They Are All Formidable

The goal of Thelma Pepper’s photography is not to incite nostalgia for Saskatchewan’s pioneer history but to honour the Prairie women who devoted their lives to caring for their communities under incredibly difficult conditions. After a lifetime of toiling, building homes, working the farmland, and raising children, many of these women spent their final decades living in old-age homes scattered throughout Saskatchewan’s farming communities. Pepper dedicated over ten years to visiting villages, homesteads and care facilities, weaving across the province to document the lives of forgotten women through conversations and portraits. In the spring of 2019, I met with Pepper and discussed her passion for storytelling and devotion to photography. Admittedly, we spent the nearly five hours together switching roles, with her often interviewing me. 

Although Pepper is primarily acknowledged for her photography, she dedicated countless hours interviewing elderly women in Saskatchewan’s long-term care facilities and isolated communities, becoming a trusted confidant and friend with whom they felt comfortable sharing highly personal stories. It is through this devotion to patience, listening, and kindness that Pepper is able to create portraits that are calm, confident, and genuine. Within these conversations, the women’s lives unfurl from childhood to present day. Many of the women share intimate details of their own mothers, families, personal aspirations, marriages, and heartbreaks. In 1989, Pepper became close with a woman named Nellie Schnell, who was born in Margo, Saskatchewan in August 1905, a week before Saskatchewan officially became a province.(1) During a conversation with Pepper, Schnell explained:

My father, I would say was not really a good farmer or an aggressive person; my mother was, aggressive for her children. She was determined that her children were going to have things better than they had. And I think that was the object of her life, really. And I think that was the objective of many, particularly women who came to the prairies during those times.(2)

Throughout her interview, Schnell is composed and thoughtful, beautifully articulating how her family operated and lived on the farm. She explains the fear, solitude, and worry that consumed her mother, as well as how the survival of all prairie communities was carried on the backs of the women.(3)

After reviewing a number of Pepper’s interviews and hearing their compelling stories, I sat down to study the portraits while listening to their voices. I was startled by the contrast between the strength I heard and their weathered faces looking back at me. The women in the interviews are strong, assured, and vibrant, but the images depict bodies that have become frail and small. This sentiment speaks more to my insecurities, our cultural prejudices, and an inherent fear of aging than to the capabilities of the women themselves. I believe this moment of recognition is the goal of Pepper’s work. Her hours of intimate conversations and invested listening built the space and trust necessary for these women to be open, honest and understood. Their candor expresses truths and realities that are rarely shared.

Born in 1920, Thelma Pepper was raised in Kingston, Nova Scotia. In 1940 she completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and in 1943 received her Master of Science in Botany from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Shortly after graduation she married her husband Jim, who was also a scientist specializing in chemistry. In 1947 they moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and Pepper put her penchant for the sciences on hold to raise her four children.

Even after spending the majority of her life in Saskatchewan, Pepper continues to see herself as an outsider, observing the unique cultural landscape that lines Prairie highways and dirt roads. Pepper is genuinely interested in the lives and experiences of the people that surround her. While interviewing Lulla Nodeland, the daughter of Norwegian settlers, Pepper discovered that Nodeland began taking care of her siblings at a very young age while her mother went out to the fields to work the farm.(4) At 12 years old, Nodeland was baking bread, cooking the family meals, sewing, and nurturing her infant siblings. She regaled Pepper with the story of how she burnt her arm on a heater while excitedly running down the stairs. Her mother healed the blistering wound with a compress of choke cherry bark sap, traditional knowledge she wished was carried on to the next generation.(5) Nodeland was shy and modest even as a child, expressing the horror of having to wear her nightgown for a Christmas concert.(6) But she was also incredibly spiritual, nurtured by the power of the earth as well as the Christian faith that surrounded her community. Near the end of the interview, Pepper asks Lulla about the death of her husband, who died of rheumatic fever when her eldest son was just seven years old. She raised her children and operated the farm completely alone and barely thought to mention it. 

Pepper’s father was an avid photographer and greatly influenced her desire to take up photography at the age of 60. After her children had moved from the family home, Pepper bought a top-of-the-line Rolleiflex camera. She joined a local artist-run centre in Saskatoon, The Photographers Gallery,(7) and began participating in critiques and exhibitions. It was during this time Pepper began volunteering at a local seniors’ home, interviewing and photographing the women who lived there. In 1986 Pepper featured these portraits in her first solo exhibition entitled “Decades of Voices: Saskatchewan Pioneer Women.”(8)

During my recent conversation with Pepper, she described a comment left on an online CBC article about her practice.(9) Although I couldn’t find the original comment, Pepper stated that the anonymous poster wished that she had photographs like these of the women in her family. Pepper reiterated this sentiment, as she feels that so many women are not valued or commemorated. These “ordinary women”(10) lived their lives in relative anonymity, clocking thousands of hours of unpaid labour, silently struggling to build homes and provide comfort for their children and husbands. During one of her many conversations with Pepper, Olessa Guttormson shared that due to her father’s alcoholism and subsequent disappearance, her mother moved all six children from North Dakota to Saskatchewan in 1910(11). She then went on to explain that she and her sisters married three brothers, all of whom were lazy.(12) Guttormson worked hard to care for her five children as well as run the farm. One day, on a trip to the lake, Guttormson’s husband disappeared: “we don’t know if he threw himself in the lake or what he did.”(13) Guttormson suddenly had to raise five children under the age of ten alone. 

Pepper encouraged the women she interviewed to talk about themselves, their experiences, beliefs and values. Grace Bolton from Outlook, Saskatchewan, was born in 1900 in Ohio.(14) Although she was an active participant in her community’s Lutheran Church, she condones premarital sex and homosexuality, a stance she claims puts her in the minority at the moment.(15) She states that due to our society’s moral hypocrisy and the complexities of modern life, we are not in any position to condemn anyone.(16) Bolton shares her interest in politics, history and spiritualism, the lack of intellectual stimuli in a small town without a library, and how she believes that young people will fight for the environment and social progress. After an argument with her husband that resulted in him threatening to burn one of her books, Bolton explained to her husband, while breastfeeding their new baby: “Now look, Frank, when I married you, I gave you my body; my soul belongs to God, but my mind is my own. And I shall think what I want to think, and not you or any other person or power on earth can change that. And I said you wouldn’t respect me and I wouldn’t respect myself if I didn’t take that stand.”(17)

In 2014, Thelma Pepper received the Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2018 she was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. As the oldest person to ever receive the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, Pepper’s work continues to dismantle stereotypes affiliated with age as well as rural life. Regionalism, classism, and sexism infiltrate how rural women are judged and honoured in Canadian society. These stereotypes lead to the perception that Prairie women are unexceptional and uneducated, that the intricacies of their lives as mothers, workers, and community members are not worth illuminating or understanding. However, as Nellie Schnell eloquently expressed, “People who I thought didn’t have too much to them, as I come to know them, I found that everyone has something… It was really one of the greatest lessons I have come to learn…There really is a divine spark in everybody.”(18)

The author would like to share a special thank-you to Gordon Pepper, Blair Barbeau, Leah Taylor, the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection, Jillian Cyca, and the Remai Modern for their time, energy and assistance. A very special thank you to Thelma Pepper for sharing so many incredible stories and thoughts with her; what a wonderful afternoon. 

1. Thelma Pepper, Interview with Nellie Schnell, 1989, courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection.
2.  Pepper, Interview with Nellie Schnell.
3.  Pepper, Interview with Nellie Schnell.
4. Thelma Pepper, Interview with Lulla Nodeland, Decades of Voices, 1989, courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection
5.  Pepper, Interview with Lulla Nodeland.
6.  Pepper, Interview with Lulla Nodeland.
7. The Photographers Gallery was a production and presentation centre that served the community in Saskatoon from 1973 to 2003 when it merged with another artist-run centre in Saskatoon, Video Vérité to become PAVED Arts.
8. Edna Manning, “Photographer focuses on ‘ordinary’ pioneer women,” Grainews, Glacier Farm Media https://www.grainews.ca/2019/01/15/photographer-focuses-on-ordinary-pioneer-women/ (January 15, 2019).
9. Danny Kerslake, “97-year-old photographer Thelma Pepper to be recognized with Saskatchewan Order of Merit,” CBC News, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/97-year-old-photographer-thelma-pepper-to-be-recognized-with-saskatchewan-order-of-merit-1.4646912 (May 3, 2018).
10.  “Thelma Pepper: Artist Profile,” ARTSask.http://www.artsask.ca/en/artists/thelmapepper.
11. Thelma Pepper. Interview with Olessa Guttormson, 1989, courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection.
12.  Pepper, Interview with Olessa Guttormson.
13.  Pepper, Interview with Olessa Guttormson.
14.  Thelma Pepper, Interview with Grace Bolton, 1989, courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection. 
15.  Pepper, Interview with Grace Bolton.
16.  Pepper, Interview with Grace Bolton.
17.  Pepper, Interview with Grace Bolton.
18.  Thelma Pepper, Interview with Nellie Schnell, 1989, courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection.

This article is published in issue 36.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue