Sheilla Jones
Mystery, intrigue, and confounding puzzles are the lifeblood of any investigative journalist, seeker of knowledge, and writer.
As a 12th-generation Canadian Settler, Sheilla has a particular and personal interest in the complexities of Settler-Indigenous relations, which is the focus of her doctoral research in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba. Her research builds upon some thirty years of working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders in Canada to find practical solutions to the knowledge gap and misunderstandings that fuel historic and contemporary tensions between Settlers and Indigenous people, and to address economic inequalities.
Modernizing Treaty annuities
Sheilla co-chairs the Modernized Annuity Working Group (MAWG), a grassroots team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders that she founded in 2019 with co-chair Sheila North, a Cree First Nations (FN) leader. MAWG works in partnership with the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg. The MAWG team took on the task of researching modernizing Treaty annuities as a means of sharing the prosperity of the land and empowering FN families, and arrived—for the first time in 170 years—in producing three viable methods for valuing the existing $5 Treaty per person annuities in contemporary terms.
And in 2020, Sheilla and MAWG co-authors Gregory Mason and Wayne Helgason published their modernized annuity research in "A modern annuity for Canada – Concrete reconciliation" in the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development.
Sheilla has been observing and writing about Indigenous political issues since the early 1990s. She got a lively introduction to Indigenous politics when she took a leave from the CBC-Radio newsroom in Winnipeg in 1994 to research and write Canada’s first book on Métis politics. Rotten to the Core: The politics of the Manitoba Métis Federation (101060, an imprint of J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, Winnipeg, 1995) was an in-depth examination of the MMF’s early troubled years (now in its third printing).
In 1998-2000, Sheilla served as researcher/editor for Métis activist Jean Allard and for the Treaty Annuity Working Group (TAWG), a special committee of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. It was formed by Allard and Wayne Helgason in 2002, and set the stage for the creation of MAWG years later. Sheilla authored the report on the results of the national conference hosted by TAWG in 2003, “Modernizing Treaty Annuities: Implications and Consequences.” A large excerpt of “Big Bear’s Treaty: The Road to Freedom”, by Allard and Sheilla, was published in 2002 in the policy journal Inroads.
From 2018-2020, Sheilla was appointed a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, leading the Treaty Annuity/Individual Empowerment Initiative.
In 2019, Sheilla’s book examining Canada’s federal Indigenous Affairs system and how it silences both Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices, Let the People Speak: Oppression in a Time of Reconciliation, was published.
Presentation: First Nations Modern Annuity
Modern Annuity Working Group, 2022
Mason, G., Jones, S., & Helgason, W. (2020). A modern annuity for Canada – Concrete reconciliation. Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development, 12(1), 92-110.
What it means to be a Settler
The term “Settler” can be controversial in Canada, sometimes used to describe anyone who is not Indigenous—First Nations, Inuit, and Métis (FNIM). Others take a more nuanced approach, with “settler” defined as a relational term describing non-Indigenous people who form the European-descendant majority. Sheilla identifies as a Settler, with deep roots in Canada that trace back to the early 1600s in the French colony of Acadia, in what is now Nova Scotia. She is a direct descendant of François Savoie and Catherine Lejeune, who were among the first European families to permanently settle in what would become Canada. By calculations worked out by Sheilla and by Professor Don Page, she counts some 11.5 million people in Canada today as blood kin, ranging from first cousins to tenth cousins. That is a lot of cousins!
François Savoie and Catherine Lejeune married in Port Royal in 1652 and had nine children. Sheilla’s line is descended from their daughter Andrée Marguerite, and then matrilineally through the Préjean, Pitre, Boudreau, Ricard and Benoit families of Acadia and New France. In 1820, Sophie Benoit married Welsh immigrant farmer Jean Jones in Vaudreuil, Quebec, and thus begat Sheilla’s patrilineal ancestry through the Jones clan—mostly farmers—who settled across Canada. Thus, Sheilla feels that she and her kinfolk have been knitted into the fabric of Canadian society, and thus have a responsibility to issues that continue to fester from the advent of the first permanent settlements.
The pen, microphone, and camera
Like many of her ancestors, Sheilla was a farmer, too, for a while. She grew up on the family farm near the village of Warren, northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba in a family of ten. They didn’t have running water on the farm but Sheilla had the freedom to wander the wide prairies of the flattest contiguous landscape in the world where you could see the horizon in every direction.
Sheilla got distracted from her ambition to become a writer by marrying just after high school graduation and ended up farming. But after a while, the novelty of driving a tractor, hauling wheat to the elevator and shovelling out grain bins wore thin, even as the calluses on her hands grew thicker. One of the few paying jobs for a writer in a small prairie community is the local weekly newspaper. So Sheilla (as Sheila Morrison) started freelancing for The Stonewall Argus and Teulon Times, a scrappy little independent newspaper at that time. She spent so much time hanging around the newspaper office that the staff joked that someday, Sheilla would appear on the payroll but nobody would remember actually hiring her. She did get hired as a reporter, and worked her way up to the position of editor, earning a raft of provincial and national awards for herself and for The Argus along the way. In 1992, she and Argus colleague Kelly Langevin were nominated for Outstanding Investigative Journalist of the Year by the Canadian Association of Journalists. It’s Sheilla’s favourite award that she didn’t win.
Not long into her journalism career, Sheilla was in demand as a “voice” speaking on political issues, neatly filling a demographic niche: female, Western and rural. She started her years as commentator in 1987 behind the microphone on CBC-Radio’s national news program As It Happens. After that, Sheilla provided her insights into regional issues for a variety of radio and television programs, and became a regular in front of the camera as “talking head” for Canada Live on CBC-TV’s Newsworld. She was also in front of the camera as host of some 125 episodes of a daily agricultural news segment for Global TV. Sheilla was back behind the microphone when she was recruited to CBC-Radio in Winnipeg in 1992 as a reporter and a news editor (as Sheila Jones Morrison).
Sheilla on air presenting the news at CBC Radio Winnipeg in 2011
Education
A quantum itch
While Sheilla was writing and producing newscasts and documentaries for CBC-Radio, her curiosity was piqued by quantum physics and its many strange paradoxes. And she wanted to figure out why leading physicists could declare that “nobody really understands quantum physics.” And she wanted to have a big-picture understand the world in which we live, from the very large to the very small—from cosmology to quantum physics.
Sheilla walked across the street from the CBC newsroom to the University of Winnipeg and enrolled, becoming the first Canadian physics undergraduate to be awarded a summer school scholarship by University of Cambridge, UK to study at the Institute of Astronomy. Her adventures in physics saw her rubbing shoulders with Nobel laureates, exploring Hubble Space Telescope images while assigned to Sir Arthur Eddington’s old office, being “microwaved” at the CERN particle collider in Switzerland, and sharing more than a few pints with physicists and physics students from around the world. While at the University of Winnipeg, she served as president of the University of Winnipeg Physics Students Association graduating with a BSc (4-year) in Physics in 2001.
Science: Books and docs
Sheilla moved on to the University of Alberta, Edmonton, for grad studies, probing more deeply into quantum physics. One of the many strange ideas in quantum physics is positing that we could be living in just one of an infinite number of universes. To try to understand that conundrum, Sheilla researched, wrote, and narrated a one-hour documentary for CBC’s Ideas. “Infinite Possibilities: The Science of Parallel Universes” featured physicists Max Tegmark, David Duetsh, Bryce DeWitt and Dwight Vincent, and aired several times in 2002 and 2003.
Terrorists and quantum suicide
Sheilla: I had started my graduate degree in physics at the University of Alberta in September 2001, just in time for 9/11. I was flying from Winnipeg back to Edmonton after the Christmas break that year, and had just completed my interview with Max Tegmark, who talked about quantum immortality—the idea that even if you were shot and killed in one universe, you’d live on in another. Times were tense in airports at that time, and security was on high alert. People in the security lineup were being told to show that their laptops, cameras and other devices were safe by showing they worked. It occurred to me, as my turn approached, that I ought to check what my tape recorder was cued to. I’m glad I did, and quickly advanced the recorder to something more benign. It had been cued to Max’s interview, where he said, “first you take a gun with a quantum trigger.”
Sheilla's supervisor was noted cosmologist Don Page, who was a long-time friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking. While in Edmonton, Sheilla wrote and narrated a variety of mini-documentaries on science for CBC Radio, served as a mentor for the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) program, and co-chaired an international physics conference in Mexico. She graduated from the University of Alberta in 2004 with an MSc in Physics.
But Sheilla was still trying to answer the puzzle about why nobody understands quantum physics. She sat down and wrote The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science (Dundurn Press/Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto; Oxford University Press, New York, 2008) framing quantum physics as a science that didn’t quite get finished, in part due to the personalities involved, but mainly due to the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism in Germany.
In the summer of 2011, Sheilla returned to the CBC-Radio newsroom for a stint as a desk editor and news presenter. In 2012, she joined forces with Dr. Alexander Unzicker of Munich to write Bankrupting Physics: How today’s top scientists are gambling away their scientific credibility (St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). It was a popular science book that was released the following year, and re-released in paperback in 2021.
Sheilla has also been reviewing books on Indigenous issues, popular science and Canadian politics for two decades, including for The Globe and Mail, the Literary Review of Canada, and the Winnipeg Free Press.
Family connections
In 2008, Sheilla married one of Canada’s leading experts on Ice Age mammoths, Dr. James A. Burns, Curator Emeritus, Royal Alberta Museum. They met at the Sherlock Holmes pub in downtown Edmonton when Sheilla was in grad school, and got started talking about writing mysteries. But that’s another story. They now reside in Winnipeg.
Curiously, while Sheilla has millions of cousins across Canada, she has yet to find a blood connection with Jim. True, his great-grandmother was on the founding committee of the Salvation Army Grace Hospital in Winnipeg where Sheilla was born, but that doesn’t count.
“The closest I can link our relatives," says Sheilla, "is that my great-great-grandmother from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea and Jim’s great-great-grandmother from Creemore, Ontario are buried in the same Winnipeg cemetery, within shouting distance of each other.”