Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba

Olive Patricia Dickason was born on March 6, 1920, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, into a family with deep Métis roots. Her father, Frank Dickason, was a fur trader and trapper of Métis descent, and her mother, Phoebe Norquay, was descended from the Norquay family, a prominent Métis lineage that included John Norquay, a former premier of Manitoba.

Dickason spent much of her early childhood in the bush of northern Manitoba and Alberta, where her family lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle tied to the fur trade. This upbringing gave her a firsthand connection to Indigenous ways of life and oral traditions, which would later inform her groundbreaking historical scholarship.

Her early education was irregular due to her family's itinerant lifestyle, but she developed a passion for reading and learning. This formative period, spent largely outside formal institutions and immersed in Métis and Indigenous culture, shaped her lifelong commitment to correcting the historical record about Indigenous peoples in Canada, a mission she would not fully realize until decades later in her career as an academic historian.

Her birth in 1920 places her life across a transformative century for Indigenous rights and Canadian historiography, and her Métis heritage would become central to both her personal identity struggles and her professional legacy as the first prominent scholar to center Indigenous perspectives in Canadian historical writing.