Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture (1890-1996) National Historic Person

Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture was designated as a national historic person in 2025.

Historical importance: a groundbreaking Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman from Six Nations of the Grand River, nurse and veteran who became a trailblazer through her resilience and determination.

Commemorative plaque: no plaque installed^{Footnote 1}

Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture (1890–1996)

Edith Monture was a groundbreaking Kanien’kehá:ka nurse and veteran from Six Nations of the Grand River. She overcame significant barriers to pursue an education in nursing, her resilience and determination leading her to become part of the first generation of hospital-trained, professional nurses from First Nations in Canada. After serving in the First World War as a nurse in the American Expeditionary Force, she was among the female veterans Canada granted the right to vote in 1917. She returned to Six Nations of the Grand River in 1919, where she became a nurse, midwife, and a prominent member of the community.

Charlotte Edith Anderson was born and raised in Ohsweken at Six Nations of the Grand River, where she attended day school. While at Brantford Collegiate Institute, she occasionally filled in for her brother, Sam Anderson, as a teacher at the No. 10 school at Six Nations. Denied entry to several Ontario nursing schools which almost exclusively admitted white students, she trained at New Rochelle Hospital in Westchester County, outside New York City. Following her graduation in 1914, she worked as a nurse at a private school in New Rochelle.

After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Anderson joined the American Red Cross Nursing Service and became part of Westchester County Unit B of the American Expeditionary Force. For more than a year, she nursed sick and wounded soldiers, primarily at Base Hospital No. 23 at Vittel in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. She recorded her experiences in a diary, writing about her work, recreation, training, and the grief she felt at the loss of a young patient. As a result of her wartime service, Anderson gained the right to vote in Canada. The Military Voters Act of 1917 extended the franchise to all British subjects who had served in the militaries of Canada, Britain, or an allied nation and would not otherwise meet existing voter qualifications, including First Nations women like Anderson. Most other First Nations women did not gain the right to vote federally until 1960, unless they were enfranchised under the provisions of the Indian Act, which meant giving up their “Indian” status to become Canadian citizens with all the associated rights and privileges.

Anderson returned to Six Nations of the Grand River in 1919. There, she married Claybran Monture and raised four children. At a time when First Nations nurses often had to leave their communities to find employment, she worked at Six Nations as a midwife and nursed at Lady Willingdon Hospital, which opened at Ohsweken in 1927. A prominent and active community member, in 1939 she was elected honorary president of the Ohsweken branch of the Canadian Red Cross.

Over the course of her career, Monture helped pave the way for the next generation of Indigenous health professionals, including her daughter, Helen Monture Moses, who became a nurse and founding member of the Registered Nurses of Canadian Indian Ancestry (now the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association). Edith Monture died at Six Nations of the Grand River on 3 April 1996. She was 105 years old.

“My grandmother Edith Anderson Monture was a pioneer of Indigenous health care and Indigenous voting rights in this country. Notwithstanding that it was Canada's own Indian Act legislation of her era that obliged her to seek her training in the United States, she resumed her calling upon her return to this country following the Great War. Over the years her story has provided inspiration to many Indigenous health care professionals."

“Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture’s work as a nurse and midwife represent the significant contributions of Indigenous women to twentieth-century Canadian health care in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Her exclusion from Canadian nurse training programs, however, highlights the racism and colonial policies that often prevented First Nations students from accessing post-secondary education. Monture advocated for many years for First Nations to be recognized as both ‘Indians’ under the Indian Act and Canadian citizens, categories the Canadian government deemed incompatible prior to granting Status Indians the federal vote in 1960. Monture’s life and work are rightly remembered by her community, by historians, and now by all Canadians as extraordinary and exceptional."

This press backgrounder was prepared at the time of the Ministerial announcement in 2025.

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