Jeannette Armstrong

Jeannette Armstrong (born 1948) (Okanagan) is a Canadian author, educator, artist, and activist. She was born and grew up on the Penticton Indian reserve in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. Jeanette Armstrong has lived on the Penticton Native Reserve for most of her life and has raised her two children there.

Armstrong’s 1985 work Slash is considered the first novel by a First Nations woman in Canada.

Armstrong's comes from a mixed Irish and Aboriginal, ancestry and likely identified to Mourning Dove's book "Cogewea, the Half-Blood", she claims to be the grandniece of Mourning Dove, who is regarded as one of the earliest Native American women novelists in the United States for her 1927 work Cogewea, the Half-Blood. Some controversy has arisen to the validity of her claim to a blood relationship to Christine Quintasket aka Mourning Dove. Upon investigation into Mourning Dove's family lineage no relation could be definitively established and further investigation did discover that Jeanette's half sister, (who had a different mother) is a Grandniece to Mourning Dove.

Armstrong is best known for her involvement with the En'owkin Centre and writing. She has written about topics such as creativity, education, ecology, and Indigenous rights.

While growing up on the Penticton Indian Reserve in British Columbia, Jeannette Armstrong received a formal education at a one-room school there, as well as a traditional Okanagan education from her family and tribal elders. She learned the Okanagan language and is a fluent speaker of that and English. For many years since her childhood, Armstrong has studied traditional Okanagan teachings and practiced traditional ways under the direction of Elders.

Armstrong discovered her talent for and attraction to writing at age fifteen when a poem she wrote on John F. Kennedy was published in a local newspaper (Voices). As a teenager, Armstrong continued to publish poetry and develop her literary voice by listening to and reading works by Aboriginal authors such as Pauline Johnson and Chief Dan George, who she identifies as her early influences.

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