Lynda Powless
One August morning in 2003, Lynda Powless went for a jog. Panting around the track outside the recreation centre of the Six Nations reserve, she heard the shot before she felt the air in front of her ripple as a bullet soared past. She hit the dirt as another bullet whooshed overhead and into the trees. Hearing nothing but her pounding heart, she sprang up and darted across the track, sprinting the one-kilometre stretch home. A few hours later, she was at work in her newspaper office.
Most people don't brush off attempts on their life so easily. But Powless had practice. After all, it was the second time in two weeks that the blunt owner of Turtle Island News, one of the most influential aboriginal newspapers in Canada, had been shot at.
Lynda Powless was born on Six Nations, Canada’s most populous native reserve, near Brantford, Ont. Growing up, Powless lived there for only a year or two at a time. Her father, James, was a steelworker who hauled his family across North America, from Frobisher Bay to Texas. He worked hard and long, and expected the same of his kids.
“We had an extremely good work ethic pounded into us,” says Terrylyn Brant, Powless’s youngest sister, a vice-principal at an elementary school on Six Nations.
So when 18-year-old Powless landed an internship as a reporter in the newsroom of a weekly paper in the Ottawa Valley, she readily accepted the credo of her colleagues: Stay on the story until it is done, no matter what time it is or what day of the week. That attitude got her to the news desks of big dailies in Windsor, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Rochester and Buffalo, and freelance assignments for the Globe and Mail and the New York Times.
At 31, Powless, a single mother of a young son, married Allen MacNaughton, a husky, traditional Mohawk chief from Six Nations. Theirs was a chemistry sparked by a passion for reserve politics. Eight years later, their brood had grown to three boys. While Powless was driving to Toronto every day to work as a producer at CBC Radio, MacNaughton was embroiled in local politics. And the marriage was falling apart.
“I’m not an easy person. I’m used to doing what I want,” admits Powless. “The job was number one for me, and it became a volleyball between the two of us.”
In 1994, Powless had a decision to make: move her kids to Toronto and climb the ranks of the CBC or fulfill a dream to start a newspaper in Ohsweken, Six Nations’ only town. “I didn’t want my sons to grow up the way I did — always being the new kid in class, never having friends for a long period of time. I wanted them to be in their community,” she says.
Powless set up an office in her basement, and on Nov. 30, 1994, published the first issue of Turtle Island News.
“She didn’t know a thing about advertising,” recalls Richard Green, a former Turtle Island News columnist and one of Powless’s closest friends. “I thought, Well, she’ll get two or three issues out and that’ll be that. But she’s never missed a deadline.”
