The summer job that put actor Tantoo Cardinal at the heart of a tiny Alberta town

Globe and Mail

20-06-2025

After a school year away in the big city, a teenaged Tantoo Cardinal returned home to the tiny hamlet of Anzac, Alta., and fell into a summer job at the town's only store. In this latest instalment of The Globe's 'How I Spent My Summer' series, the legendary Dances with Wolves and Legends of the Fall actor and activist shares how she learned that some gigs are worth well more than the money – even at a buck an hour.
I'm from Anzac, Alberta. It's just an hour southeast of Fort McMurray on the highway now, but this was 1966 before the road went in. Fort McMurray was just starting to be known as a boom town. I was 16.
A year before that, I'd essentially left the Anzac community to go to high school in Edmonton, but now I was back home for the summer. I never had to look for a job in Anzac, but I always had one: I babysat, I dug potatoes on farms, I filled in at the Fort McMurray hospital answering phones for my sister-aunt – she's my grandmother's baby, nine years older than me, and I was raised by my grandmother, so that's how she became my 'sister-aunt.'
I spent most of my free time hanging around the Anzac store. Anzac was a very small community and it had only one store, Willow Lake Mercantile, for everything: Groceries, clothes, supplies. We sold rope and oil for lamps and gas, eventually. Things that are useful for rural people, and we either had what they wanted or we didn't. Once a week, the train would go through from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, and that was pretty much our lifeline for outside merchandise. We got what we got.
I didn't apply or anything to work at the store, because I wasn't that kind of person. But since I was there hanging around all the time anyhow, the manager would give me things to do. I'd tally up people's goods, I'd straighten things up, I'd sweep the floor and stock the shelves. Whatever had to be done. This wasn't a city store with a staff. Sometimes I'd be there all by myself managing the whole place.
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They paid me like a dollar an hour, I think, which was better than before, when I did the same job for free. My family had briefly been keepers of the store, but other people manage it now. It was nice to earn a little bit of money, but I didn't need or buy much and wasn't all that into money anyhow. At 16, I had no sense of the value of time. The job was just something to do and I didn't mind doing it. There was nothing to love or hate about the job, I was just kind of doing life. I knew I wouldn't be there forever – it was just what I was doing right now to get by.
I think this mentality helped me survive in the world of acting for a long time. Money wasn't the prominent reward; the prominent reward was being around people you wanted to be around. We counted once and Anzac only had 99 people. If someone new got off the train, it was a big deal. If we didn't know them at all, we'd call them 'beatniks,' but usually we'd find out they were connected to the community somehow and then we knew them too.
I wasn't much of a salesperson because I wasn't very talkative, but I was a really good listener. With the road going in, there were so many major changes occurring all around. People from Fort McMurray would soon have access to our lake, and there was all this dust in the air from people driving in and leaving their trash around. There was this sense that things were changing and it wasn't gonna be just us anymore. It felt like the walls were coming down around this little world we had going on.
This was all so different from my new life in Edmonton, which had been a bit of a culture shock, because I didn't know anybody. If you were friendly with somebody, they looked at you like there was something wrong with you and ignored you. Here, I knew everyone and had known most all of them all my life, which I recognized was very special but wouldn't last.
As told to Rosemary Counter