A new adventure for Bernice takes young readers through difficult history

It hadn’t been Jessica Outram’s intention to take Bernice (Normandin) Lamondin on another adventure, but when an entry in a local history book “kept coming back to me and coming back to me,” Outram had no other choice but to write Bernice and the Wild Waters.

Bernice and her family were introduced to readers in Bernice and the Georgian Bay Gold (2023). In that book, Bernice’s mother Cecilia takes Mémèr (grandmother) to Toronto because Mémèr swallowed a sewing needle. 

The item in the history book that grabbed Outram’s attention revealed that Mrs. Lamondin swallowed a pin while sewing. Outram believes that would have been her great-great grandmother. Outram imagined what their time at the Toronto General Hospital would have been like and the fictional story emerged that Cecilia meets a woman from Wiikwemkoong First Nation looking for her children who she believes have been taken to boarding school.

“(The story idea) just came in too late in book one to introduce such a large theme,” said Outram, who is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario with roots in the Georgian Bay Métis community. “Some time passed now and I sat with that story…then the title Bernice and the Wild Waters appeared to me one day and I could see Bernice paddling up the river toward the rapids looking for her cousins.”

In The Wild Waters, Cecilia tells her children about the encounter with the Wiikwemkoong mother and then sternly directs them that they will be permanently changing their surname from Métis Normandin to French Lamondin in order to avoid them being taken to Indian residential school.

“Why can’t I just be who I am? Why do we need to hide?” wonders eight-year-old Bernice.

Underscoring Cecilia’s fears are the disappearance of her two nieces. Nobody knows if the girls have run away or if they were taken to the nearby Spanish Indian Residential School. There are rumours in town that an Indian agent has shown up and has been asking questions and checking off names in his notebook.

Bernice and her brothers can’t understand why no one is searching for the girls. After all, the Normandin family’s lives centre around manning the Gereaux Island light house on Georgian Bay and, when a boat is in trouble, help is immediately sent. So, the four siblings go on a rescue adventure.

“As the story unfolded through the writing process, it became important to me to show how capable children are of working through big feelings, acting from their values, and using what they've learned,” said Outram.

Residential schools, Indian agents, changing names, and hiding their Métis culture are among the heavy topics tackled in The Wild Waters. The book is geared toward children nine to 12 years of age.

Outram, who has been an educator for more than 25 years and specializes in Indigenous education, says when tackling such a serious topic as residential schools, the words of Dr. Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, come to mind. Blackstock said that if children were young enough to experience Indian residential schools, children that same age can learn about Indian residential schools. 

“I know from my work in education, children are learning about these things as early as Grade 1. And what are those ways to enter in? And I tried to write it in a way that the story would open up questions for kids to want to learn more and to better understand things,” she said. 

Outram, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Cobourg, Ont., brings her expressive poetic style to her story, evident in such lines as, “Sadness feels like a lonely moose in winter, wandering ice covered rivers, bays, and islands looking for signs of life.”

“Children can picture that image, and they can see it and it will sit with them in a particular way…and that might be the truth of that moment and the best way to capture it,” she explained. “I know from working in the school system that children will meet you there and children also like to reread things sometimes and, if you can speak in metaphor, that children do find their way through.”

Both books are inspired by Outram’s great aunt Bernice, although the timeline has been adjusted to 1914 (seven years before Bernice was born) because Outram wanted to bring artist Tom Thomson’s visit to and his painting of the Gereaux Island lighthouse into the story as a way to show “that connection of the world coming to them.”

“I also found it to be a rich time with it being right before the start of World War I and before big changes are coming. I thought historically that was also a very interesting time period to explore,” said Outram.

At the end of Bernice and the Wild Waters, Outram includes the facts on and further reading about the shipwrecks referred to in the book, information on the Georgian Bay area, the Gereaux Island Lighthouse and the Lamondin family.

Outram’s family lived at the lighthouse from the late 1860s with two generations of keepers remaining there until 1946.

Outram is not planning any more Bernice books. However, she’s sticking with the females in the Lamondin family for her next work, which will focus on Mémèr as a child around 1851. The setting will be just after the signing of the Robinson Huron Treaty, the forming of municipalities, and the “massive presence” of the church.

“It could be interesting to see over time, what is the story of the women of this family told through generations, but through the eyes of children,” she said.

“I have found in my research over the last couple of decades, it was really hard to find anything about women in the stories. It's getting easier now, thankfully. But it was really, really hard. So I thought, ‘Well, if I'm going to put my energy into this and this work, I really want it to be in a way that's telling (the women’s) story, even through the fiction, what that might look like’,” said Outram.

Bernice and the Wild Waters is published by Second Story Press. It will be released Sept. 22 and is available at https://secondstorypress.ca/products/bernice-and-the-wild-waters?srsltid=AfmBOooJKLMLl9d08cT7ETsgiCOfh0Mil-Fej-koiOVDW_WnRCZWMEzo