The Mended Memory

Author's note

The Mended Memory is a work of fiction set in a semi-historical world inspired by the upper Great Lakes country around 1819–1822, in the long wake of the War of 1812.

Cedar Narrows, Half-Frozen Crossing, the valley of many fires, and every family, band, and person in this story are invented. They are not portraits of any real First Nation, living or historical, and should not be read as such.

The world of the story draws, with gratitude and caution, on documented elements of Anishinaabe history and culture: the seasonal rhythms of ricing, sugaring, winter trapping, canoe-and-portage travel, hospitality, diplomacy, and the doodem system, in which the Crane clan traditionally provided leaders and speakers.

Within that frame, the novel takes fictional liberties. The wedding rite, the household cord, and the grandmothers' band are fictional creations for this story. They are not intended as records of real Anishinaabe ceremony. Real ceremony belongs to the people whose it is. This novel tries to write near sacred things with respect, not inside them.
Other historical liberties appear throughout the story. Horses carry more of this romance than they likely would have carried in that country, where canoes, snowshoes, and dog-sledges did much of the true work of travel. The colonial administration, legal disputes, treaty rooms, and officials are simplified and compressed for fiction.
The sickness that crosses the ice late in the book is only a shadow of a far heavier historical truth. Epidemics devastated Indigenous nations on a scale no romance novel can hold, and no happy ending should be mistaken for that history.

Astrée's hidden heritage is Kanien'kehá:ka — Mohawk, one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Her silverwork, remembered medicine ways, and fragments of language come through the memory of her grandmother. Indigenous ancestry concealed within French colonial families was real, as were old rivalries, marriages, adoptions, friendships, and crossings between peoples that official histories too often flatten.

Anishinaabemowin and Kanien'kéha words appear sparingly in these pages. Any errors remain the responsibility of the text. This story could need to be read by Anishinaabe and Kanien'kehá:ka sensitivity readers, whose corrections would matter deeply and whose generosity should never be presumed.

What is not invented is the heart of the story:- that a person can be made a line in someone else's ledger;- that love, when patient and honorable, can give a name back its dignity;- and that sometimes the strongest place in the cloth is the place that was mended with care.

Thank you for reading The Mended Memory.