Ronald Derrickson

Derrickson was born on the Westbank Indian Reserve in the British Columbia interior to Ted Derrickson and Margaret (née Schoven) on October 6, 1941. As a young man, he worked as a fruit picker and a welder and rancher before he was elected Westbank band chief in 1976.

Over the next ten years he led his band in a period of rapid economic development, taking it from one of the poorest in British Columbia to one of the wealthiest.[3] He returned to band leadership in 1998 and broke new ground by leading his people on a logging venture on their Aboriginal title lands with an Indigenous rather than a provincial permit, an action that led to similar logging initiatives among B.C. Indigenous peoples.[4]

In 1986, the federal government launched an enquiry into Derrickson's tenure as chief in the form of the Hall Commission. The enquiry cleared him of any wrong-doing.[5]

Derrickson was made a Grand Chief by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 2012 in recognition of his lifetime of political and economic leadership. His books that he co-authored with Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call (Between the Lines, Toronto, 2015) won the Aboriginal Prize of the Canadian History Association in 2016[6] and Reconciliation Manifesto (James Lorimer and Company, Toronto, 2017) won the B.C. Book Prize for Non-fiction in 2018.[7] His most recent book, Fight or Submit: Standing Tall in Two Worlds, is a finalist for the Indies Award in the Autobiography and Memoir category. [8]