“It is the time of year when animals burrow and hide, the spruce trees are heavy with snow, and the naked poplars reach their spindly arms into the brutal, northern sky.”
This is how Diana Davidson describes the December of 1891 at the beginning of her novel Pilgrimage. The story starts inside the Cardinal home in the Métis settlement of Lac St. Anne, and ends inside that same home more than one year later, in March 1893. The pages in between follow the intertwined lives of four protagonists. Mahkesîs Cardinal is a young Métis girl impregnated by the Hudson’s Bay Company manager. Georgina Barrett, the manager’s Anglo-Irish wife, who wishes she was far away from Lac St. Anne, longs for a child. Irish-Catholic Moira Murphy keeps house for the Barretts, a position negotiated by Moira’s midwife mother in return for keeping Georgina’s secret, a position she hoped would give her daughter a chance for a better life in a new land. Gabriel, Mahkesîs’s handsome brother who traps with his father in the winter and works on the Athabasca River in the summer, falls in love with Moira.
Lac St. Anne is a real place, not a fictional setting. The lake known as Manito Sakahigan or “Spirit Lake” in Cree is located seventy-five kilometers west of Edmonton, Alberta, and was renamed Lac St. Anne by the first Catholic priest to establish a mission in 1844. A shrine to Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus and patron saint of childbirth, was erected in the late 1880s. The Cree and Nakoda have long believed the lake has healing powers. The first pilgrimage occurred on St. Anne’s Feast Day in July 1899. People seeking healing and spiritual renewal continue to make the annual Catholic pilgrimage today.
The story in Pilgrimage takes place six years after the Métis rebellion and the hanging of Louis Riel. The Europeans, French, English, Cree, and Métis peoples at Lac St. Anne are still affected by these events. Racial tensions mark their interactions. Georgina warns Moira about getting involved with Gabriel, saying, “Just because that boy is not full-blooded Indian does not mean he is not savage.”
The author describes the beauty and harshness of Lac St. Anne’s landscape and its traditions in tangible, eloquent ways. Men “shake off the cold at the door.” At a dance in the “pent-up solitude of winter,” “water from the inside of glass windows drips from the sills as the wooden building starts to warm.” Northern images are used throughout the book. When Mahkesîs’s aunty kneads bannock, her hands “dive into the bowl like a northern pelican catching trout in its gullet.”
Against the backdrop of the northern landscape, amid a clash of cultures, Diana Davidson tells a story about the lives of women. The book is about the difficulties women faced in the north at that time, the choices they made, the choices made for them, and their ability to survive. In the Author’s Note at the back of the book, Davidson says, “the book is about the lives of women and how pregnancy and motherhood shape, sustain, and betray.” She also says that she “wanted to show the beauty of motherhood, so setting the story at a lake named for the patron saint of childbirth seemed fitting.”
The story contains scenes of rape, childbirth, miscarriage, seduction, everyday chores, and community gatherings. Yet, the real action takes place inside the heads of the characters. The story is written from multiple perspectives in third person, pulling the reader into the thoughts and feelings of several characters. The transitions from one person’s thoughts to another’s flow naturally, avoiding the confusion and story disruption that can sometimes occur with the use of this technique. The use of present tense pulls us in closer. We know the characters’ fears and dreams. We learn about their pasts through their memories. We know their secrets.
Those secrets and the things left unsaid create a sense of a life beneath the surface. The design of the book cover reflects that sense as well as speaking to the northern setting. The bottom two-thirds of the cover is stark white, like snow, interrupted only by the title of the book. On a grey background, through a haze of snow, the top third contains evergreens and a teepee made out of sticks.
Pilgrimage is a debut novel by Edmonton writer Diana Davidson. Davidson has a Ph.D. in literature and has taught at the University of Alberta and the University of York, UK. Her writing was long-listed for the Canada Writes CBC creative nonfiction prize in 2012. She won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Prize in 2010. In both her fiction and non-fiction, she writes mostly about women in the north.
The women in Pilgrimage live a hard life. They have little power and few choices. Yet, they find ways to survive. They care for each other and dare to dream and love. Their inner strength and resilience is what gives this tragic story hope.
Pilgrimage is a well-written, compelling story, whose characters will haunt you after you’ve turned the last page and set the book down.
Brindle & Glass | 288 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927366172
‘Pilgrimage’ by Diana Davidson
Book Reviews
“It is the time of year when animals burrow and hide, the spruce trees are heavy with snow, and the naked poplars reach their spindly arms into the brutal, northern sky.”
This is how Diana Davidson describes the December of 1891 at the beginning of her novel Pilgrimage. The story starts inside the Cardinal home in the Métis settlement of Lac St. Anne, and ends inside that same home more than one year later, in March 1893. The pages in between follow the intertwined lives of four protagonists. Mahkesîs Cardinal is a young Métis girl impregnated by the Hudson’s Bay Company manager. Georgina Barrett, the manager’s Anglo-Irish wife, who wishes she was far away from Lac St. Anne, longs for a child. Irish-Catholic Moira Murphy keeps house for the Barretts, a position negotiated by Moira’s midwife mother in return for keeping Georgina’s secret, a position she hoped would give her daughter a chance for a better life in a new land. Gabriel, Mahkesîs’s handsome brother who traps with his father in the winter and works on the Athabasca River in the summer, falls in love with Moira.
Lac St. Anne is a real place, not a fictional setting. The lake known as Manito Sakahigan or “Spirit Lake” in Cree is located seventy-five kilometers west of Edmonton, Alberta, and was renamed Lac St. Anne by the first Catholic priest to establish a mission in 1844. A shrine to Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus and patron saint of childbirth, was erected in the late 1880s. The Cree and Nakoda have long believed the lake has healing powers. The first pilgrimage occurred on St. Anne’s Feast Day in July 1899. People seeking healing and spiritual renewal continue to make the annual Catholic pilgrimage today.
The story in Pilgrimage takes place six years after the Métis rebellion and the hanging of Louis Riel. The Europeans, French, English, Cree, and Métis peoples at Lac St. Anne are still affected by these events. Racial tensions mark their interactions. Georgina warns Moira about getting involved with Gabriel, saying, “Just because that boy is not full-blooded Indian does not mean he is not savage.”
The author describes the beauty and harshness of Lac St. Anne’s landscape and its traditions in tangible, eloquent ways. Men “shake off the cold at the door.” At a dance in the “pent-up solitude of winter,” “water from the inside of glass windows drips from the sills as the wooden building starts to warm.” Northern images are used throughout the book. When Mahkesîs’s aunty kneads bannock, her hands “dive into the bowl like a northern pelican catching trout in its gullet.”
Against the backdrop of the northern landscape, amid a clash of cultures, Diana Davidson tells a story about the lives of women. The book is about the difficulties women faced in the north at that time, the choices they made, the choices made for them, and their ability to survive. In the Author’s Note at the back of the book, Davidson says, “the book is about the lives of women and how pregnancy and motherhood shape, sustain, and betray.” She also says that she “wanted to show the beauty of motherhood, so setting the story at a lake named for the patron saint of childbirth seemed fitting.”
The story contains scenes of rape, childbirth, miscarriage, seduction, everyday chores, and community gatherings. Yet, the real action takes place inside the heads of the characters. The story is written from multiple perspectives in third person, pulling the reader into the thoughts and feelings of several characters. The transitions from one person’s thoughts to another’s flow naturally, avoiding the confusion and story disruption that can sometimes occur with the use of this technique. The use of present tense pulls us in closer. We know the characters’ fears and dreams. We learn about their pasts through their memories. We know their secrets.
Those secrets and the things left unsaid create a sense of a life beneath the surface. The design of the book cover reflects that sense as well as speaking to the northern setting. The bottom two-thirds of the cover is stark white, like snow, interrupted only by the title of the book. On a grey background, through a haze of snow, the top third contains evergreens and a teepee made out of sticks.
Pilgrimage is a debut novel by Edmonton writer Diana Davidson. Davidson has a Ph.D. in literature and has taught at the University of Alberta and the University of York, UK. Her writing was long-listed for the Canada Writes CBC creative nonfiction prize in 2012. She won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Prize in 2010. In both her fiction and non-fiction, she writes mostly about women in the north.
The women in Pilgrimage live a hard life. They have little power and few choices. Yet, they find ways to survive. They care for each other and dare to dream and love. Their inner strength and resilience is what gives this tragic story hope.
Pilgrimage is a well-written, compelling story, whose characters will haunt you after you’ve turned the last page and set the book down.
Brindle & Glass | 288 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927366172