RESOURCE GUIDEBOOK FOR EDUCATORS
First Muslim Elected
10.05 THE STORY OF THE FIRST MUSLIM ELECTED IN CANADA
In 1964, Peter Baker was elected as the representative of the mostly Indigenous riding of Mackenzie in Canada, and served in this role for the next three years. Some sources suggest that he was the one to introduce a motion to have the city of Yellowknife made (Yellowknife became the capital in 1967.)
At the time of his election, Baker was 77 years old. His actual name is variously given as Bedouin Ferran, Ahmad Ali Ferran, or Faron Ahmad. He was born in Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1887. In 1907, Ferran faced the prospect of mandatory service with the Ottoman army in Yemen. He decided to move away to North America.
His mother gave him the money he needed for the journey, and his brother took him to the port of Beirut. From there, he got on a ship which took him to Marseilles, France and Liverpool, England. He lived in Liverpool for two years, and here he met John Morie, a friend who he would cross paths with again. In 1909, Ferran moved to Halifax, where he spent a week in detention, waiting to be examined by the “immigration doctor”.
Ferran wanted to move to the US, but he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. He found work carrying luggage and as an interpreter for Turkish-speaking Armenians. He soon moved to Eastport, Maine, and found work at a factory.
After three months of hard work and frugal living, he sent $50 to his mother in Lebanon. He then moved to Boston, where he began shoveling dirt to make 15 cents an hour. On Christmas Eve in 1909, looking for a place to warm his hands, he wandered into a Catholic school called Holy Cross College. There he was offered a job as well as a name that his employer could pronounce: Peter Baker. (“Ferran”, in Arabic, refers to “baker”.)
Baker fondly remembered meeting many Hispanic Americans at the school. He enjoyed working there, but eventually decided to look for better-paying jobs, moving on to Michigan City and Cincinnati. He used to write regularly to his friend from the UK, Morie, who had moved to St. John’s, New Brunswick.
But one day Morie’s reply came from Edmonton, Alberta, urging Baker to join him there. In 1911, Baker took a train that took him from Indianapolis to Edmonton via Chicago and Winnipeg, meeting Ukrainian and Scottish immigrants along the way. In Edmonton, he was welcomed by Morie and an Arab he had met in Liverpool, Mike Tarrabain. He found different jobs as a labourer over the next few years. He vividly recalled the celebrations marking the end of the First World War in Edmonton on November 11, 1918.
He was soon on the move, this time to British Columbia. He worked at a lumber camp in Hutton, and then moved to Prince Rupert, Princess Royal Island (where he worked in a gold mine), and Vancouver. There he found work laying the tracks for the Great Pacific Eastern Railway, now known as BC Rail. In 1921, having saved up a good amount of money, Baker made the mistake of gambling, and lost it all. He found himself homeless on the island village of Alert Bay. A Scottish lady named Mrs. McLean offered to let him sleep in her home, and when he was ready to leave, gave him $15 out of her own pocket. Baker didn’t want to take it, but she insisted, saying, “I have confidence that you will send $15 out of your first earnings.” Baker soon sent her $25, and never forgot her kindness. He never heard from her again, but later met a man from Alert Bay who said that Mrs. McLean used to often talk about a man she had trusted who proved to be honest and sincere.
Baker soon received a letter from Morie, asking him to return to Edmonton. He did, and Morie told him that oil had been discovered around the McKenzie River, and they should both set up a business taking everyday supplies up to Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories (720 km northeast of Edmonton).
Thus began Baker's life as the "Arctic Arab."
The incredible stories that Baker told of his years in the Far North can't all be shared in one article. At one point, he decided to hop on to a ship that was sailing from Great Slave lake up to the Arctic, taking a shipment of oranges to sell in Indigenous settlements along the way. For many, it was their first encounter with oranges, and he not only sold them all but also earned the nickname Jiac Oza, meaning "orange."
Traveling by dogsled, eating moose meat, and helping other early Muslim settlers who were venturing up north, Baker established himself well in the Northwest Territories in the 1910s and 1920s. But he also continued to face many challenges, especially racism.
At one point, Baker was arrested on the charge that he had knowingly traded in stolen tobacco. There was no evidence, but the charge was brought up by the Magistrate of the Northwest Territories, and he did as he pleased. In the meantime, Baker, shackled at his feet, was put to work chopping up logs for firewood. After three weeks, Baker's was released on the orders of an RCMP officer in Alberta. The letter arrived on the last round of winter mail before the routes froze; if not for it, Baker would have been in jail until spring. The jail staff refused to help him get home, so he walked 25 km to Fort Smith Baker’s close relations with Indigenous communities irritated many European settlers in the north. He had learned to speak Slavey and Dogrib, and during the episode of his arrest, the Indigenous were among the first to support him.
In the mid-1920s, Canada’s Minister of the Interior, Charles Stewart, used his powers to change the Territorial Trading and Trafficking Laws without any consultation. He was encouraged by the Northern Traders Company, which felt threatened by independent traders like Baker. The new laws meant that Baker was restricted to trade at Fort Smith and couldn’t travel elsewhere to trade. In 1926, Baker confronted Stewart in Edmonton, to which Stewart replied, “It wouldn’t be necessary for the new rule if it was not for those damned Syrians and Jews going around fooling the poor Indians!”
Despite such obstacles, Baker persevered. By 1964, he was elected to be an MLA in the Northwest Territories, representing a mostly Indigenous riding; it is important to note that major breakthroughs in Indigenous people’s right to vote had occurred in 1960, so many Indigenous people may have cast their first-ever vote for a Muslim.
It’s not clear what Baker was up to between 1967, when he left office, and 1973, when he passed away in Rochester, New York, aged 86. We know that he retired and moved to Yellowknife, where he began to write his story in News of the North, which eventually turned into the memoir published after his death, Memoirs of an Arctic Arab. It is also said that he had gone snowblind, and was in Rochester for treatment at the time of his death. His Islamic burial took place at the Al-Rashid Mosque, Canada’s first mosque, on November 13, 1973.
REFERENCES
Baker, Peter. “Memoirs of an Arctic Arab: A Free Trader in the Canadian North, The Years” 1907-1927. Yellow-knife, NWT: Yellowknife Publishing Company, 1976.
Kassam, Karim-Aly S. “Muslim Presence in Alberta: Contribution and Challenges.” In Chinook Country Remembered. Calgary: Chinook (Alberta) Historical Society, 2005. 183-195.
Liepert, David. “The Imaginary Divide: Peaceful Coexistence Between Muslim and Non-Muslim Albertans in Long-Standing”. AlbertaViews. December 1, 2010. https://albertaviews.ca/the-imaginary-divide/ .