by Nikki Rajala | Aug 1, 2024 | Featured, Voyageur
“Je suis un homme du nord.” Not just any paddler could make that boast of being “a man of the north,” or full-fledged voyageur. He had to be baptized by a veteran canoeman. In “The Voyageur’s Highway,” Grace Lee Nute says that after the annual rendezvous, large...
by Nikki Rajala | Mar 3, 2024 | Featured
Readers have asked for maps of Andre’s travels. To make it easier to locate him, I included a map in Book 3. And because I love maps and perused them extensively while writing “Uncharted Waters,” I’m sharing my favorite sections of those maps, with...
by Nikki Rajala | Jan 19, 2021 | Featured
Did you like reading the story of the Flying Canoe? Here’s the backstory: In print, the tale of the Flying Canoe, La Chasse Galerie dates back to 1891 but it was an old tale then and told across Canada.Some sources date it to Europe, and other versions have...
by Nikki Rajala | Jan 12, 2021 | Featured
What’s better on a cold night than to get cozy and hear an old story?. Here is a popular French-Canadian story — the tale of the Flying Canoe. (also known as La Chasse Galerie, The Bewitched Canoe and The Wild Hunt.) It’s New Year’s Eve at a far-flung...
by Nikki Rajala | Nov 18, 2020 | Featured
At school programs, girls usually ask, “What about girls in the fur trade—were they ever ‘voyageurs’?” Oui, mademoiselle — but not as paddlers. Nearly all women in the fur trade were Aboriginal, invaluable allies who scraped beaver pelts, dried fish and...
by Nikki Rajala | Jun 10, 2020 | Featured
Did you read biographies as a kid? Bigfork’s tiny public library had one shelf of biographies for youth, jacketed in red and yellow, illustrated with black and white drawings. After finishing the life stories of all the women (maybe 7 total), I kept on, reading...
