AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sometime in the 1970s, my parents received a call from an agency inquiring whether they would be interested in adopting a baby of Indigenous descent. A few hours later I became part of an extended family, and I spent the rest of my childhood on a working farm. I was welcomed by my dear parents, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and by the entirety of the Mennonite church we attended.

One of my earliest memories is of riding a horse with my father, a passion we would share for a lifetime. My mother made sure I had stacks of books by visiting the library every time she drove to town for supplies. I often read under a willow tree, with farm dogs panting contentedly beside me in the summer heat: endless books about horses, about gray wolves trotting across frozen landscapes, about sisters growing up in restrictive societies, about mysteries at sea, about dolphins and islands and about determined Indigenous women who made their own way.

My adoptive family never made a secret of how I’d joined them and they also ensured I was aware of my Indigenous heritage; it was beautiful to grow up with this openness. Later, as an adult, when I sought to learn more about my birth family, I realized there were some aspects of my history that might remain unknown to me.

While Mask of the Deer Woman is purely fictional, writing it allowed me to explore the what-ifs of my personal history. What if my birth family had a clearly established connection with an Indigenous community? How would this community receive me as an outsider, a stranger? Questions such as these prompted me to become an engaged listener, taking in the lived experiences of people who were born into and raised in Indigenous communities. My understanding continues to evolve as I respectfully learn more about a collective heritage haunted by a traumatic past.

Writing Mask of the Deer Woman was a cathartic process in which I also grappled with my fears as a woman whose confident daughters were launching their own lives into the Big, Wide World. What I have written in this book is in no way a reflection of them—or their decisions or experiences—either past or present. One of my daughters allowed me to borrow her name for a fictional character. Her generosity let me breathe life and love into a character who became the vessel for all the worst-case scenarios that existed only in my worried maternal mind.

Ultimately, this novel—and those novels to come—is a love letter to myself, to my daughters, to every woman. We are all children of the same mother in the end.