Long before Joan Phillip entered the British Columbia legislature, she had spent decades defending Indigenous rights, land and community institutions. Phillip, also known as Amshen, died on August 28, 2026, at 74, according to CityNews. At the time, she was serving as the BC NDP MLA for Vancouver-Strathcona and as parliamentary secretary for community development and non-profits, as The Canadian Press reported.

Phillip was səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and a member of the Penticton Indian Band. She grew up around the North Vancouver waterfront and Commercial Drive before her family moved to an old orchard in North Vancouver. She later returned to the Drive area with her children and worked as a youth counsellor at Britannia Secondary School.

Politics, for Phillip, started outside electoral office. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip told IndigiNews that she had been active since she was 16. He recalled that as a teenager she climbed out a bedroom window to join an Indigenous fishing-rights struggle at Frank's Landing. He also said she later spoke for a Native Peoples delegation to China and served as a band spokesperson during the Oka Crisis.

That movement work shaped her partnership with Stewart Phillip, the longtime president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. They met through the board of the Vancouver Indian Centre Society. He said: "It was the movement that brought us together. It was the movement that sustained our relationship."

Her community service moved through classrooms, friendship-centre programs and First Nations land administration. The Province of British Columbia recorded her work as a youth counsellor at Britannia, education and program director at the Aboriginal Friendship Centre, and lands manager for the Penticton Indian Band. GreenPAC reported that she held the lands role for more than two decades.

Phillip and her husband worked together in campaigns concerning the Site C dam, the Trans Mountain pipeline, the Ajax mine and salmon farming. In 2017, the Wilderness Committee jointly gave them the Eugene Rogers Environmental Award for their commitment to protecting lands, waters and the environment.

Electoral politics became a late chapter, not a new direction. Phillip ran for the federal NDP in Central Okanagan-Similkameen-Nicola in 2019 and 2021. In the second campaign she received 13,813 votes, or 21.5 percent, but did not win the seat.

Her provincial breakthrough came in the June 24, 2023 Vancouver-Mount Pleasant by-election. Phillip won 67.79 percent of valid votes and was sworn into the legislature the next month. The First Nations Leadership Council called her the second First Nations woman to be sworn in as a British Columbia MLA.

The riding became Vancouver-Strathcona before the 2024 general election, and voters returned Phillip with 68.17 percent of valid votes. In November, Premier David Eby appointed her parliamentary secretary for community development and non-profits.

Phillip described political progress with an image of reclaiming a pie one portion at a time. "We had everything taken from us, including our authority, and we’re going to get it back slice at a time," she told IndigiNews. The words joined the patience of an elected representative to the persistence of the activist who had begun as a teenager.

Phillip's public record runs from East Vancouver friendship-centre rooms to Penticton Indian Band land work and the legislature. The things she strengthened remain concrete: Indigenous title and rights, the lands and waters she defended, community services she advanced, and a seat in provincial politics opened wider for the First Nations women who follow.