Alderville loses Marsden matriarch
Special to Anishinabek News
PETERBOROUGH – Ruby Marsden Hicks — the oldest citizen of Alderville First Nation, and the only member of the seven Williams Treaty First Nations who was alive when the treaty came into effect in 1923 and still living when a settlement was negotiated in 2018 – has passed into the Spirit World.
Just five days short of her 101st birthday, Ruby was the youngest of 13 children born to former Alderville Chief Moses Muskrat Marsden and Nellie Orma Franklin, and the only one of her siblings born in a hospital. She grew up in Lakefield after her parents left the reserve near Cobourg, and remained in the area most of her life, including the last nine years as a resident of Peterborough Retirement Residence, formerly Peterborough Manor.
From her earliest job working as a babysitter for an Anglican minister in Lakefield, she was a wage-earner for the next 50 years, including stints as a seamstress in a garment factory in Toronto, where she married Harold Switzer and gave birth to Maurice, her only child.
When Ruby returned from Toronto as a single mother, she and Maurice lived with her parents in a pebbled fieldstone home built by her father on the east side of Lakefield. There was no central heating, running water, or indoor plumbing. She got a job measuring draperies for Cherney’s furniture store in downtown Peterborough, and later worked on production lines in the former Peterborough plants of Outboard Marine Corporation and the Canadian General Electric Company.
She recalled giving her parents $5 of her $12 weekly earnings for room and board, and paying another $3 for weekly bus fare to work.
Ruby’s birth certificate listed only one given name, but she took it upon herself to add the middle name “Alma” to some documents after fellow high school students teased her about not having one.
She acquired a new last name after marrying Arthur Hicks, a Royal Navy veteran of World War II whom she had met while still in Toronto, and with whom she lived happily for almost 40 years before he died of heart failure in the kitchen of the modest two-storey house they bought and remodelled on Fitzgerald St. near Lakefield fairgrounds.
Royal Canadian Legion Branch 77 in Lakefield conferred an honourary lifetime membership on Ruby in recognition of hundreds of hours of volunteer work, and she was still playing in cribbage and euchre tournaments as she approached 90. She also volunteered to read and spend time with patients in a private hospital in the village, just as she had with wounded veterans like great uncle Robert Franklin Jr. in Toronto hospitals following World War II.
During her last few months, Ruby frequently reminisced about her parents, fondly giving credit to a strict but kind father, and a mother who was 43 when she brought her into the world, and who nursed her through a bout of life-threatening childhood diphtheria.
While not a church-goer, she practised a personal creed of “being kind to other people, and helping others whenever possible.”
“We don’t need religion to love anybody,” she was fond of saying.
Despite maintaining strong ties with family and friends in Alderville, the now-discredited practice of “enfranchisement” of First Nations members leaving their reserves meant that Ruby was denied Indian “Status” until the Indian Act amendment of Bill C-31 in 1986. Her parents never lived to see reinstatement of their status, nor to receive any benefit from the negotiated settlement of the Williams Treaty. Ruby’s cheque helped pay her retirement home rent for the last year of her life.
Former Alderville Chief J.R. Marsden – a cousin involved in achieving the Williams Treaty settlement – joined the celebration for Ruby’s 100th birthday at Peterborough Manor .
Alderville First Nation’s historic cenotaph bears the names of four immediate family members. Father Moses Marsden was too old for active service in World War I, but helped organize a band that played military music to support the war effort, and brothers Larry, Fred, and Percy all wore Canadian uniforms during World War II.
She doted on her offspring, and made many personal sacrifices for the benefit of son Maurice Switzer, North Bay, and grandson Capt. Adin Switzer (Wendy), Wooler. Nothing pleased her more than visits from great-granddaughter Olivia Switzer (Ryan Chabassol), Trenton, and great-grandson Capt. Jacob Switzer (Jordee Matson), Colorado Springs.
Due to visiting restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ruby never got to hold her great-great-granddaughter Adeline Margaret-Marie Chabassol, born in January to Olivia and Ryan, but seeing photos brought broad smiles to her face.
Ruby will rest beside her beloved Art at Rosemount Memorial Gardens in Peterborough.
A celebration of her life for family and friends is tentatively planned for this coming fall.