Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel

Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel

In this haunting, groundbreaking, historical novel, Danielle Daniel imagines the lives of her ancestors in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family link to a girl murdered near Trois-Rivi res in the early days of French settlement.

Marie, an Algonquin woman of the Weskarini Deer Clan, lost her first husband and her children to an Iroquois raid. In the aftermath of another lethal attack, her chief begs her to remarry for the sake of the clan. Marie is a healer who honours the ways of her people, and Pierre, the green-eyed ex-soldier from France who wants her for his bride, is not the man she would choose. But her people are dwindling, wracked by white men's diseases and nearly starving every winter as the game retreats away from the white settlements. If her chief believes such a marriage will cement their alliance with the French against the Iroquois and the British, she feels she has no choice. Though she does it reluctantly, and with some fear--Marie is trading the memory of the man she loved for a man she doesn't understand at all, and whose devout Catholicism blinds him to the ways of her people.

This beautiful, powerful novel brings to life women who have literally fallen through the cracks of settler histories. Especially Jeanne, the first child born of the new marriage, neither white nor Weskarini, but caught between worlds. As she reaches adolescence, it becomes clear she is two-spirited. In her mother's culture, she would have been considered blessed, her nature a sign of special wisdom. But to the settlers of New France, and even to her own father, Jeanne is unnatural, sinful--a woman to be shunned, and worse.

And so, with the poignant story of Jeanne, Danielle Daniel imagines her way into the heart and mind of a woman at the origin of the long history of violence against Indigenous women and the deliberate, equally violent, disruption of First Nations culture--opening a door long jammed shut, so all of us can enter.

Daniel, Danielle: -

DANIELLE DANIEL is an award-winning children's book author and illustrator of Algonquin, French and Scottish descent. Her picture books include Once in a Blue Moon and Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox, winner of the Marilyn Baillie Award, shortlisted for the 2017 Blue Spruce Award, First Nation Communities Reads Award, a 2019 Prix Peuplier finalist for the French edition, and a Best 100 title at the New York Public Library. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnaabeg (Sudbury, Ontario).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780735282087
ISBN 10	0735282080
Title	Daughters of the Deer
Author	Danielle Daniel
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House Canada
Year published	2022-03-08
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.