamloops, is an Interior Salish of the Lillooet tribe from the Fountain Reserve.

The award was given “in recognition of exceptional missionary work in the Canadian home missions.”

It was apparent in her interviews that she struggled with a tension between her religious life and her Indigenous background.

“You soon learn to work in the two cultures,” she said. “I feel I can identify myself with both.”

She was asked at one point whether to describe being “both a Native person and a sister.” She replied that it didn’t matter anymore, but it once did.

“You feel that you’re in two worlds (Native and non-Native), but you soon learn to work in both cultures,” she said.

She admitted to sometimes still feeling somewhat separated from the non-Indigenous world.

“Yes, but I feel I can identify myself with both, so I’ve learned that.”

After returning to Victoria in 2000, she continued her ministry at Queenswood Centre, introducing retreatants and community groups to the Medicine Wheel spiritual discernment process.

In a 2012 B.C. Catholic article, Vancouver priest Father John Brioux, OMI, described the heavy demands of mission work among the Shuswap and Chilcotin people in the Cariboo/Chilcotin region in the early 1980s. “I just couldn’t handle the workload and so began praying to Bl. Kateri for help,” he wrote.

Then-Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha had been declared venerable by Pope Pius XII in 1943 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Father Brioux wrote, “I even visited her tomb at Kahnawake, Que., in the summers of 1981 and 1982, where I petitioned her intervention with the Lord for some solution. In the end, the answer to my prayer was the assistance of two Sisters of St. Ann, both status natives – Sister Kateri Mitchell, a Mohawk, and Sister Dorothy Bob, a Lillooet.”

Sister Dorothy Bob played a role in the vocation of another Indigenous Catholic leader, Deacon Rennie Nahanee, who later became the first coordinator of First Nations Ministry for the Archdiocese of Vancouver.

Deacon Nahanee recalled meeting Sister while he was taking a course for Native American lay leaders. Sister introduced him to a First Nations pilgrimage site in Lillooet, and during a visit there he awoke in the middle of the night to see a light in the shape of a cross shining through his tent. The experience led him to discern his call to the permanent diaconate, and in 2009, he was part of the Archdiocese of Vancouver’s first class of diaconal candidates.

Even in retirement, Sister Bob embraced what her obituary described as her “mission of prayer, presence, and wisdom-sharing.”

Her funeral was held March 7 at Holy Cross Church in Victoria and she was buried at Hatley Memorial Gardens.

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