Anahareo

Gertrude Bernard (June 18, 1906 – June 17, 1986), commonly known as Anahareo, was a Canadian writer, animal rights activist and conservationist of Algonquin and Mohawk ancestry. Throughout her life, she challenged cultural stereotypes of First Nations women and proved herself to be "an intrepid, resourceful, and self-reliant woman who could manage on her own in the wilderness and yet was no stranger to the customs and trappings of modern civilization". Bernard adored her grandmother, who related many memories of her beloved husband and taught her Mohawk customs. Bernard and her descendants were always proud of their Mohawk ancestry. At the age of eleven, her grandmother became too frail to care for her, and one of her aunts, with her family, moved in. Bernard proved to be a rebellious child and grew into a strongly independent young woman.

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 makeupthe very picture of a modern woman."

His name was Archibald Belaney and he would later come to be known as Grey Owl. 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.

Life with Grey Owl (19261936)

In February 1926, forgoing her plans for school, Anahareo (as she would come to be commonly known) joined Belaney near Doucet in the Abitibi region of northwestern Quebec, where he was earning a living as a trapper.

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. She 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.

I speedily discovered that I was married to no butterfly, in spite of her modernistic ideas, and found that my companion could swing an 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, and one that I did not in those days look on with any great approval. — Grey Owl, Pilgrims of the Wild

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. Their intention was to set up a beaver colony, where the beavers would be protected and could be studied. It was here that Belaney transformed himself into the writer and lecturer, Grey Owl. The transformation began with the appearance of his first article, "The Passing of the Last Frontier", which was published in 1929 in the English outdoors magazine Country Life. There followed a request from the publisher for the book that would be published in 1931 as The Men of the Last Frontier. He had fully entered into the persona of Grey Owl by January, 1931, when he gave a talk at the annual convention of the Canadian Forestry Association in Montreal. "The event was a huge success. It set the pattern for numerous speeches Grey Owl was to give, dressed in his Indian regalia, with films of his tame beaver to illustrate his stories."

In the spring of 1931, Grey Owl accepted an offer of employment from the Parks Branch as the "caretaker of park animals", 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 a new life in the west.

Due to her continuing interest in prospecting, she began to study mineralogy. In 1933, she heard of a discovery of gold in Chapleau, Ontario. Leaving Dawn in the care of the Winters 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.

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 to Wollaston Lake, 550 kilometers north of Prince Albert, and continued farther north to the edge of the Barren Lands. 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 makingalso irritation that the endeavour cost more than they could afford.

At Grey Owl's request, Anahareo returned from the prospecting trip 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. She sewed his costume for the tour and later wrote:

Archie brought back five moose-hides and about two pounds of beads, but since every stitch of his outfit had to be hand-sewn, with only three weeks to do it in, I told him that I wouldn't have time for beadworkand besides all that fancy stuff would make him look sissified. To this he answered, 'Do Indians in full regalia look sissified?' 'No, but a bushman would look funny all decorated up.' 'I agree with you there. But I'm not going as a bushman, I'm going as the Indian they expect me to be.' and Pilgrims of the Wild. ) But her attempt came to an end in June 1937, when she gave birth to her second daughter, Ann. The father's name did not appear on the birth certificate and she never publicly stated who the father was. Anahareo found herself in a precarious position financially and socially: Attempts to make use of the backcountry skills she had developed to make money as an experienced guide were fruitless, and she lacked the means to support herself and a new baby. Due to entrenched cultural stereotypes, she also faced particular challenges as an unwed Indigenous mother: The possibility that Ann would be forcibly taken away from her, and she herself institutionalised, were not negligible. After taking shelter for some time in a Salvation Army residence for unwed mothers in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she gave Ann up for adoption by the Eagles, an Anglo-Canadian couple, who took her to live with them in Calgary. She would grow up with them and only later discover the identity of her biological mother.

After having been away for many months on his second lecture tour, taking in Great Britain, the United States and Canada, Grey Owl returned home, a very ill man. Anahareo was alerted that he was dying in hospital in Prince Albert. She rushed there, but he died before she could see him, on April 13, 1938.

Shortly afterwards, 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.

In 1939, Anahareo met Eric Moltke, a member of the noble Moltke-Huitfeldt family and formally a count. He had immigrated to Canada from Sweden to start a new life.

They were married in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they hoped to find good job opportunities, but ended up doing menial labour. According to Kristin Gleeson, the use of alcohol was a problem for the couple:

Eric, like Grey Owl, was no stranger to drink and by this time it was a familiar part of Anahareo’s life. For Anahareo alcohol was an integral part of any celebration, good time, relaxation or party that enabled her to overcome her shyness and become outgoing, but for Eric it was a daily necessity.

Success and recognition (19601986)

After moving in with Dawn, Anahareo was diagnosed with a malfunctioning thyroid, the cause of the depression and ill-health from which she had suffered for years. With the improvement brought about by its successful treatment, she began to pursue two projects: a film and a book about Grey Owl. These, she insisted, must portray herself and Grey Owl authentically. She travelled to Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles promoting the film project, but with no success. There was little appetite in the film industry for an authentic portrayal of Indigenous Canadians in the 1960s.

In 1972, Anahareo's book Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl was published. It was a popular success, reaching number four on the Toronto Star best seller list. The title was inspired by a conversation she had had with Grey Owl years before, in which he told her he would write a book called "Devil in Deerskins", which would be his last book:

The idea of a film about Grey Owl returned in 1975, when a Toronto film company bought the rights to Dickson's Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl. The film was supposed to feature Marlon Brando as Grey Owl, but the idea never got off the ground. (The company later approached Anahareo for the rights to her book for parts to be included in a scaled-down production of Dickson's story, but she refused. This idea too never got off the ground.) Meanwhile, a Toronto theatre company put on a play entitled Life and Times of Grey Owl. Anahareo's reaction to the opening night performance was scathing: It was "totally unrealistic and the actress bore no resemblance in appearance or mannerisms and definitely not in spirit to her." She stated: "It turned out to be a parody. Archie must have flipped in his crib."

Two profiles of Anahareo appeared in the Vancouver Weekend Sun and BC Outdoors in 1980 and 1981, which "succeeded in portraying Anahareo as a living, breathing First Nations woman who could not be easily slotted into any old Aboriginal stereotype... She was a determined woman, with miles of experience, who was committed to her views."

In the remaining years of her life, Anahareo continued to be active in the conservation and animal rights movements. 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. In 1979, she became a member of the Order of Nature of the International League for Animal Rights. The medal she received was engraved with Grey Owl's words, "kindness is the hallmark of civilization". In 1983, she was presented with the Order of Canada.

During a visit to Grey Owl's birthplace of Hastings to meet the Grey Owl Society, Dawn suddenly died after a long-term battle with diabetes. On June 17, 1986, just a day before her eightieth birthday, Anahareo died in Kamloops, British Columbia. She was buried next to Dawn and Grey Owl above Beaver Lodge.

Anahareo's writings

My Life With Grey Owl (1940) Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl (1972)