Anahareo

Gertrude Bernard (June 18, 1906 – June 17, 1986), commonly known as Anahareo, was a writer, animal rights activist and conservationist of Algonquin and Mohawk ancestry.

Gertrude Bernard was born in Mattawa, Ontario, on June 18, 1906.

Her mother, Mary Nash Ockiping, was Algonquin.

Her father, Matthew Bernard, was Algonquin and Mohawk.

She grew up a strongly independent girl and young woman, and was described as something of a tomboy.

Her father nicknamed her "Pony".

When Bernard was 19, she met Archibald Belaney at Camp Wabikon in Temagami, Canada, where she was working as a waitress and he as a guide.

Almost twice her age at 36, Belaney, who would come to be known as Grey Owl, claimed to be the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman and to have been born in Mexico.

As they got to know one another, she insisted on accompanying him to his traplines.

She did not approve of the way he was living, and encouraged him to stop his trapping activities and become an animal rights activist.

They had one daughter, Dawn, born in 1932.

In Pilgrims of the Wild (1934), Belaney recounts how Anahareo, by saving the lives of two beaver kits and raising them, led him to change his way of life and to work for the protection of wildlife.

They considered themselves married, albeit informally, despite the fact he was still legally married to his first wife Angele Egwuna.

The couple split up in 1936.

In June, 1937, Anahareo gave birth to a second daughter, Ann.

The father's name did not appear on the birth certificate and she never publicly stated who the father was.

Belaney died in 1938, a best-selling author.

Shortly after his death, it was publicly revealed that he was not part-Apache as he had claimed, but an Englishman named Archibald Stansfeld Belaney.

In 1939, she married a Swedish nobleman, Count Eric Axel Moltke-Huitfeldt, who had immigrated to Canada.

They had one daughter, Katharine.

In 1940 Bernard, using the name Anahareo that Belaney had given her, wrote a book called My Life With Grey Owl with the encouragement of Belaney's publisher, Lovat Dickson.

She was dissatisfied with it, in part because her lack of control over the final publication; it stereotyped her, as she put it, as "a sweet gentle Indian maiden."

Her husband died in 1963.

Over the 50 years following her separation from Belaney, Anahareo, as she is now better known, continued to be active in the conservation and animal rights movement.

In 1972, she wrote the best-seller, Devil in Deerskins: My Life With Grey Owl, in which she denied having known Belaney's true origins.

She said she had been hurt to discover his deception.

In 1979 she was admitted into the Order of Nature of the Paris-based International League of Animal Rights.

She was elected a Member of the Order of Canada in 1983.

On June 17, 1986, just a day before her 80th birthday, Anahareo died in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.