Vulgar History Podcast
Canadian Heritage Minute(s): Anahareo AKA Gertrude Bernard
March 28, 2025
Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Canadian Heritage Minute(s) by Vulgar History, which is a spinoff of the main Vulgar History podcast, it’s the feminist women’s history comedy podcast. This is the Canadian feminist history comedy podcast/where I, your host, Ann Foster, update listeners who may not live in Canada with what’s going on in Canada lately. And what’s going on in Canada lately is there’s going to be a federal election, which, the way that that works here — because people are listening from various different countries where things work differently — unlike in, for instance, America, where there’s years-long campaigning, what happens here is that the prime minister announces that there’s going to be an election, and then for about the next, I think it’s, like, four to six weeks, it’s basically for the next month, there is campaigning. And then at the end of that month, there is an election, and once those results are in, then the people take over their jobs. There’s not, like, a ceremonial date where they have to do elections. The prime minister can choose when to have an election, basically, and it’s a blissfully short election season. The way that it works is that everybody— well, people in Canada, we all vote for who’s going to be our member of parliament in our riding, and everybody belongs to one of the major political parties. And then whichever political party has the most members of parliament elected, the leader of that party becomes the prime minister. That’s how it works.
So, in Canada right now, in this particular election, there’s basically two front-running parties where it’s, like, one or the other of them is almost definitely going to win. So, there’s the Liberal Party, whose leader used to be Justin Trudeau, and now it’s Mark Carney, who in terms of, like, Canada and the elbows up of it all, Mark Carney is a hockey player. He got a hockey scholarship to university. He was a goalie, which everyone is saying that’s really notable because they’re kind of like, you have to have a certain skill set to be a goalie. Anyway, he’s the leader of that party, the Liberal Party, who might win. And then the other party who might win is the conservative party, literally called the Conservative Party, who I do not support, who I am against, who I would suggest everybody not vote for.
In most parts of Canada, it makes sense to vote for your local Liberal candidate to try and get the liberals more seats. In ridings like mine, I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the hatred of the Liberal Party is decades long and runs very deep. And there’s basically no chance that a liberal will ever be elected in Saskatoon, where I live. So, in this riding, it makes more sense to vote for the third party, which is the NDP. So anyway, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a website— If you’re in Canada and you want to know in your riding, what’s the best way to vote so the conservatives don’t win, I’ll put that link there because I found that useful so we can all vote in a way to try and make our country not descend into a fascist regime, like is happening to other places in the world. Speaking of, the most recent attack on Canada is that we were called nasty, which is like, bro, you’re reusing your insults. Also, it’s like, oh. Oh, really? We’re nasty Canadians? Is that as a response after some female politicians made some very strong appearances on television? It’s like, really? Really?
Anyway, I’m in Canada, and I’m doing these episodes about women from Canadian history. When I first was asking on social media for people, like, what are suggestions? I don’t know a lot about women from Canadian history because it didn’t come up a lot in my schooling. I don’t know what it’s like now for people going to school, but when I was a youth, or even when I was in university, it was just a lot of fur trade treaties, which is just like a lot of men in rooms signing documents together, is what I recall. So, I’m unearthing these Canadian history stories about women, and one of the first responses I got actually when I was asking about this on social media for suggestions is somebody said like, “Please discuss Indigenous women from Canadian history.” And I was like, yes, yes, yes! I really want this series, Canadian Heritage Minute(s), to include all kinds of people from all kinds of cultural backgrounds because part of what makes Canada Canada is the multiculturalism of it all. And, of course, like any country that was founded in colonialism, there were people living here when the white people showed up.
I’m going to be talking today about a woman whose name… She’s known by several different names, and this is sort of like, let’s discuss. So, the woman who I’m talking about today, her name when she was born was Gertrude Bernard, and then she later became known as Anahareo, which we’ll talk about how and why that happened. As far as I can tell from the research that I did, which largely came from reading an article about Anahareo by Alison Wick from ThePeopleAndTheText.ca, as well as a very comprehensive Wikipedia entry. You know, Wikipedia doesn’t say who wrote it, but it’s been edited many times by somebody called Dsiedler as well as the CanadianHistoryEncyclopedia.com.
So, people in her life called her Gertie, her name was Gertrude. Her father nicknamed her Pony, because she always ran, she never walked. There’s a movie about this situation where her character is just called Pony. I’m going to go with Anahareo as her name because that was how she published some books, and that was the name she chose. But Gertie I might also use, because that’s what people called her. We’ll get into it. Like so many people in this podcast, there’s various names.
So, Anahareo, Gertrude Bernard, was born in Mattawa in 1906 to Mary Nash Ockiping, who was an Algonquin woman, and Matthew Bernard, who was an Algonquin and Mohawk man. She came from the Pikwàkanagàn First Nation on Golden Lake in Ontario. Her mother died when she was four years old. And so, you know, I’ll call her Gertie now because she’s a kid, she didn’t change her name yet. So, she was little Gertie, 4 years old. After her mother died, she was raised by her paternal grandmother, Mary Catherine Papineau Bernard. Catherine, also known as ‘Big Grandma,’ love it, spoke to her in the Mohawk language, taught her skills and crafts, and instilled in Gertie the value and pride of her heritage, like, Big Grandma’s background. As a child, she had been taken from her family and sent to a convent where she learned to speak French, she learned the Catholic religion. She later escaped as a teenager and returned to her family in Oka. She, Big Grandma, — amazing person, what a story — she married John Bernard Nelson, a Mohawk man, his parents disapproved and they moved from Oka to Belleville and then to Mattawa. So, although Big Grandma was not raised on her ancestral territory, she raised her descendants with the teachings she learned from her grandmother, a testament to her strength and resiliency.
So, little Gertie, unable to sit still, remember her dad called her Pony because she always ran, she never walked, and she could not sit still. These days, people might be like, “Oh! ADHD, perhaps.” But in those days, it was just kind of like, “That’s a kid with a lot of energy.” So, she would often cut class to explore the woods and wilderness, even paid her friends sometimes to complete and hand in assignments for her. At age 11, Big Grandma, just health reasons, she was not able to care for her anymore and so, one of her aunts, one of Gertie’s aunts and family, so I guess her aunt and the aunt’s children moved in and so, this is her new guardian. So, this aunt was invested… The aunt was very Catholic; she wanted to really uphold the values and social conventions of the Catholic Church and mainstream society, which were at odds with Gertie’s unrestrained passion for life and adventure and the wilderness and her heritage, her Algonquin and Mohawk heritage. So, this was a tense situation. In her mid to late teens, Gertie moved back in with her father. Her father worked away from the home most of the time, so she had more freedom than with her previous guardians to go outside and, like, do these things in nature that she loved to do.
When she was 19… So, this is 1925, and I do want to say, if you look at pictures of her in 1925, she has the most adorable bobbed haircut with bangs. That haircut didn’t look good on everybody, still doesn’t. But in the 1920s, people getting this flapper haircut. And for her, I feel it’s more like a tomboy haircut, like, get the hair out of the way so you can climb trees better or whatever. It suits her, she looks cute as a button with this haircut. And frankly, she looks cute as a button in general, and that’s part of why what happens next happens next.
So, when she was 19, she took a summer job as a waitress at the Island Resort of Camp Wabikon on Lake Temagami, this is in Northern Ontario, I believe. So, a woman named Kristin Gleeson wrote a biography of Gertie and Kristin Gleeson wrote:
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.
So, Gertie, which is still what she was called, at this point, she caught the eye of a guest at the resort, a wealthy New York man who offered to pay her school fees. So, she and her father decided that in the fall, she would attend a Roman Catholic boarding school in Toronto. She’s 19, remember? So, maybe like a college, finishing school. But these plans did not come to pass because later in the summer, she met someone else, a guide working at the resort, like an outdoor, someone who would take the visitors on, you know, canoe trips into the woods and whatever. And this man’s name was Archie Belaney. And to quote, again, from Kristin Gleeson’s biography:
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.
So, she’s just like, “Who’s this guy?” He’s got, like, two long braids, he’s wearing this deerskin coat with fringe on it. So, he was 36, she was 19. So, he’s almost twice our age, and he introduced himself as the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman, and he said he was from Mexico. And they fell in love.
So, she chose to join Archie, where he was going next to, like— Also, he was like this wilderness guy, and she like loves nature. So, he’s like, “I’m going to go to Northwestern Quebec to work as a trapper.” And she’s like, “Great, I will come with you.” So, he gave her an Indigenous name based on her memories of her Mohawk great-grandfather Jean Baptiste Anenharison, chief who died in 1856. So, this is where Anahareo comes from; he gave the name to her.
So, she accompanied him on the trapline, like, going out trapping animals to skin them, to sell them for fur, et cetera. And she was this outside, outdoors person, but she had not really been a hunter, and she was horrified by what she experienced on the trapline, just seeing all the frozen corpses of animals who had died in agony while trying to escape from these leg hold traps, watching him killing all these animals. And she was just like, “This is not cool, bro.” Especially beaver, she was really affected by seeing them being killed. So, she tried to make him see the torture that the animals suffered when they were caught in traps. During their time together, Archie 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. And did you know beaver babies are called kittens? They are. And when they cry, it sounds a lot like human infants crying. And Anahareo, which I’ll call her that now, because that’s her name now, she begged him to set the mother free, she felt so badly for the babies. But he needed the money from selling the beaver’s pelt. But the next day, he went back and rescued the baby beavers, and they adopted the baby beavers and raised them as their sort of pets/children. They called them McGinnis and McGinty.
So, Archie wrote this about Anahareo. And note, he says that they’re married, but they at this point were not married, but they were, like, together all the time. So, here’s what he wrote:
I speedily discovered that I was married to no butterfly in spite of her modernistic ideas and found that my companion could swing and axe as well as she could a lip-stick, and was able to put up a tent in good shape, make quick fire, and could rig a tump-line and get a load across in good time, even if she did have to sit down and powder her nose at the other end of the portage. She habitually wore breeches, a custom not at that time so universal amongst women as it is now…
So, he wrote this, like, a decade or two later. “… and one that I did not in those days look on with any great approval.” So, for this podcast, when women wear trousers, we’re here for it. It’s one of the catchphrases of Vulgar History, just like, to keep your pants on. So, she’s just there like, “This makes sense. I’m going to do me. I’m going to wear lipstick, powder my nose, wear trousers, go in a canoe, raise beaver babies.” She’s doing her, and I respect it.
So, Anahareo, also handy; she probably learned these sewing skills from Big Grandma. She made her own clothes, she made Archie’s clothes out of buckskin, canvas, and cloth. So, this is again, like she dressed in a distinctive way that was not typical of… Well, really of anyone, not typical of white women, which she was not, but also not typical of Indigenous women. She wore breeches, fringed buckskin jackets, and vests and lace-up prospector boots with her cute little bobbed hair and bangs.
So, here’s an understatement. “Their courtship was at times eventful. In her memoir, she claimed that she stabbed Archie with a knife at one point.” So, it’s like two people with big personalities. Two years into cohabitating, he proposed to her, but he was already married because he’d married somebody called Angele Egwuna, and because he’d never actually divorced from her officially, they could not marry under Canadian law. But the chief of the Lac Simon Band of Indians gave them a “marriage blessing,” so they were, like, spiritually married. And then, one year later, they, along with the adopted beaver children, moved to the area of Cabano in southeastern Quebec, and they stayed there for three years. Their plan was to set up a beaver colony. Beavers were their… Conserving beavers is, like, a huge thing in their life, which, what could be more Canadian than that? The beaver is the, like, national animal of Canada.
So, they wanted to set up a beaver colony where the beavers would be protected and could be studied, and it was here that Archie transformed himself. He renamed himself and sort of redid his backstory. And he’s like, his name was now Grey Owl, which is how he is best known now, actually. So, he had fully entered this new persona as this kind of, like, nature conservator guy who gave talks, he wrote articles and lectures. Meanwhile, Anahareo was asserting her independence and embarking on prospecting expeditions on her own in remote areas of northwestern Quebec. She was always interested in prospecting, which means, like, trying to find gold basically. She was always hoping to stake a claim to find some gold, but it did not pan out, although she did improve her backcountry skills on these solo trips. During one of these trips, she accepted a job that involved hauling over a thousand kilograms of equipment to a distant lake in winter by dog sled. She just, like, gets this thing done. This is where I just feel like the Canadian vibes are just, like, Canadian-ing in this story.
So, in the spring of 1831, sorry, 1931, Grey Owl accepted an offer of employment from the parks, like Parks Canada basically, to be the caretaker of park animals at the Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and then also later at the Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, where I have been, it’s in northern Saskatchewan. So, he and Anahareo with, I guess, I don’t know, the two beaver babies grew up, they spread their wings and went off to be adult beavers on their own, I guess. They have two new baby beavers named Jelly Roll and Rawhide. So, they left Quebec, bound for a new life in the West. So, he started writing, partially because Anahareo encouraged him to write because he’s like, “If I can’t kill beavers and sell their pelts, then how am I going to make money to survive?” And she’s like, “Well, you could write books.” So, he did. She found that it made him like a zombie when he was working on writing. She was also, at this time, pregnant. She had a daughter named Shirley Dawn, who was born in 1932, but she just got tired of him sitting— They were living in these, like, log cabins with two beavers and she wrote that she just got fed up. She later wrote, “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.”
She’s still interested in prospecting, trying to find gold, and so she began to study mineralogy. And she continued going on these solo prospecting trips to the remote Churchill River area, one of her trips. And she took the daughter with her because, like, that guy wasn’t going to care for a child. I don’t know if she took the beavers with her, probably not. So, she took a trip, one trip took an entire year from the summer of 1934 to the summer of 1935. She also traveled by canoe to Wollaston Lake, 550 kilometers north of Prince Albert in Saskatchewan, and continued further north to the edge of the Barren Lands. They exchanged letters during these trips; Grey Owl’s letters to her betrayed a mixed bag of emotions. He admired her independent spirit and courage in taking these trips on her own, he was also concerned for her safety, he was jealous that she could go on this trip that he wasn’t able to go because he was having some health problems. Also, he had the pressure of, like, writing to make money for them. Anyway, at his request, she returned from the prospecting trip in the summer of 1935 to help him prepare, he was going on a lecture tour in Great Britain.
So, Grey Owl had become sort of an international celebrity of this sort of, like, seemingly Indigenous person (not to spoil a twist that’s coming up) with his, like, long braids and his fringed coat, talking about saving the beavers and environmentalism and stuff. So, he was kind of a celebrity, and he was going to go to Great Britain. And when he was going there, the plan was that she would look after the two beavers and presumably their daughter while he was away, which she did. It was a hugely successful lecture tour in Great Britain. When he came back, they had a huge fight, and they decided to separate for some time. They parted for good at that point, April 1936. They’ve been together now for 10 years. So, she’s like 29 years old. Oh, actually, to clarify. So, when she’s going on her year-long prospecting trip, their daughter Dawn was not with her; her daughter Dawn was in the care of a family in Prince Albert, which is the nearby city. So, okay, she was truly by herself.
And then she was like, “What am I going to do?” So, Grey Owl/Archie had made some short films, this is part of his sort of like fame and celebrity and she appeared in some of them, so she was like, “Well, maybe I can go pursue a film career in Hollywood, which didn’t really pan out.” One year later, she gave birth to another daughter whose name was Ann. The father’s name is not on the birth certificate, and she never publicly stated who the father was. But she was now in this precarious position financially, but also socially because she was an Indigenous woman, a single mother. She was so skilled with, like, going off in the woods and the back country as a guide, but she wasn’t able to find work doing that, and she lacked the means to support herself and this new baby. And then because of the cultural stereotypes, which are still facing people today here, just sort of like, how a single Indigenous woman, an unmarried mother is sort of looked down upon. So, there was a real concern that her daughter Ann would be taken from her by force, that she would maybe be institutionalized. This was just sort of, like, what’s going to happen to her? It was a scary time, and she was broke.
So, she went to a Salvation Army residence for unwed mothers in Saskatoon, the city in which I live now. Eventually, she had to give Ann up for adoption; she was adopted by an Anglo-Canadian couple who took her to live with them in Calgary. Meanwhile, although she and Grey Owl were no longer together, they still were amicable with each other. He had gone back for another lecture tour in Great Britain, but came back, and he was very ill. She was alerted that he was dying in a hospital in Prince Albert, and so she rushed there, but he died before she could see him, April 13, 1938.
After he died, shortly afterwards, the sensational news broke. Who could have seen this coming? He was not actually half Apache, half Scottish from Mexico, but he was in fact from England. He was an Englishman born in Hastings, without a trace of Indigenous blood. This is why there is a movie that was made about this story starring Pierce Brosnan, which is not whitewashing casting, but accurate casting of a white man playing a white man in this story. 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 was someone I had never known and that Archie had never really existed.
So, because his books and his speaking tours had been so popular, this meant that the news that he wasn’t really Apache meant that the scandal was reported widely in Canada, Britain, and the US. So, she was sort of embroiled in this as well, so she’s invited by his London publisher to go to England where she met Archie Belaney’s white mother, Kittie Scott-Brown. And then the publisher asked her, “Could you write a new book to try and, I don’t know, sort all this out to make people feel less weird about it?” And so, she did because she needed money. So, she wrote a book called My Life with Grey Owl, which was published in 1940. She was not happy with the book; she didn’t really have control over the content. She kind of had to write the story that they wanted her to write, which wasn’t really truthful. She wrote, “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.” Like, that’s not what she was like, but this is the book that she kind of had to write to make money.
In 1939, she met Eric Moltke, who is a Swedish count who had immigrated to Canada from Sweden to start a new life. They got married in Winnipeg, where they hoped to find good job opportunities. But in fact, they did not and both of them ended up doing just, like, menial labour-type work. So, this one source says that Eric, this Swedish count, had some similarities to Grey Owl, so she kind of… She had a type. He was charming, he was funny, and like Grey Owl, he liked to drink and party and have a good time. And so, with both men, Anahareo was happy to drink with them and have fun. But she was just sort of like, she’s never happier than when she was off by herself in the bush. And she’s living in Winnipeg, she’s living in the city. She had been through it, living in Saskatoon and the unmarried women’s shelter in Calgary. Her confidence had diminished; she had so many skills, but she was not living a life where she was able to use those. The trips, that she wasn’t able to go into the bush anymore, that would help her reinforce her sense of capability and strength. She knew this was where she was talented and good, but without that, she was unhappy. The jobs that she got didn’t challenge her inquiring mind, and so she started drinking more. Eric was also a heavy drinker.
Then, World War II started. Eric enlisted in the army and served as a tank driver. Anahareo— I don’t know if she’s still going by that at this point, maybe she’s going by Gertie, I don’t know. She’s pregnant again. So, this will be her third daughter, named Katherine. She moved back to Saskatoon, she rented a small house, and lived on the pension of being the wife of an army guy, which finally, she at least had income. So, she’s able to bring back her daughter Dawn from Prince Albert to live with her and Katherine, and she tried to just concentrate on raising her girls, hopefully with the love and tradition that Big Grandma had raised her with.
At this point, Eric returned from the war; Katherine was 4 years old, Dawn was 13 years old. Eric had trouble adjusting to civilian life, so he started drinking even more, and he was unable to find a job. 1947. So, Dawn, the teenage, oldest daughter, returned to Prince Albert. Anahareo left Eric and took a job as a cook and housekeeper at a farm. One year later, Eric found a job in Canmore, Alberta and hoping for a new start, Anahareo brought their daughter Katherine to join him there, hoping that this time it’ll work out. But the relationship continued to be troubled; it was on-off, like, they would separate and get back together again repeatedly.
But then, in 1953, she received a visit from her second daughter, remember Ann? Who had originally been called Ann, the same way I spell my name, A-N-N, but Anne had now started spelling her name with an E; couldn’t be me, but I respect the choice. So, at this point, Anne was 16 and had discovered this was who her biological mother was, and so it was so exciting to get to meet her daughter for, really, the first time. And then eventually, Anahareo and Katherine left Eric for good. She moved back to her childhood home in Ontario in Mattawa, where she lived with her family for the first time in nearly 30 years, like, where she had come from. Eric suffered a severe workplace accident, and she got back together with him again, where he was in Calgary, where he was receiving treatment. He was now permanently disabled, unable to work, depressed, drinking even more heavily. And she was also just depressed and tired. So, their daughter Katherine left her beauty school and she decided to go live with her older daughter, Dawn. So, she and Eric— I know I said before they separated for good, but now they actually separated for good. They permanently separated on good terms in 1959.
So, after she moved in with her daughter, Dawn, Anahareo was diagnosed with a malfunctioning thyroid, which was probably one of the things causing her depression and some of the health problems she’d been having for years. Once this was diagnosed, she was able to get treatment, and then she had the energy and the ambition to pursue two projects; a film and a book about Grey Owl that she wanted to portray herself and Grey Owl authentically. So, she traveled to Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles promoting this film project, but there were no takers, really, there was little appetite in the film industry for an authentic portrayal of Indigenous Canadians in the 1960s. And Grey Owl had been so famous in, like, 1935, but that was decades ago. So, she focused on writing a book about Grey Owl. She had that other one before, but she never really cared for it, and actually, this coincided with some interest in his life starting to increase because in the late 1960s, the public started to care more about the negative impact of pollution, the importance of the wilderness to the health of the planet. So, Grey Owl, his legacy, which is like, yeah, he was an Englishman pretending to be an Apache man, but he did important conservation work, and that work was starting to be seen as important.
So, where he used to live in Prince Albert National Park in that, sort of, log cabin, it’s called Beaver Lodge, and it was restored by Parks Canada. You can still go up there, it’s a day’s hike. If you go to Prince Albert National Park, you can see the cabin is still there. You can see the part in the corner where the beavers would live. So, some more writings about Grey Owl started to appear. In 1972, the CBC, the national broadcaster, produced a Grey Owl documentary. And then, in 1972, that same year, Anahareo’s book, Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, was published. This was a popular success. It reached number four on the Toronto Star Bestseller list. The title, Devil in Deerskins, was inspired by a conversation she’d had with Grey Owl years before, where he had told her that he was going to write a book called Devil in Deerskins, which would be his last book. She assumed that he was going to reveal his real identity in that book, so she took that title for her own book.
The idea of a film about Grey Owl started to gain more traction. Archie’s London publisher, published a new collection of Grey Owl’s memoirs called Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl, and then the rights for that were bought by a film production company, which sucks that they didn’t buy the rights to Anahareo’s book, but to this other book. The film was supposed to feature Marlon Brando as Grey Owl, but it never actually got off the ground. Meanwhile, a Toronto theatre company put out a play called Life and Times of Grey Owl. Anahareo went on opening night, and she hated it. She wrote, “It was totally unrealistic and the actress bore no resemblance in appearance or mannerisms and definitely not in spirit to me. It turned out to be a parody. Archie must have flipped in his crib.”
So, in 1980 and 1981, Anahareo was profiled in the Vancouver Weekend Sun and in BC Outdoors, and these succeeded in portraying her not as a stereotype, not as a victim, but as a living, breathing First Nations woman who cannot be slotted into the old stereotypes. This is a quote about the articles: “She was a determined woman, with miles of experience, who was committed to her views.”
In the 1980s, she continued to be active in the fields of conservation, environmentalism and animal rights. She joined the Society for the Protection of Fur Bearing Animals and campaigned for various issues regarding animal protection, such as banning leg hold traps and promoting the use of humane traps. She became a member of the Order of Nature of the International League for Animal Rights. And in 1983, she was presented with the Order of Canada, which is, like, the highest honour you can get as a Canadian person.
She died one day before her 80th birthday on June 17, 1986, where she was living at that time in Kamloops, British Columbia. Her body was buried at Prince Albert National Park, where the cabin is. So, she’s buried next to her daughter Dawn, who had died of issues related to diabetes before her, and Grey Owl is also buried there. And that is the story of Anahareo, AKA Gertrude Bernard.
I wanted to share this story, not just like because I want to share the story of more Indigenous people from Canada, and also because the last Canadian Heritage Minute that I did about Mona Parsons, I mentioned how frustrating I find it when a woman in death is defined, or even in life, but especially… In life and in death, is just defined by, “Oh, she was married to this guy.” So, like, Anahareo is so much is just known as kind of like, “Grey Owl’s wife, Grey Owl’s girlfriend,” where it’s like, no, she was a whole person by herself. And she lived so much life, not with him, actually. And in the movie, the Pierce Brosnan movie, which I think is just called Grey Owl, her character, I was like, I wonder who played her? And at first, I was scrolling through the cast, and I’m like, “Did no one play her? Is she not in this movie?” But she is, but they just call her Pony in the movie, which is like, okay, that’s what her father called her. Anyway, I think that she should be the main character in her own movie.
And that’s this week’s Canadian Heritage Minute, I’m Ann Foster. It’s really interesting for me to be looking at Canadian women in history, which is, again, I’ve always been someone interested in history, but just, like, the stories of women were not presented to me, and it takes some digging around to find these stories. If you are a person who knows about another interesting woman from Canadian history, please let me know because I am very motivated to continue on with these bonus episodes because I’m learning about stuff, and I’m teaching you stuff, and I think it’s important, in the wake of people who are saying things like “Canada is not a real country,” to be like, fuck you, it is. We have a history, and these are the things that have happened here. And it’s not just a history like I experienced being taught in school of, like, men doing the fur trade and then signing documents. There are so many interesting women in our history as well, as well as interesting people of other genders, and we’re going to get to that maybe next week, maybe the week after.
But anyway, elbows up, Canada. Vote for the Liberals, unless you’re in Saskatchewan, then vote for the NDP. We’re going to get through this. I find Anahareo to be a really inspiring person. I think there’s so much, a lot of… You know, society let her down in a lot of ways, just like, when she wasn’t able to use her skills when she was being looked down upon as, like, this Indigenous single woman. But her tenacity and her commitment and her love of nature and stuff, I find really admirable, and I appreciate the way that she was true to herself her whole life. She dealt with this kind of shocking twist, this betrayal that she learned after Archie had died about his real identity, but she continued on. I think a lot of that’s probably because of her grandmother, Big Grandma, who raised her to be so proud of her roots and in touch with nature and stuff. Anyway, Canada, elbows up. Everybody, keep your pants on, keep your tits out and talk to you next time.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Canadians: get info on strategic voting for the federal election at SmartVoting.ca
Buy a copy of Anahareo’s book Devil in Deerskins: My Life With Grey Owl
Info on Grey Owl’s cabin in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan
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Anahareo, by Alison Wick
Anahareo (Wikipedia)
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