Honourable Senators, I want to share with you some happy news about our former colleague the Honourable Lillian Eva Quan Dyck.

Lillian retired in August 2020 but continues to rack up accolades and awards. For example, in October 2022, she was inducted as a member of the Order of Canada, and exactly one month ago, Lillian Dyck received the Chinese Canadian Legend Award, along with former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and a handful of other outstanding Chinese Canadians from across the country. I had the honour of receiving the award on her behalf at a banquet in Toronto on August 17.

Lillian dedicated the award to her father, Quan Leen Yok, from whom she derives her Chinese ancestry. Her mother, however, was Cree from the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan. The circumstances that led to a marriage between an Indigenous woman and a Chinese man are, on the one hand, the stuff of romance novels and, on the other hand, a cruel reminder of the trying circumstances facing both Indigenous and Chinese people in the first half of the 20th century.

Lillian grew up thinking she was pure Chinese because her mother, who was a residential school survivor, did not want her daughter to be burdened by the knowledge of being Indigenous and to face the prejudice that would have come with it.

Chinese people, however, were hardly a privileged class in the middle part of the last century. In fact, during the 22 years before Lillian was born in 1945, there was virtually no Chinese immigration to Canada thanks to the Exclusion Act of 1923. Even so, Lillian’s mother judged that the misery of being Chinese in Canada was better than the misery of being Indigenous. It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in Canada at that time, but it is also in some ways an uplifting one about how many Chinese immigrants in Canada found solidarity, succour, friendship and, indeed, love from their First Nations brothers and sisters.

Lillian eventually learned about her Cree roots and grew to embrace her Indigenous heritage with gusto. Among her many accomplishments as a senator, she is remembered for her role as a long-serving chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, which produced many groundbreaking studies under her leadership. She did all this without turning her back on her Chinese roots.

Some years ago, she made a pilgrimage to Guangdong to see her father’s birthplace and visit the ancestral home. She mused with me that the house would still be in the family if her dad had gone back to China, perhaps with her in tow. Imagine an alternate universe where Lillian Dyck is unleashed on post-revolution China. What a great movie that would make.

But we do have a movie and it is Café Daughter, which was released last year. It is based on a play by Kenneth Williams about Lillian’s early years and it has been performed numerous times across the country. If you are looking for a way to celebrate our former colleague’s latest achievement and understand how she did it against all odds, I suggest you watch Café Daughter. You can stream it for free on CBC Gem.

Congratulations, Lillian.