LEECH LAKE — The Leech Lake community is mourning two leaders after their deaths last week.
Laurel Jean Jackson, the wife of Leech Lake Tribal Chairman Faron Jackson, died March 3 at the age of 68 at the Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.
According to her obituary, Jackson grew up on the north side of Minneapolis, where she attended school and worked for Honeywell. She married Faron in 1978, eight years after they met, and they lived in Minneapolis for 40 years before retiring and moving to Onigum.
The Jackson family fostered numerous children over 30 years in addition to raising their own and adopting five of the foster children.
Joseph “Bob” Jourdain, author and a longtime Ojibwe instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College, died March 2 in his Cass Lake home at the age of 79.
Jourdain's obituary said he was born in Frog Creek, Ontario, and attended a residential school in Manitoba, where he earned his GED. He worked as a logger before relocating to Cass Lake to pursue education. Jourdain earned a Bachelor of Arts and later a master’s degree, both in English.
He worked for Walker-Hackensack-Akeley’s Indian Education Department and later at Cass Lake-Bena Schools before working at the Leech Lake Tribal College, where he taught both English and Ojibwe.
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School on the Leech Lake Reservation canceled classes on Monday, March 10, with respect to these funerals.
