Eagleridge Bluffs protester and First Nations elder Harriet Nahanee spent nine days out of the final month of her life in jail.

The 71-year-old activist great-grandmother is being mourned following her death, due to pneumonia and complications, at St. Paul’s Hospital on February 24. She was initially arrested one month earlier, on January 24, for protesting the destruction of the ecologically sensitive bluffs and wetlands in West Vancouver. An overland highway is to run through the area as part of the Ministry of Transportation’s Sea-to Sky Improvement Project.

Nahanee’s flu- and asthma-induced ill health did not exempt her from having to serve her sentence at Surrey Women’s Pre-Trial Centre. Fellow 78-year-old great-grandmother Betty Krawczyk told the Straight she knows from personal experience the pretrial centre is a "hellhole". Krawczyk said she warned B.C. Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown in a letter that she was "very worried" about Nahanee. In the end, Nahanee was hospitalized a week after her release from Surrey.

"I’m devastated," Krawczyk said. "We were both counterparts, in a way. We were more or less the same age, and she lost two children and I lost two children. We both fought for the same things, which is, ‘What are we leaving behind?’ "

On February 23, the Indigenous Action Movement held a walk and a prayer vigil for Nahanee.