Canadian Women In The Sky

How a few women fought to board planes, then fly them, and finally to break through earth’s atmosphere into space. The story of how women in Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, struggled to win a place in the world of air travel, first as passengers, then as flight attendants and pilots, and, finally, as astronauts. Anecdotes, sometimes humourous and always amazing, trace these women’s challenges and successes, their slow march over 100 years from scandal to acceptance, whether in Second World War skies, in hostile northern bush country, and even beyond Earth’s atmosphere. From the time the first woman climbed on board a flying machine as a passenger to the moment a Canadian woman astronaut visited the International Space Station, this is an account of how the sky-blue glass ceiling eventually cracked, allowing passionate and determined “air-crazy” women the opportunity to fly.

These are the stories of early intrepid Canadian women bush pilots from the late 1940s onwards, who set new records of achievement in northern Canada.

BREAKING NEWS: Amanda Lindhout’s lead kidnapper, Ali Omar Ader, has been caught. Amanda Lindhout wrote about her fifteen month abduction in Somalia in A House in the Sky. It is the New York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most remote places and then into captivity: “Exquisitely told…A young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph” (The New York Times Book Review). As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is “a searingly unsentimental account. Ultimately it is compassion—for her naïve younger self, for her kidnappers—that becomes the key to Lindhout’s survival” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

In October 2008, Mellissa Fung, a long-time reporter for CBC’s The National, was leaving a refugee camp outside of Kabul. Suddenly, she was grabbed by armed men claiming to be Taliban, stabbed, stuffed into the back of a car and driven off into the desert. When the group finally reached a village in the middle of nowhere, her kidnappers pushed her towards a hole in the ground. For twenty-eight days, Mellissa Fung lived in that hole, which was barely big enough to stand up or lie down in, nursing her injuries, praying, writing in her notebook and, as a veteran journalist, interrogating her own captors. Under an Afghan Sky is the gripping tale of Fung’s days in captivity, and a powerful book about survival and the indomitable spirit of one woman in the most perilous of circumstances.

Canadian Women in the Skytraces a century of Canadian women’s progress in aviation and space flight. From the first woman to climb on aboard a flying machine as a passenger to a female astronaut’s second visit to the International Space Station, these women cracked the sky-blue glass ceiling to achieve their dreams.

This collection of poetry, short stories and visual art honors the legacy of Sky Woman. Nearly 40 writers and visual artists are represented in 22 Indigenous nations across Canada, United States, Mexico, Pacific Islands and Japan, featuring exemplary artists such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jeannette Armstrong, Daphane Odjig, and Lee Maracle.

"Calling Down the Sky" is a poetry collection that describes deep personal experiences and post generational effects of the Canadian Aboriginal Residential School confinements in the 1950's when thousands of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools against their parents' wishes. Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. The author portrays how the ongoing impact of the residential schools problem has been felt throughout generations and has contributed to social problems that continue to exist today.