Gertrude Bernard CM (June 18, 1906 – June 17, 1986), commonly known as Anahareo, was a writer, animal rights activist and conservationist of Algonquin and Mohawk ancestry.
Anahareo | |
|---|---|
 Anahareo (ca. 1928) | |
| Born | Gertrude Bernard June 18, 1906 Mattawa, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | June 17, 1986 (aged 79) Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada |
| Resting place | Ajawaan Lake, Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan |
| Known for | animal rights conservationist |
| Spouse | Count Eric Moltke-Huitfeldt (m. 1939; died 1963) |
| Partner | Grey Owl |
| Children | 3 |
| Awards | Order of Canada |
Biography
Gertrude Bernard was born on June 18, 1906, in Mattawa, Ontario, where she spent her childhood. Her mother, Mary Nash Ockiping, was Algonquin. Her father, Matthew Bernard, was Algonquin Mohawk. Her father nicknamed her "Pony" because "she always ran, she never walked". Her mother died when she was four, and she was raised first by her grandmother and then by an aunt. She proved to be a rebellious child and grew into a strongly independent young woman.[1]
In 1925 Bernard took a summer job as waitress at the island resort of Camp Wabikon, on Lake Temagami. Her biographer, Kristin Gleeson, writes: "At nineteen she was now a beautiful and energetic young woman with bobbed hair who dressed in riding breeches and shirt, though if the occasion demanded she would apply makeup – the very picture of a modern woman." She caught the eye of a guest at the resort, a wealthy New Yorker who offered to pay her school fees. She and her father decided that in the fall she would attend Loretto Abbey, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Toronto. This was not to be, since later in the summer she would meet a guide working at the resort, Archibald Belaney, who would later come to be known as Grey Owl.[1]
A handsome mysterious man, dressed in a buckskin vest, a Hudson Bay belt and moccasins, Archie appeared to Gertie like the dashing daredevil heroes she idolized – Jesse James and Robin Hood. Compared to the bland wealthy vacationers, Archie reeked of adventure and excitement. Gertie found him so fascinating she wasted no time in discovering his name and that he was a guide.[2]
He was 36, almost twice her age, and claimed to be the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman and to have been born in Mexico.[3]: 9
In February, 1926, forgoing her plans for school, Bernard joined Belaney near Doucet in the Abitibi region of northwestern Quebec, where he was earning a living as a trapper.[3]: 12 Anahareo accompanied Belaney on the trapline and was horrified by what she experienced:
Nothing in her small-town up-bringing had prepared her for the heart-wrenching sight of the frozen corpses of animals who had died in agony while trying desperately to escape from the unyielding metal jaws of the leghold traps. Nor could she bear to watch as Archie used the wooden handle of his axe to club to death those who were still living.[4]: 52
She attempted to make him see the torture that animals suffered when they were caught in traps. According to the account given in Pilgrims of the Wild, Belaney located a beaver lodge, which he knew to be occupied by a mother beaver, and set a trap for her. When the mother beaver was caught, he began to canoe away to the cries of the kittens, which greatly resemble the sound of human infants. Anahareo begged him to set the mother free, but, needing the money from the beaver's pelt, he could not be swayed. But the next day he rescued the baby beavers, which the couple adopted and named McGinnis and McGinty.[5]: 27–33
Their courtship was at times eventful. In her memoir Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, she later claimed that she stabbed Belaney with a knife at one point.[3]: 63 In summer, 1927, Belaney proposed to her. Due to his undissolved marriage to his first wife, Angele Egwuna, the couple could not marry under Canadian law, but the chief of the Lac Simon Band of Indians gave them a "marriage blessing".[6] Belaney gave her the name "Anahareo", which he derived from "Naharrenou", the name of the Mohawk chief who, she claimed, was her great-great-grandfather.[3]: 33
In 1928 Belaney and Anahareo, along with the adopted beavers, moved to the area of Cabano in southeastern Quebec, where they were to reside until 1931. It was here that Belaney transformed himself into the writer and lecturer, Grey Owl.
In the spring of 1931, Grey Owl accepted an offer of employment from the Parks Branch as a conservationist, first at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and then at Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. He and Anahareo, with two new beavers, Jelly Roll and Rawhide, left Quebec, bound for the new job in the west.
The winter of 1931-1932 found Grey Owl preoccupied with writing. Although Anahareo had strongly encouraged him to write, she found it made him "like a zombie". Pregnant with their daughter, Shirley Dawn, who would be born in 1932, she was fed up, later writing "All I heard from Archie that winter was the scratch, scratch of his pen, and arguments against taking a bath. Like a kid, he loathed baths."[7]: 112
Anahareo had a great interest in prospecting and began to study mineralogy.[8] In 1933 she heard of a discovery of gold in Chapleau, Ontario. Leaving Dawn in the care of a family in Prince Albert, she set out on a prospecting trip to try her luck, an event that was reported in the Christian Science Monitor under the headline, "Indian Squaw Turns From Kitchen Duties to Gold Prospecting". She changed her mind and returned home after experiencing five days and nights in a drenching rain that prevented her from going into the woods.[9]
Anahareo went alone on prospecting trips to the remote Churchill River area. The first trip was in the summer of 1933. The second trip lasted an entire year, from the summer of 1934 to the summer of 1935. She travelled by canoe as far as Wollaston Lake, 550 kilometers north of Prince Albert. Grey Owl's letters to her betrayed a mixed bag of emotions: admiration for her fiercely independent spirit and courage in making such an arduous trip alone, concern for her safety, envy that she could make a trip into the bush that poor health and the pressure of writing prevented him from making – also irritation that the endeavour cost more than they could afford. At his request, she returned in the summer of 1935 to help him prepare for the upcoming lecture tour in Great Britain and to look after the beavers in his absence.[10]
The couple separated in 1936.[7]: 163–164 Shortly after Grey Owl's death in 1938, the sensational news broke that he was not half-Indian, as he had claimed to be, but an Englishman born in Hastings, without a trace of Indigenous blood. Anahareo later wrote:
When, finally, I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling for all those years I had been married to a ghost, that the man who now lay buried at Ajawaan was someone I had never known, and that Archie had never really existed.[3]: 187
With the encouragement of Belaney's publisher, Lovat Dickson, Anahareo wrote a book of memoirs called My Life With Grey Owl, which was published in 1940. She was dissatisfied with the book, in part because of her lack of control over the content. She complained "The usual portrayal of myself has been that of a sweet, gentle Indian maiden—whispering to the leaves—swaying with the breeze, tra la—. No, no, I’m a rebel really."[11] In 1972, her more accurate portrayal of her years with Grey Owl was published as Devil in Deerskins: My Life With Grey Owl.
Anahareo appeared in two of Grey Owl's "beaver" films: The Beaver People[12] and Pilgrims of the Wild.[13]
In June, 1937, Anahareo gave birth to a second daughter, Ann. The father's name did not appear on the birth certificate and she never publicly stated who the father was.[14]
In 1939, she married a Swedish nobleman, Count Eric Axel Moltke-Huitfeldt, who had immigrated to Canada. They had one daughter, Katherine.[15] The couple eventually separated and her husband died in 1963.[16]
Over the 50 years following her separation from Belaney, Anahareo, as she is known, continued to be active in the conservation and animal rights movement. In 1979 she was admitted into the Order of Nature of the Paris-based International League of Animal Rights. She was elected a Member of the Order of Canada in 1983. On June 17, 1986, just a day before her 80th birthday, Anahareo died in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.[3]
Anahareo's writings
- My Life With Grey Owl (1940)
- Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl (1972)
See also
References
Further reading
- Kristin Gleeson: Anahareo: A Wilderness Spirit. Fireship Press, Tucson 2012, ISBN 1611792207.
- Kristin Gleeson: Blazing Her Own Trail: Anahareo's Rejection of Euro-Canadian Stereotypes, in Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, edited by Sarah Carter, Patricia McCormack, Athabasca University Press, 2010. The publication won the 2011 Canadian Historical Association's Aboriginal history book prize.