Anahareo

18 June 1906 - 17 June 1986

Anahareo, born Gertrude Philomen Bernard, was an Algonquin and Mohawk writer, conservationist, and animal-rights activist born in Mattawa, Ontario. She is often publicly remembered as the wife of Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney), the trapper, writer, and conservationist who claimed Scots and Apache ancestry but was revealed after his death in 1938 to be an Englishman. Together they had one daughter, Shirley Dawn (b. 1932). Anahareo’s parents were Mary Nash Ockiping (Algonquin) and Matthew Bernard (Algonquin and Mohawk). Mary came from Pikwàkanagàn First Nation on Golden Lake in Ontario (Gleeson 5).

When Anahareo was very young, her mother died (1911), and she was raised by her paternal grandmother, Marie Catherine Papineau Bernard (Algonquin, b. Oka 1833). Known as “Big Grandma,” Catherine spoke to Anahareo in Mohawk (Kanien’kéha), taught her practical skills and crafts, and instilled in her a sense of pride in her Indigenous heritage. As a child, Catherine herself had been taken from her family and sent to a convent, where she was taught French and Catholicism, to which she later escaped as a teenager and returned to find relatives in Oka. She married John Bernard Nelson, a Mohawk man, and when his parents disapproved of the marriage, they moved from Oka to Belleville and then to Mattawa. Although Anahareo was not raised in her ancestral territories, she grew up with the teachings and stories her grandmother carried—a testament to Catherine’s strength and resilience.

A restless and adventurous child, Anahareo often skipped school to roam the woods and rivers around Mattawa, sometimes even paying classmates to complete and hand in her homework. By age eleven, her energy had become too much for her aging grandmother to manage, and her father arranged for her to live with an aunt deeply committed to the Catholic Church and the social conventions of mainstream society. Anahareo’s unrestrained love of freedom and the outdoors frequently clashed with these expectations. In her mid-to-late teens, she moved back in with her father, whose work frequently took him away from home and left her with far more independence than she had known with previous guardians.

In 1925, at nineteen, Anahareo took a job as a waitress at a resort on Lake Wabikon in Temagami, northern Ontario, where she met Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney). They formed an immediate connection, and soon she went to live with him in his trapping cabin. Her family did not approve, but this decision profoundly shaped the rest of her life and career. Grey Owl taught her trapping and much of what she came to know about survival in the bush. He also gave her the name Anahareo, inspired by her Mohawk great-grandfather Jean Baptiste Anenharison, a hereditary chief who died in 1856 (the name appears in various historical spellings, including Narisson). 

By this time, overtrapping had pushed beavers close to extinction. When Grey Owl trapped a mother beaver out of season, Anahareo insisted that he rescue the orphaned kits. This experience marked a turning point for both of them and led them to work for beaver conservation rather than trapping. Anahareo encouraged Grey Owl to write and to give public talks about conservation, helping to shape his public role. Ironically, the solitary work of writing eventually drove a wedge between them. Anahareo did not find the same companionship in the solitary writer that she had enjoyed in the hunter and trapper. In 1936, she left him and their cabin for the last time, although they parted on good terms. The life they had shared later compelled her to write two memoirs in his defence and in defence of his legacy.

Two years later, Grey Owl died, and his true English origins were revealed, creating an international scandal given his fame as a “Native” conservationist. The fame that his best-selling books and speaking tours in Britain, the US and Canada had brought him meant that the scandal was widely reported in the English-speaking press. Anahareo, shocked by the revelation, was encouraged to write about their life together, and in 1940, she published My Life with Grey Owl. The book was shaped in part by the expectations of Grey Owl’s publisher, Lovat Dickson, who wished to preserve Grey Owl’s readership. Anahareo later expressed dissatisfaction with the limited control she had over how their story was told, and this frustration would eventually lead her to rewrite the book.

Beyond her association with Grey Owl, Anahareo built a remarkable life of her own. As a young single Indigenous mother and later as a gold prospector travelling on her own, she navigated and resisted multiple layers of injustice, racism, and sexism. She had a second daughter, Anne (b. 1937), whom she placed for adoption. While working to support herself and her first child, she began her first book and, in 1939, married Count Eric Moltke, a Swedish man with whom she had a third daughter, Katherine (b. 1942).

After an intense twenty-year marriage, Anahareo and Moltke separated. In the 1960s, she became increasingly involved in conservation and animal-rights activism. Renewed interest in Grey Owl’s writings created an opportunity for her to revisit her earlier memoir. In 1972, with the help of her daughter, she published Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a reworking of her first book that offered a more candid and self-directed account of her life. The book became a bestseller and established Anahareo as an essential public voice not only on Grey Owl and his legacy but also on conservation and animal rights issues more broadly.

Over the course of her life, Anahareo received multiple honours, including membership in the Order of Nature of the International League for Animal Rights (1979) and appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada (1983). She died in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1986. Her ashes were interred with Grey Owl’s and their daughter Shirley Dawn’s near Beaver Lodge on Ajawaan Lake in Prince Albert National Park.

Selected Bibliography

Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard). Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl. 1972. Ed. Sophie McCall. U of Manitoba P, 2014. 

Gleeson, Kristin. Anahareo: A Wilderness Spirit. Fireship Press, 2012.

Gleeson, Kristin. “Blazing her Own Trail: Anahareo’s Rejection of Euro-Canadian Stereotypes.” Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands. Ed. Sarah Carter and Patricia McCormack. AU Press, 2011, pp. 287-311.

Grey Owl. Pilgrims of the Wild. 1935. Scribner’s, 1971.

Mackey. Doug. “Mattawa Woman Grey Owl’s Inspiration.” 16 June 2000. Past Forward Heritage. Says Big Grandma died age 108 (not true, she was mid-nineties); interviewed Anahareo’s sister, Johanna.  http://www.pastforward.ca/perspectives/june162000.htm, accessed
4 September 2016.

McCall, Sophie. Rev. of Anahareo: Wilderness Spirit, by Kristin Gleeson. LRC: Literary Review of Canada www.reviewcanada.ca, accessed 4 Sept. 2018.

Smith, Donald B. From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl. Douglas & McIntyre, 1991.

Works Cited

Anahareo: A Portrait of A Famous Canadian Woman, Brasov Professional
Group, www.anahareo.ca, Accessed 23 February 2018, http://www.anahareo.ca/anahareo/her-people/historical-
documents/death-burial-records.html.

Provides scans for great-grandfather Francois Kaondinaketch Papineau, Grand Chief of the Nipissing, d. 1854; great grandfather Jean Baptiste Anenharison, Chief of the Iroquois, d. 1856; uncle Ignace Bernard Narisson, d. 1897; older sister Mary Louise Bernard, d. 1902, in infancy; mother Mary Nash Ockiping, d. 16 Nov. 1911; aunt Mary Ann, d. 1915; maternal grandmother, Catherine Angelique Ockiping (Benoit), d. 1922; paternal grandmother, Catherine Papineau (Pimatanokse) d. 1923 (age 94)—her father named Francis Papineau of Oka, mother named Robinson; niece Nathalie Murphy, d. 1925 (age 5); aunt Elizabeth Bernard (Decaire), d. 1931.

Anahareo. Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl. 1972.

Gleeson, Kristin. “Anahareo’s ‘Devil in Deerskins’”  2 April
2014 www.kristingleeson.com/blog/category/sophie-mccall. Accessed 23
February 2018.
Glenbow Archives. Anahareo Family Fonds. 1.27 m. of textual records; 600 photographs, relating to Anahareo’s life; Compiled by Dawn Richardson and Katherine Swartile. Donated, 2012.

Ludolph, Rebekah. “Humour, Intersubjectivity, and Indigenous Female Intellectual Tradition in Anahareo’s Devil in Deerskins” originally appeared in Literary History. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 233 (Summer 2017): 109-126.

Donald B. Smith fonds. Ontario Archives.  Contains photographs of Anahareo.

Additional Resources:

For a critique of modern hunting policies with an emphasis on conservation, see:

Heister, Anja. “The existing critique of the North American model of wildlife
conservation.” The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, 2022, pp. 77–102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14149-2_4.
Even in The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, the most recent 2019 book promoting the NAM, the authors found no place to mention or quote female conservation activists other than Rachel Carson. While the reader of this publication learns about a trapper named Grey Owl, the existence and life of his wife is entirely omitted. Notably, his wife Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard), a free-spirited Canadian (1906–1986) Footnote34  was already a naturalist and animal rights advocate who turned her husband from a trapper into an animal-respecting conservationist. Anahareo campaigned for the banning of leghold
traps and poison, and in her later years, was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Animal Rights activists. Heister 88

For an examination of the Canadian government’s “Heritage Minutes”, in which Indigenous peoples and their circumstances are at many instances misrepresented, see:

Christopher Gunter & Robin Nelson. “Producing the Past: The Changing
Protagonists of Canadian Heritage.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 52, no. 6, 2022, pp. 369-386, DOI: 10.1080/10632921.2022.2093807
Although it may not seem apparent, Grey Owl’s wife was visually present, with no lines, during a transportation scene from the airport to the First Nations’ gathering. Her presence amounts to nothing more than five seconds of screentime to show caring support for Grey Owl during his essential mission. What makes this portrayal grievous is how much impact his wife had on Indigenous Peoples. Grey Owl’s wife, Anahareo, was a writer, animal activist, and conservationist of Mohawk and Algonquin ancestry who was even elected a Member of the Order of Canada in 1983. Many historical accounts, including her own published account of her life and relationship with Belaney, underscore that her influence encouraged Grey Owl to change his way of life by converting hime to being more conservationist (James-Abra and Smith 2019).

Despite attempts by her husband and his publisher to portray her as “a
sweet gentle Indian maiden” (Anahareo 2014, 203), she was an independent woman who worked as a prospector to support her husband. With this in mind, it is curious that Grey Owl was chosen as the central figure, even when it was commonly known he was not Indigenous and that his wife had a more significant societal impact.

Anahareo entry by Alison Wick, September 2018. Updated April 2019. Ali is an alumnus of Simon Fraser University, with an undergraduate degree in Indigenous Studies.

Additional Resources collected by Eli Davidovici in April 2024. Eli is an alumnus of McGill University, graduating with an M.Mus. in Jazz Performance in Summer 2024.

Entry edits by Margery Fee, April 2024. Margery Fee is Professor Emerita at UBC in the Department of English.

Updated by Kayla MacInnis in November 2025. Kayla is an MA student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant with The People and the Text.

Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca with any comments or corrections.