Shirley Peruniak named to the Order of Ontario

Jeff Green | Jan 28, 2010

Shirley Peruniak has been a reverse snowbird for many years.

Just as many seniors are starting to plan their escape to the South in the early fall, Shirley would start the trek from her summer home at Quetico Wilderness Park on the far western edge of Ontario to the luxury of Sharbot Lake for the winter season.

It is for her work as a naturalist at Quetico that she is receiving a medal today at Queen’s Park in Toronto, recognising her as a member of the Order of Ontario.

Shirley was born and raised in Sharbot Lake, and although her family moved to Perth when she was nine, in 1935, it was her first school principal at Sharbot Lake Public School who introduced her to naturalist pursuits.

“He took us outside and introduced all sorts of vegetation and birds, showed us Blue Herons. It certainly caught my attention,” she said, when interviewed from her home on Sharbot Lake on Tuesday morning.

Shirley always returned to Sharbot Lake on weekends to visit her grandmother. In 1988, she had a small house built on the lake, on a lot in the village that was still in her family, to serve as her winter home.

It was difficult to talk to Shirley on Tuesday, because the phone kept ringing as friends from all over were calling to congratulate her as news of her appointment to the Order circulated around the province.

“I’ve known for three weeks, but I wasn’t to tell anyone except for family until it was officially announced,” she said, but since Shirley is not exactly prone to self-promotion it is likely she wouldn’t have told anyone about it at all if it hadn’t already been publicized.

After being raised in eastern Ontario, Shirley said, “I wanted to know what it was like to live in different parts of the province.” That led her and her husband, who was a teacher, to move to Kenora. In 1956 a road was built joining Quetico with the rest of Ontario, and it wasn’t long after that that Shirley made her first trip to the park.

Fifty-four years later, her story has become synonymous with that of Quetico Park. Marie Nelson, who has worked as a ranger in the park with her husband Jon, is the person who put the application for the Order of Ontario together.

Jon Nelson has written about Shirley. In one of his articles he paraphrased a former park warden, Dave Elder, who said, “Shirley is the heart and soul of Quetico. Everybody who knows Shirley would agree with this assessment of her. She has definitely poured her heart and soul into her work in Quetico and her impact on co-workers in the park and park visitors has been profound.”

Although she lived in Atikokan in the early ’60s and took full advantage of the canoeing opportunities of the park, which is dominated by waterways, Shirley is being honoured for work that began in 1974, when she walked into the Atikokan Ministry of Natural Resources Office and asked for a job.

She was hired as a naturalist, based partly on her knowledge of birds, and together with Shan Walshe, a keen botanist, they formed a team that served the park and its visitors well for 20 years. They conduced tours and hosted education programs for anyone who was interested, and at the same time pursued their passions for collecting information.

For Shirley that included not only archiving written material about the park, but also collecting the stories of the people who made up the history of the park. She began collecting oral histories.

“I talked to trappers, park rangers, poachers, and elders from the Lac LaCroix First Nations, anyone who knew about where the park had come from,” Shirley said. “I remember getting children to interview their grandparents, who only spoke Ojibway, and having them translate for me.”

All of the interviews were transcribed and materials were stored away in filing cabinets. This part of Shirley’s personality is familiar to people in Sharbot Lake, where she has been doing the same thing for the Oso Historical Society since 1988.

At Quetico, her work led to the founding of a research library in 1986, using funds from the estate of long-time Quetico Foundation Chair Frank Ridley. The Ridley library is the only library in an Ontario Provincial Park.

Former Park Superintendent Jay Leather credits her with helping to bridge the gap between park officials and the Lac LaCroix First Nation when their respective interests in the park came into conflict in the early 1990s. “Shirley’s relationship in my own view was really crucial. She had a level of credibility and a personal relationship with the people there that we didn’t have. She maintains that relationship to this day,” Leather told the newspaper the Atikokan Progress late last summer.

In 2000, the Friends of Quetico published a 270-page volume Quetico Provincial Park, an Illustrated History, by Shirley Peruniak with Michael Dawber, who was the librarian in Sharbot Lake at the time.

Although Shirley retired from the park in 1991, she has continued to volunteer there each summer since then. Starting next year she is planning to cut back her visits. She maintains a little cabin next to the park and after so many years the park will certainly continue to call her back.

Her son, daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson are all accompanying her to Toronto to receive her medal.

They will be put up at a hotel near Queen’s Park for two nights. But she will be back in Sharbot Lake pretty soon after that.

“I’m not particularly fussy about the big city,” she said.