Marie Josephine Dinwoodie

Marie Olson Dinwoodie passed away peacefully at St. Luke Extended Care in Ronan, Montana, July 27, 2023, at 6 pm, an hour and a half after her daughter Adrienne arrived after a long trip to say goodbye.  Marie was born November 19, 1937, in Grand Junction, Colorado.  She grew up at her parents’ (David William and Lila Tufly Olson) small farm east of Grand Junction, in the rural community of Pear Park.  Her mother’s family were ranchers in the Appleton area, later Clark, Colorado, and Dixon, Montana, and her father’s family were contractors for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, building tunnels and bridges along the Arkansas River, cutting, and distributing ice for refrigeration from Kremling, Colorado, and later overseeing work crews throughout the US Southwest. 

Though Marie’s father dropped out of school to support his family after grade 8, her family placed a strong emphasis on education.  Marie graduated from Central High School as Valedictorian in 1955.  She began her studies at Colorado University in 1955 with an interest in Mathematics.  She attended the Scandinavian Seminar in Denmark 1957-8, became fluent in Danish, and developed an interest in world geography, politics, and history. She graduated from Colorado University with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1960.  She met her husband David Hepburn Dinwoodie at the University of Colorado where he was a graduate student in History.

Marie’s husband entered the Foreign Service, and they lived in Mexico from 1960-64 where she learned to speak Spanish.  In 1964 David took a position in the History Department at the University of Alberta, Canada, and he and Marie moved to Edmonton, Alberta.  Marie earned a Master of Arts in Community Development from the University of Alberta in 1977.  In 1980 Marie and David established a residence in Charlo, Montana, nearby David’s mother, a rural schoolteacher and artist, and Marie thrived in the Mission Valley, putting enormous physical energy into her house, garden, ranging ponds and wild meadows, helping establish Flathead Resource Organization, a moderate environmental group oriented toward work on issues like waste-disposal oversight and water quality. 

Notably intelligent Marie was enormously appreciative of all her neighbors, Native American families of diverse ethnicity living sometimes intermittently in the Mission Valley (Salish, Iroquois, Metis, Columbia River, Navajo, etc.), cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, gardeners, loggers, wildlife refuge managers, National Park Rangers, local children, pheasant hunters, artists, a variety of eccentrics, activists, and more typically, “inactivists.” Her dining room table was a Rocky Mountain salon for conversations that ran roughshod over conventional political lines. 

David developed Alzheimer’s in the 1990s.  Marie cared for him at home until he died in 2002. 

Marie is survived by her brother, David William Olson and his wife Margie (of Grand Junction, Colorado), her cousin Roy Tufly (of Lakeside, Montana), her children, David and his wife Suzanne (of Albuquerque, NM), Ian (of Anaconda, MT), and Adrienne and her husband Thomas Crown (of Winchester, California), her granddaughters, Emily and Elizabeth (of Albuquerque, NM), and her nieces and nephews, George, Jackie, and Delene (Olson), and Gail, Dawn, and Demetrious (Dinwoodie).