Nursing pioneer Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk is dead
Just 12 days ago, Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk returned to Nova Scotia after spending six months with family members in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
“I put her on a plane two Sundays ago and she was fine,” said her daughter Sharon Douglas, a former Director of the United Way Peel Region.
The trailblazing nurse succumbed to COVID-19 on April 15.
She was 89.
Douglas is shocked by her mother’s sudden death.
“She was almost 90 and slowing down,” she said. “Mom wanted to return to Nova Scotia for a few months before coming back to reside permanently with me. Even though four of her children are in the GTA, Nova Scotia was her home and she always wanted to be there. The plan was to see a close friend who she graduated from nursing school with and is very ill and a few other people and then come back.”
Douglas-Yakimchuk was the aunt of Tony Ince, Nova Scotia’s Minister of African Nova Scotia Affairs.
“She was gentle, thoughtful, caring and classy,” he said. “She was one of the people that advocated more than 30 years ago for the collection of race based data to address systemic racism in this province. That is going to come to fruition very soon in Nova Scotia. She knew it was coming because I gave her a heads-up, but it’s so sad she will not be around the see it.”
This is the second major family loss Ince has suffered in the last year
His mother and Douglas-Yakimchuk’s younger sister, Thelma Coward-Ince, died on April 17, 2020.
Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk (l) with her daughter Sharon Douglas and nephew Tony Ince (Photo contributed)
Mayann Francis, Nova Scotia’s first Black Lieutenant Governor, held Douglas-Yakimchuk in high esteem.
“Growing up, I thought Clotilda was the most beautiful woman in the world,” she said. “In addition to her beauty, she was such a kind, smart, intelligent, compassionate and caring person who was full of ideas. She was just a great person and wonderful role model and I just enjoyed being around her. This is a woman who influenced and helped a lot of people and she will be missed.”
Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard said Douglas-Yakimchuk was more than a nursing trailblazer.
“Clotilda was an activist, community leader and union organizer,” she added. “But to her children and grandchildren, she was a strong family matriarch who others want to emulate. I will miss her.”
A member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia, Douglas-Yakimchuk was the Nova Scotia Hospital School of Nursing (NSHSN) first Black graduate.
She was part of a generation of the first Barbadians that went to work at an integrated steel plant in Whitney Pier.
Arthur and Lillian Coward arrived in 1914.
“They taught me to be determined and never give up along with the importance of securing a solid education and contributing to your community,” Douglas-Yakimchuk, a former Black Cultural Society of Nova Scotia Vice-President, told me in an interview in 2019. “I learnt from them that you are not only here to get whatever you can, but to play a part in giving back and helping to solve issues that arise in your community.”
She needed plenty of resolve to deal with racial exclusion while trying to enter nursing school.
“I applied to many hospitals and none of them responded,” Douglas-Yakimchuk pointed out. “My brother (the late Alfred Coward was a musician who starred in the first CBC variety show aired in the Maritimes and taught classical & jazz piano and voice) was doing pre-medicine at Dalhousie University at the time and he suggested that I try the Nova Scotia Hospital. He also felt that psychiatric nurses would fill a critical role and there would always be a need for them. He was so right.”
Then Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil (r) and Governor General Arthur LeBlanc presented the Order of Nova Scotia to Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk in January 2019 (Photo contributed)
The thrill of becoming the first Black to graduate from the NSCSN in 1954 was soon tempered when White patients brought their unhealthy prejudices and biases to Nova Scotia Hospital in Dartmouth.
“They didn’t feel that Blacks should be taking care of them and some called me the ‘n-word’,” said Douglas-Yakimchuk who is in the Nova Scotia Black Hall of Fame. “There was however this one female who didn’t want to me to have anything to do with her. Six weeks later, she came around and started to speak to me and it became virtually impossible for me to avoid her. We became friends and she gave me a Royal Doulton tea cup and saucer after she was discharged from my unit.”
The gesture was very significant for the 1991 Harry Jerome Award and only Black to preside over the Registered Nurses Association of Nova Scotia which is now the College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia.
“It reminds me how people can change when you look beyond colour and get to know someone,” she said.
Finding nursing uniforms fashionable and professional inspired Douglas-Yakimchuk to pursue that career.
“I liked the uniform and thought I would look pretty nice in it,” she said. “But what I soon found out was that it was a career that had to do with compassion, empathy and understanding people.”
Douglas-Yakimchuk was the Admission Unit head nurse for three years up until 1957 before heading to Grenada where she was the Director of Nursing for nine years at the island’s psychiatric hospital.
After graduating from the NSCSN, she met and married Grenadian-born Benson Douglas who wanted to return home to make a contribution after graduating at the top of his class in 1954 from Dalhousie University with an undergraduate degree in law. He was chosen to deliver the valedictory address and graduated the following year with a Master of Laws.
While the psychiatry hospital that was bombed by mistake during the United States invasion of Grenada in 1983, Douglas-Yakimchuk expanded the outpatient psychiatry clinic before returning to Nova Scotia with her husband in 1967 and becoming a staff nurse at the Sydney City Hospital.
The couple separated and Douglas went back to Grenada and became a judge before his death in January 1975.
She spent 24 years at Cape Breton’s psychiatry hospital, serving as nursing supervisor for five years and the first Director of Staff Development for 19 years before being appointed Director of Educational Services at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. She held that position for two years.
Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk celebrated her 87th birthday in January 2019 with her children Carl Douglas (l), Valerie O’Neale, Kenrick Douglas, Sharon Douglas & Leslie Douglas-Shaw (Photo contributed)
After retiring in 1994, Douglas-Yakimchuk contributed her vast knowledge and expertise in the field of mental health to the development of the community residential workers program at the Nova Scotia Community College Marconi campus. The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services recognized the program by adopting it as the minimum standard of care for residential services in the community.
She also collaborated with faculty at Marconi campus to develop and deliver their long-term care program.
Douglas-Yakimchuk was also the President of the Cape Breton Council of Senior Citizens & Pensioners, a Founding President of the Black Community Development Organization that provided affordable housing in low-income communities and focussed on education and culture, and a key contributor in the compilation of ‘Reflections of Care: A Century of Nursing’ that tells the stories of Cape Breton nurses who graduated from the hospital-based school of nursing. Proceeds from the sale of books were used to create an award for Cape Breton University (CBU) nursing students.
Nearly three decades after being part of a committee that vigorously lobbied for a nursing degree program at CBU that admitted its first class in 2007, the university awarded the trailblazer with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 2010 alongside students graduating from the nursing program she helped create.
Clotilda Douglas-Yakimchuk gets a big hug from grandson Isiah Douglas after receiving her honourary degree in Cape Breton in 2010 (Photo contributed)
Douglas-Yakimchuk, whose second husband -- two-term Sydney Ward 5 alderman Dan Yakimchuk -- died in 2011, broke the colour barrier at NSCSN six years after Ruth Bailey and Gwyneth Barton became the first Black women to graduate from a Canadian nursing school. They were trained at Halifax Children’s Hospital.
Bernice Redmon, who had to go to the United States to acquire her nursing certification, was the first Black nurse to practice public health in Canada when she joined the Nova Scotia department of public health in 1945.
