Her students at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario know her as Dr. Farrell, something that has led to embarrassment for at least one student.
Asked to find a book by a Native author and make a presentation to the class, one of her students signed out of the library a book by Ruby Slipperjack. She was all prepared to present to Dr. Farrell when she learned that Dr. Farrell and Ruby Slipperjack are the same person.
Slipperjack is the maiden name and the pen name of Ruby Slipperjack-Farrell, the author of several novels that draw from her childhood experiences living in northern Ontario. She was in town recently for a reading at Northern Lakes College as part of Literacy Week.
More than just an amusing anecdote about mistaken identity, the incident with her student is one of many in her life in which she defies the expectations of others, and of herself, that she could be a writer.
Slipperjack-Farrell grew up never expecting to be a professor and author one day.
She was born in a trapper shack on Whitewater Lake north of Thunder Bay. Her parents, Ojibway from the Eabametoong First Nation, survived by hunting and fishing.
“People ask where on the lake are you from and I say all over. We lived off the land. The birds and the fish told us where to go,” says Slipperjack-Farrell.
When she was required to attend a residential school at age seven, she had never been in a classroom before and spoke no English.
These experiences would eventually become her first novel, Honour the Sun, a story set in the early 1960s about a young girl called Little Owl who lived in one of the many communities of Natives that grew up along the CN Rail line after children in the bush were made to attend residential schools.
But it would be some time before she would put her story into print.
After graduating from high school, she told her Indians Affairs counselor she wanted to go to university.
She says that her counselor discouraged her by saying that, “Indian girls don’t go to university.”
After that she married, worked as secretary, and wrote pages of prose that she would quickly burn in the fireplace. It was not until her children were in school that she herself thought of returning to school.
She immersed herself in a Bachelor of Education program.
“The more I learned the more I wanted,” she says.
It was during this time that she first thought about publishing her writing. After hearing on a radio programme about a publisher that was looking for Native writers, she sent in a stack of papers she had saved from burning only because she had moved to a home without a fireplace.
When her work was accepted, she ended up editing and doing revisions for her editor between classes at school. It was not until she got the finished galley proof of her novel during her exams that she realized what she had done. Like her student many years later, she suddenly recognized that she was a writer.

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