Senior citizen Dale Colleen Hamilton is calling on “senior citizens, old hippies & baby boomers” to join a protest she’s initiating called Seniors Citizen Sit-Ins, as a companion effort to Fridays for Futures youth strikes. She will be staging peaceful sit-ins in front of the provincial legislature at Queens Park in Toronto (at the corner of College and University) every Friday from 12:30-1:30 pm beginning on January 10.
Her goal is to help “make the decade of the 2020s the new 1960s”, except, having experienced the dark underbelly of the hippy movement, she hopes to create Senior Citizen Sit-Ins as healthier, equitable and sustainable. Even though her focus is on engaging seniors, Dale welcomes people of all ages, as well as all backgrounds, recognizing the importance of intergenerational and intercultural collaborations. In an effort to move beyond land acknowledgments and apologies, she is also inviting Indigenous elders to join her.
Dale has been involved with Indigenous issues and communities for her entire adult life, including helping to create a play in the 1970s about mercury pollution at the Wabaseemoong Independent Nation (formerly the Whitedog Reserve) in northern Ontario and volunteering as the Victoria BC Coordinator of The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, which stopped the logging of Meares Island and created the first Tribal Park as an Indigenous land claim mechanism. She is the wife of the late Coast Salish Indigenous Master Carver Harold (Hyhatsa) Rice and the mother of their two young adult children.
Her passion, for over 30 years, has been community-engaged theatre as a tool for community development and environmental education/ activism, including a major project (120 cast members) staged in the ruins of a woolen mill in the Rockwood Conservation Area in 1990, which resulted in halting a rural estate housing development on her family’s ancestral farm.
Having returned to university after a 40-year “break”, Dale is presently completing her Masters in Environmental Studies at York University, with a focus on using the arts for engaging the public in climate change solutions. She is also working as a Research Associate on York’s Indigenous Environmental Justice Project. Dale has found returning to school “keeps my mind open and my heart pumping” (and tuition is free at York for those over 60).
She recently attended COP25, the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Madrid, as part of the York University delegation. She also performed her one-woman show about climate change solutions in Madrid and Barcelona; as well as staging short Senior Citizen Sit-Ins in front of city halls in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona.
Dale lives on her 16 acres near Guelph in the hamlet of Eden Mills, which has been working towards carbon neutrality for over a decade and has reached over 90% of this goal.
source: media release, Dale Hamilton
