Tantoo Cardinal

Rose Marie "Tantoo" Cardinal was born the youngest of three children to Julia Cardinal, a woman of Cree and Métis descent, and to a Caucasian father who left when Cardinal was six weeks old. Her grandmother became the children’s caregiver when Cardinal was six months old. Cardinal’s mother lived in poverty until she died at a young age. Cardinal experienced further family tragedies when her sister was taken during the Sixties Scoop and her brother was murdered at the age of 24.

Cardinal met her first husband, Fred Martin, while boarding at his family’s home during her high school years in Edmonton. They were married from 1968 to 1978 and had a son, Cheyenne, prior to their divorce. She had her second son, Clifford, with actor Beaver Richards. From 1988 to 2000, Cardinal was married to actor John Lawlor, with whom she had a daughter, Riel.

In the 2018 film The Grizzlies, she plays a high school principal who is skeptical a first-time teacher can address social issues in the northwestern Nunavut community of Kugluktuk.

In 2017, she was named the winner of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement.

In 2012, she performed the role of Regan in an all-aboriginal production of William Shakespeare's King Lear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, alongside a cast that also included August Schellenberg as Lear, Billy Merasty as Gloucester, Jani Lauzon in a dual role as Cordelia and the Fool, and Craig Lauzon as Kent.

On August 23, 2011, Cardinal, Margot Kidder, and dozens of others were arrested while protesting the proposed extension of the Keystone Pipeline.

In 2009, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada "for her contributions to the growth and development of Aboriginal performing arts in Canada, as a screen and stage actress, and as a founding member of the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company".