Bio – About Nikki Rajala

During the pandemic, I researched for my third novel about the fur trade era, Uncharted Waters, by taking Zoom classes — among them on weaving voyageur sashes and on the history of the Great Lakes, by studying websites, like Michilimackinac and British forts of the 1800s, and on medicine that Lewis and Clark used, with a smattering of current wilderness medical techniques. I hiked (part of) the famous Grand Portage trail, visited several new-to-me sites and now I’m looking forward to attending a rendezvous again.

Waters Like the Sky is the first in the series of the Chronicles of an Unlikely Voyageur, co-authored with Mom. But she died before it was published, so for the next stories I was on my own.

To create Book 2: Treacherous Waters, I learned whether voyageur paddles were red (mostly not) and how trades were conducted (autumn trading differed from spring trading), tasted wild edible plants, got a ride on a dogsled, identified constellations from an Ojibwe perspective and watched a beaver being skinned. Each discovery sparked my curiosity, and weaving it into my story was a puzzle I particularly enjoyed.

All three voyageur novels pay homage to my being a direct descendant of French-Canadian voyageurs, fur traders and explorers.

Some Like It Hot: The Sauna, Its Lore and Stories (North Star Press, 2000) is a reflection of my Finnish heritage and love of the family sauna.

Waters Like the Sky is Agnes Peloquin Rajala’s fourth published book. She wrote A Tale for Saint Urho’s Tay and Of Finnish Ways under the name Aini Rajanen and Sweden: A Good Life for All as Kari Olsson. (All three books were published by Dillon Press of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and are out of print.) Among her many interests, Agnes enjoyed writing — her Christmas letters were filled with clever puns. From her life and genealogy research, she wrote 11 family histories, the most recent about her career as a teacher in rural one-room schools, as well as four cookbooks. She died October 14, 2013.