'She stood with us': Memorial vigil held for Coast Salish grassroots leader Kat Norris in Vancouver

Drums and honour songs filled East Vancouver's Grandview Park on Tuesday night, as more than 400 people gathered to remember Kat Norris.

Norris, of Lyackson First Nation on Vancouver Island, was a pivotal community leader and activist for decades in the city.

The 67-year-old died last Thursday, of complications from a surgery, her family said.

Family members and friends recounted her decades of leadership on countless community causes.

Her work, through her own project the Indigenous Action Movement, involved everything from cultural events such as urban pow wows and Indigenous Day, to land and environmental issues, missing and murdered women, and calls to reform policing.

Musqueam Nation member Mary Point met Norris 10 years ago, when she came to support Point and other Musqueam members' successful blockade to save a village site from development.

"Kat was very special to us," Point told the hundreds gathered for her vigil. "I remember the first time she put a drum in my hand and taught me a song … telling us how we are all connected, how important it is for us to stand together."

Norris played a major organizing role when the Idle No More movement swept across Canada ten years ago, and got her start as an activist in the American Indian Movement.

She had also been inspired by the Black Power movement during teenage years in Los Angeles, where her mother took her children after they were forced to attend Kuper Island Residential School.

Norris' brother, Sam Bob, said she had been a rebel her whole life, recounting that in residential school, she would break the rules separating children by gender, and shout messages to him through the fence; he also remembered her dancing on a table at the school one time, and always looking out for her younger siblings like a protective parent.

"Kat Norris wasn't going to give up," said Seis'lom, a fellow Elder and longtime friend of Norris, who said he was with her in her last moments last Thursday. "She stood with us.

"I'm happy to say she was doing that right up to the end."

But even more people knew Norris through her massive bannock giveaways. She likely gave out bannock to thousands over her lifetime, family members said.

And though she probably gave out thousands of fry-breads in the Downtown Eastside, she also hosted many events in Grandview Park, where loved ones gathered Tuesday with candles, sweetgrass. and song.

It was a scene marked by tears, but also stories about Norris' legacy of change-making, cultural work, and advocacy — and one final bannock give-away.