A Canadian friend (shout out to Veronica!) first told me about Olivia Poole, who was one of the first Indigenous women in Canada to patent an invention, hers being the Jolly Jumper: a baby jumper. She invented the Jolly Jumper in 1910, and then patented it in 1957 with the help of one of her sons.
Poole was part Ojibway or Chippewa, and was born in North Dakota. She spent her childhood on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, and went to study music at Brandon College in Manitoba, Canada. She got married and moved to Ontario, but it was at White Earth Reservation that Poole saw mothers using cradleboards as baby carriers. Some of the mothers suspended the cradleboards with leather straps or ropes from trees or other structures to make a hammock or swing, and then after she had her first child, Poole fashioned a cradleboard of her own. Her first attempts included using a broom handle and a diaper, and what she fashioned was quite different from the original cradleboards that she had seen. For one, it did not have a rectangular board, and it also had a spring, for another. It was also close enough to the ground so that the baby’s feet could reach the ground and the baby could exercise its leg muscles by bouncing against the ground.
Poole went on to have six more children, and she used her Jolly Jumper with all of them. Before applying for the patent, she continued to make improvements to it, even using it with her grandchildren. It went into mass production in the early 1950s, and the business was eventually sold in the 1960s. The Jolly Jumper continues to be made by a company in Mississauga, Ontario.
Poole’s story was featured in two children’s books: How to Become an Accidental Genius and Canadian Women Now and Then: More than 100 Stories of Fearless Trailblazers. She died in 1975 in British Columbia.