On air at CBC-Radio, 2011.
Mystery, intrigue and confounding puzzles are the lifeblood of any investigative journalist. As an award-winning journalist (with an advanced degree in theoretical physics), Sheilla has developed a fine appreciation for the very human drama underpinning the machinations of mystery, science and politics. And family.
A 12th generation settler
Sheilla has very deep roots in Canada, tracing her ancestry back to the early 1600s of the French colony of Acadia, in what is now Nova Scotia. She is a direct descendant of Francois Savoie and Catherine Lejeune (born in 1633), as are some 4-million others in Canada. That’s a lot of cousins!
The Lejeune family was among the earliest settlers in Port Royal in the 1620s, along with the Martin and Gaudet families. Francois, born in 1595 in France, arrived in Acadia in the 1640s. There is considerable speculation about the parentage of Francois, but he is now generally accepted to be the illegitimate first-born of Thomas, Prince of Savoie (Savoy) and Marie Bourbon. This would seem to link all the 4-million cousins in Canada to the House of Savoy in Turin, as well as the French, German and Spanish royal families.
Francois and Catherine married in Port Royal in 1652 and had nine children. Sheilla’s line is descended from their daughter Andrée Marguerite, and then through the Prejean, Pitre, Boudreau, Ricard and Benoit families. Sophie Benoit married Welsh immigrant farmer Jean Jones in 1820 in Vaudreuil, Quebec, and thus begat the Welsh, English and Scottish branch of the Jones clan—mostly farmers—who have settled across Canada.
The first and second people
Sheilla’s deep roots played a role in her research into the relationship between Canada’s first and second people—First Nations people and settlers. In 2018, she was named a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy to lead the Treaty Annuity/Individual Empowerment Initiative. In 2019, her latest book Let the People Speak: Oppression in a time of reconciliation came out, and she teamed up with First Nations leader Sheila North to create the Modernized Annuity Working Group (MAWG), a special committee of Frontier. MAWG is exploring the implications of modernizing Treaty annuities as a means of sharing the land and empowering FN families, in the spirit of reconciliation.
Sheilla has been observing and writing about Indigenous political issues since the early 1990s. She got a lively introduction to Indigenous politics when she took a leave from the CBC-Radio newsroom in Winnipeg in 1994 to research and write Canada’s first book on Métis politics. Rotten to the Core: The politics of the Manitoba Métis Federation (101060, an imprint of J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, Winnipeg, 1995) was an in-depth examination of the MMF’s early troubled years.
In 1998-2000, Sheilla served as researcher/editor for Métis activist Jean, and was a facilitator for the Treaty Annuity Working Group (TAWG), a special committee of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. It was formed by Allard and Wayne Helgason in 2002, and set the stage for MAWG. Sheilla authored the 2004 TAWG report on the results of the national conference hosted by TAWG in 2003, “Modernizing Treaty Annuities: Implications and Consequences”. Allard’s “Big Bear’s Treaty: The Road to Freedom”, was published in 2002 in the policy journal Inroads.
Taking up the pen
Sheilla knew she was going take up the pen and become a writer from the time she was eleven years old. Born in the Salvation Army’s Grace Hospital on Preston Avenue in Winnipeg in 1954, Sheilla is the third oldest of eight children, and grew up on the Jones family farm near the little village of Warren, Manitoba. It sits on the largest stretch of flat terrain on the planet (the sedimentary basin of glacial Lake Agassiz), where her older brother continues to run the farm. And yes, if the family dog had decided to run away, it would have taken three days before he disappeared.
Sheilla got distracted from writing by marrying just after high school graduation and ended up farming. But after a while, the novelty of driving a tractor, hauling wheat to the elevator and shovelling out grain bins wore thin, even as the calluses on her hands grew thicker. One of the few opportunities for a writer in a small prairie community is the local weekly newspaper. So Sheilla (as Sheila Morrison) started freelancing for The Stonewall Argus and Teulon Times, a scrappy little independent newspaper at that time. She spent so much time hanging around the newspaper office that the staff joked that someday, Sheilla would appear on the payroll but nobody would remember actually hiring her. She did get hired as a reporter, and worked her way up to the position of editor, earning a raft of provincial and national awards for herself and for The Argus along the way. In 1992, she and Argus colleague Kelly Langevin were nominated for Outstanding Investigative Journalist of the Year by the Canadian Association of Journalists. It’s Sheilla’s favourite award that she didn’t win.
Not long into her journalism career, Sheilla was in demand as a “voice” on political issues, neatly filling a demographic niche: female, Western and rural. She started her years as commentator in 1987 with an “appearance” on CBC-Radio’s national news program As It Happens. After that, Sheilla provided her insights into regional issues for a variety of radio and television programs, and became a regular “talking head” for Canada Live on CBC-TV’s Newsworld. She even found time to host a daily agricultural news segment for Global TV. Sheilla was recruited to CBC-Radio in Winnipeg in 1992 as a reporter and a news editor (as Sheila Jones Morrison).
A quantum itch
While Sheilla was writing and producing newscasts and documentaries for CBC-Radio, her curiosity was piqued by quantum physics and its many strange paradoxes. And she wanted to figure out why leading physicists could declare that “nobody really understands quantum physics”.
Sheilla walked across the street from the CBC newsroom to the University of Winnipeg and enrolled, graduating with a BSc in Physics in 2001. While there, she served as president of the University of Winnipeg Physics Students Association. Sheilla was also awarded a scholarship by the University of Cambridge, UK to study at the Institute of Astronomy. Her adventures in physics saw her rubbing shoulders with Nobel laureates, exploring Hubble Space Telescope images while assigned to Sir Arthur Eddington’s old office, being “microwaved” at the CERN particle collider in Switzerland, and sharing more than a few pints with physicists and physics students from around the world.
To answer the question about whether we live in just one of an infinite number of universes, Sheilla wrote and narrated a one-hour documentary for CBC’s Ideas called “Infinite Possibilities: The Science of Parallel Universes”. It featured physicists Max Tegmark, David Deutsh, Bryce DeWitt and Dwight Vincent, and aired several times in 2002 and 2003. And, for the record, we cannot know if we are the universe, or just one of many.
Sheilla moved on to the University of Alberta for grad studies. Her supervisor was noted cosmologist Don Page, and his supervisor was Stephen Hawking, who became a long-time friend and colleague of Don’s. While in Edmonton, Sheilla wrote and narrated a variety of mini-documentaries on science for CBC Radio, served as a mentor for the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) program, and co-chaired an international physics conference in Mexico. She graduated from the University of Alberta in 2004 with an MSc in Physics.
But Sheilla was still trying to answer the puzzle about why nobody understands quantum physics. She sat down and wrote The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science (Dundurn Press/Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto; Oxford University Press, New York, 2008) framing quantum physics as a science that didn’t quite get finished, in part because of the personalities involved, but mainly due to the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism in Germany.
In the summer of 2011, Sheilla returned to the CBC-Radio newsroom for a stint as a desk editor and news presenter. In 2012, she joined forces with Dr. Alexander Unzicker of Munich to rewrite his award-winning German book on the many troubles facing physics for a popular science audience. Bankrupting Physics: How today’s top scientists are gambling away their scientific credibility (St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) was released the following year.
In 2008, one of Sheilla’s two daughters officiated at her marriage to one of Canada’s experts on Ice Age mammoths, Dr. James A. Burns, Curator Emeritus, Royal Alberta Museum. They met in Edmonton and now live in Winnipeg.
Curiously, while Sheilla has millions of cousins across Canada, she has yet to find a blood connection with Jim. True, his great-grandmother was the founding director of the Salvation Army's first Grace Hospital where Sheilla was born, but that doesn’t count.
“The closest I can link our relatives is that my great-great-grandmother from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea and Jim’s great-great-grandmother from Creemore, Ontario are buried in the same Winnipeg cemetery, within shouting distance of each other.”
Updated November 2019
The content of this website is copyrighted by
Sheilla Jones, unless otherwise indicated.
All rights reserved.
This site is composed of 100%
recycled electrons.