Compelling Reimagination

him as he strides towards his goal.”

In our post-pandemic world, uncertain and traumatized as many readers are, a new way to honor the character’s past seems not just topical but rewarding. Every book does not need to be from a non-white, non-male perspective, but this reader believes that books that will find resonance with readers are those that adjust from the typical Campbell narrative structure (“a strong manly hero striding across the landscape bending events to his will”) to a narrative which acknowledges the journey thus far, and that one truth does not exclude another.

Indeed, when Peretur returns to protect her mother, she finds that more has changed than just herself. And we readers have changed too. In our new post-pandemic world we must make room for how the world changed, how our family structures may have changed, how our own health changed. Griffith acknowledges that Peretur “knows that though she has to move on, her past will always be a part of her.” As it will be for us.

That’s why we still turn to our comfort reads, like Arthurian legends, but why we also need the fresh take that acknowledges that we are no longer the people we were.

Katie Stine writes award-winning Regency romances about women’s boxing as Edie Cay. Her first two books have won the Golden Leaf, the Next Generation Indie Book Award, the Best

Indie Book Award. A Lady’s Finder came out in March. She is a

founding member of Paper Lantern Writers.

BY KRISTEN MCDERMOTT

Danielle Daniel, Canadian author and illustrator of several children’s books about First Nations lifeways, makes her adult historical fiction debut with Daughters of the Deer (Random House Canada, 2022), a lyrical narrative about the “Brides of New France,” Algonquin women who married the French trappers and farmers moving onto their ancestral lands. Inspired by family stories of her ancestor, Marie, originally an Algonquin woman who married settler Pierre Couc, her genealogical research revealed surprises that connect her 17th-century subjects to our own time.

“My mother and my aunts told me about Marie and Pierre,” Daniels explains, “and shared our genealogy with me. But I didn’t learn about Jeanne [their eldest daughter] until I had a conversation with my aunt, more than ten years ago now, about the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in our country. I was very upset and feeling quite helpless in the face of all those disappeared women. That’s when my aunt told me that one of our own ancestors ...had been murdered by two settlers, making her one of the first murdered Indigenous women in four centuries of such violence. I was driven to learn more about her.”

The result is a richly imagined rendering of the domestic life of the community formed by these intermarriages, centered on the TroisRivières region of Daniel’s native Quebec. The narrative is told from the point of view of both Marie and Pierre, and later their daughter Jeanne. “Choosing who should tell this story and in which voice was a long process. I experimented at first with the first-person voices of Marie and Pierre in alternating chapters. With each consecutive draft, it became clear that Marie’s experience and how colonization affected her on a daily basis was the thing that I had to focus on,” Daniels says, “so I kept her voice in the first-person and moved Pierre’s into the third.” The poignant narrative traces the consequences for the next generation of Marie’s decision to marry Pierre: “Though her daughter Jeanne carries most of the story in that last stretch of the novel, I still wanted readers to experience the story through Marie’s eyes and heart.”

Daniels conducted “extensive” research into details on Algonquin and Weskarini lifeways, consulting “original documents from that period and texts written by Algonquin scholars held in several university libraries across the country.” She was also inspired by the “feminist academics and scholars named in my acknowledgements, particularly texts about women’s role in the fur trade.” The Couc family has been historically documented in Madame Montour & The Fur Trade by Simone Vincens, translated from the French by Ruth Bernstein (2011). Daniels, a native French speaker, also explored the town archives at Trois-Rivières.

“That’s where I found the records of the court case against Jeanne’s attackers, which mention the act of violence and the names of the accused and witnesses involved, as well as the sentencing,” Daniels recalls. “After I saw that document, I knew that no matter how challenging it was, I would never be able to walk away from this novel—I felt compelled to give Jeanne a voice.” The voice she created for Jeanne draws on traditions surrounding “two-spirited” people, a term that covers both gender orientation and identity in many indigenous cultures. LGBTQ+ persons in pre-modern societies, rarely acknowledged in historical record, must often be identified more by absence than by presence: “I learned that Pierre and Marie had to pay an annual fine to the king of France because their daughter Jeanne remained unmarried. According to the king’s law, women in New France had to be married by seventeen and men by twenty-one. But when Jeanne was killed, she was twenty-two and still unmarried,” Daniels explains. “I asked myself why her parents would have paid that fine for five years when they had other children to care for. Was Jeanne unwell? Could she have had a physical or cognitive impairment? Or, maybe, she was two-spirited and loved another woman and refused to marry. It was Jeanne, the character, who took me by the hand and said, yes, yes, this is where we are going. Let’s go there. Follow me. And so, I followed her, and I am glad that I did because it allowed me to explore this great suppression of a deep and accepted love that was revered before the priests arrived.”

Daniels mentions in the novel’s Acknowledgements that writing this novel was an “excruciating experience” that “scared” her, but that her ancestors “insisted” she write: “From the very beginning of the process, I felt them around me. Every time I wanted to stop, they nudged me forward, they urged me to get back to the story, they even appeared in my dreams. They wouldn’t let me go until their story was told. It’s my story, I know, but somehow I felt like I owed it to Marie, to Jeanne, and also in some ways to Pierre.”

While, as Daniels notes, writing about the history of colonization is challenging because of the “painful and sensitive subject matter,” the novel succeeds because its focus is on the domestic lives of people and communities, their food, clothing, healing arts, and rituals, and on the diverse ways they learned to live together in the face of cultural erasure and oppression. Daniels approaches her role as a guide to this time reverently: “The other part of the struggle was to have to live in such a dire place in my imagination for so long, writing about painful subject matter, trying to feel everything my characters were feeling so my readers could feel it too. I needed to insulate myself while writing this book. I needed to set parameters to ensure I could do the hard work. This meant limiting the news I consumed and spending as much time in nature as possible to ‘fill my well’ so I could return to my writing desk.”

The result is a detailed, intimate narrative of family life and female