The silence. The quiet that fell over our family, over other Métis families.

Essay | Tara Gereaux | Issue 52

Wild People Quiet

Traditional Métis floral beadwork incorporates the four parts of a plant – stem, bud, leaf, and fruit or flower. Its full life cycle. Each element is connected to one another by a stem or tendril, and even if the design is asymmetrical, it’s balanced – one side a reflection of the other. A harmony, which some say speaks to the experience of the Métis who are often reconciling their two heritages.

Before the pandemic, I started to bead myself. I took a few lessons and have a few five-petalled flowers around the house, their leaves lopsided and vines jagged. Threads pulled too tight or left too slack. But I’m love with Indigenous beadwork. Not just with the vibrant colours and elaborate designs, but also for the care and patience that beadwork requires, for the deliberate commitment of both body and soul.

There’s a resurgence in beading now. Indigenous people are taking it up with intensity and passion, learning designs and creating their own. I understand this resurgence because beading can fill you up. With the history you weren’t taught as a child. With the ancestors you never knew you had.

∞

I’m in line to fly from Regina to Vancouver, my first flight since the pandemic started. My mother is beside me and we’re going to see my grandfather. My stomach’s a knot.

My grandpa was born in 1926 and turned 95 in July. I couldn’t make the trip until now in August, but he doesn’t know I’ve missed his birthday – his mind and memory have long been fading. So many things forgotten. I worry I will be one of them.

∞

A lot of my childhood was spent with my grandparents. I lived with them for several years and bonded closely with my grandfather. My favourite times with him were mornings. I’d get up and go downstairs where he’d already be on the couch with a coffee, and I’d plant myself in his lap. He built that four-storey, split-level. It had two bathrooms and an ensuite for my grandmother. There were two sundecks too, one off the master bedroom, again, for my grandmother. Building things, working with his hands, that was his language. He rarely spoke, and neither did I. Sometimes though, he’d ask me for a story and I’d make one up. He knew I liked stories. Mostly, we just sat in the quiet, waiting for the sun to fill the room.

∞

During the pandemic and in between my attempts at beading, I start to write a novel about beading. Or rather, about a woman who hides her Métis identity until she rediscovers her passion for beading. The main character’s name is Florence because it sounds like my grandfather’s, Clarence. Months after I select the name, I learn it stems from a Latin word that means flowering or blossoming.

The novel takes place in the mid-forties when my grandpa was a young man, when he was just starting out on his own, making big life decisions for himself. Like the decision to forget certain things on purpose. To cut certain threads.

∞

In the early days of Louis Riel’s uprising in 1869, a massive portion of prairie was sold to the Canadian government. Before the transfer had been finalized, Riel turned away a Canadian land survey team. He wanted to ensure that the residents of that land, especially the Métis, would be guaranteed their language, religious and land rights. In response, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald sent the lieutenant governor of the North-West Territories to negotiate terms with Riel and his Métis supporters. Macdonald said of the lieutenant governor: “I anticipate that [he] will have a good deal of trouble, and it will require considerable management to keep those wild people quiet.”

There was a good deal of trouble, and it lasted for fifteen years – failed negotiations, prison sentences, battles, deaths. It culminated in the hanging of Riel for what the Canadian authorities called treason, but it was really to muzzle the man who led the Red River Resistance. To muzzle all resistance.

This is where it began. The silence. The quiet that fell over our family, over other Métis families.

Growing up I was told to tell people I was French. This was partly true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Years later, an adult myself, and feeling tugged by own thread, by all the things unspoken, I sort through documentation from the past. I find a picture of my grandfather’s mother. Who made the decision not to say anything? Was it you, Grandpa, because you knew that with your lighter shade you could pass? Like Florence? Or was it your mother? Did she encourage you to stay silent to have an easier life?

Grandpa, did that silence turn to shame? I wish we could talk about it.

∞

The elevator rises to the fourth floor and a brief panic blooms; I hide it from my mother.

We step into a large dining room with several long tables in the middle and chairs and couches along the outer windowed walls. A massive television plays a daytime show, and the volume is up loud despite the room being mostly empty. We’ve missed the lunch rush, and the staff is cleaning tables, dirty dishes clatter from behind the kitchen doors. But there are a couple stragglers, and I slow my pace when I see him.

He’s at a table all by himself. Sweatpants, hooded zip-up sweatshirt, loose runners with their laces tied around his ankles so they don’t fall off. An elderly schoolboy.

I tuck in behind my mother, who approaches with confidence. “Dad,” she says. I hear the smile behind her mask. When he looks up, she unhooks her mask, so he sees her face in full. He beams, raises his arms. “It’s you,” he says, and pulls her into a hug. My mom cries.

He peppers her with questions. “When did you arrive?” “How long are you here?” He asks her three times if she drove. Three times she says we flew. Mom suggests we go to his room to visit and I step forward. He turns his head in my direction and I copy my mom, unloop a strap from my ear and peel back my mask. He watches me a moment as I stand there. “Oh,” he says, “how are you?” But there’s no recognition in his eyes. He’s only being polite because he can read my body language – he knows he should know who I am. My mother is already heading down the hall to his room, and I secure my K95 back in place.

∞

In February 2020 just before lockdown, I attended Ziigimineshin, the second annual beading symposium, held in Winnipeg that year. Over four days in freezing temperatures, I visited beading collections at art galleries, museums, universities. I watched other experienced beaders work on their projects and even started a new flower myself. What resonated with me most deeply was listening to other Indigenous women share what beading means to them. They talked about how beading is reconnection. How that line of thread is like blood in the veins, joining everything and carrying knowledge and memory. When we’re beading, when we string beads onto a thread, tack them down, connect a pistil to a petal to a leaf to a stem, that line is also connecting us to our grandmothers and their grandmothers. I hold my breath thinking of this.

But there’s something else that becomes evident during that symposium. Something I can’t hide from anymore. Despite all the practice for months, my beading has never gotten better. Each flower is just as sloppy as my first. I’ve been this way my whole life. I tried to take up cross stitch and embroidery in grade school when they became popular. Knitting when it was all the rage in university. But I’ve never been good with my hands. Not like my grandfather.

While my interest in those other crafts faded, it hasn’t with beading. Despite being unable to do it myself, I feel pulled towards it. To study it and learn about it. To learn from it. And to imagine the hands that made it. But can I still (re)connect when I can’t bead myself?

∞

When I was seven, my grandfather took a trip to the States, somewhere in Michigan, to attend a family reunion and meet relatives he’d never met before. When he returned and entered the front door, putting his bag on the floor, I rushed to him. I was happy he was back and wondered if there were any presents in that bag for me. But when I approached, he didn’t respond. He stared into nothing as he untied his laces. “Grandpa?”

Sensing something was wrong, my grandmother walked through the kitchen and stood in the doorway. “Clarence?” Again, no response. Grandpa removed his jacket, hung it in the closet. “How was the trip?” She tried again, a cigarette pinched between her fingers. My grandfather was silent for a long moment, lost in a deep quiet. One that I couldn’t reach. Then he finally spoke. “They’re all just a bunch of Indians,” he said. Then he turned and started up the stairs for the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

∞

While in Vancouver, Mom and I take a day as tourists. It’s the perfect west coast day – cold, damp, grey. Like everything is covered in felt. On Granville Island we find a store that sells authentically made Indigenous art and clothing. A rack of baseball caps captures my attention. Grandpa always has one on his head and when we visited him, he was wearing a stained and tattered Blue Jays cap. I find a black cap with a red and white whale on its front panel. Designed by a Coast Salish artist, its concentric crescents and curls are captivating. “That’s beautiful,” my mom says when I tell her I’m going to get it. She thinks I’m buying it for my partner. “No,” I say, “for Grandpa.”

“Don’t buy that for him,” she says. “That would make him furious. You know he hates that kind of stuff.”

I do know. I was never told, it was just common knowledge for my whole life, something intuited from my earliest days. I thought things might be different now – with certain memories fading maybe others could slip in. But something inside me frays and I replace the cap.

My own grandfather has forgotten me, but not his feelings about his Indigeneity.

∞

Months after my visit to the coast, I share a draft of my novel with friends for feedback. I continue to learn about beadwork and attend Radical Stitch, the third annual beading symposium, at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina this time. I tour the exhibit that’s part of the symposium and return again and again because I can’t get enough. I examine the size of the beads, their colours, the way the beader has placed them together to create movement, how the shades they’ve selected create emotion. I’m moved by each piece.

The whole time I’m there, I keep wishing I could bead something just as beautiful. Something that speaks to Indigenous history, to that long line of thread – that bloodline – that connects us. To our relations and the love there. To our own family. I wish I could bead something to place in my grandfather’s hands that would move him too. That would both remind him and release him.

∞

I always begin my writing time by scrawling in a journal first. Telling myself what I need to work on that day. I need to make the description of the road allowance clearer. I haven’t surfaced the complex emotions Florence feels when she encounters a family member from the past. I write about how I can incorporate something I’ve just learned about Métis lives in the 1940s. About the struggles and the joys too.

I look down at my notebook now. My handwriting messy and scrawling across the pages. The ink, like long looping strands of thread and I understand something.

Grandpa, I’m writing this for you. We don’t have to be quiet anymore.

Tara Gereaux is the author of Saltus, which was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Novel Award and three Saskatchewan Book Awards; and Size of a Fist, a teen novella, which was also shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Tara holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and has worked as a writer and story editor for film and television. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan and lives in Regina on Treaty 4 territory and the homeland of the Métis.

Wild People Quiet
by Tara Gereaux
Simon & Schuster, 2026

Publisher’s Description

A taut, exquisitely rendered story exploring the repercussions of a woman’s decision to hide her Métis identity while living in a small, predominantly white prairie town in the 1940s, for readers of The Berry Pickers, Tommy Orange, and The Vanishing Half.

Torduvalle, Saskatchewan, 1946.

Florence has created a beautiful life for herself. Her home is immaculate; she is a model employee at Pratt’s Insurance, where she works as a secretary. Her hair is the perfect shade of movie-star blonde—never once does she allow her brown roots to show. She dyes them every other Saturday night, without fail.

But one morning, everything changes.

Florence notices a new group of men at the local diner, Métis workers from out of town, hired on for the season at a nearby farm. And one of them has a connection to the past that Florence has spent her entire life outrunning. He has one simple request for her.

Suddenly, Florence is thrown back into memories of her life before. Suddenly, the line between who she once was and who she has chosen to be feels very thin.

And when Florence learns of the government’s plans for the Métis community on the fringes of town, she will be faced with a choice—one that will shatter her carefully constructed life forever.

This extraordinary novel asks us what we will do for our community, for our families, for our friends, even at our own expense. It examines the harrowing effects of choosing to live as someone else—and the radiant peace that comes from finally living one’s truth. Gripping, wrenching, and utterly immersive, Wild People Quiet is a stunning achievement by a remarkable literary talent.

Discover Send My Love to Anyone

About SMLTA

Ignore Me with Kathryn Mockler | The First Time with KIRBY

One of These Days We’ll Both Be Fine | Interviews | Book Publicity | Prompts | Poetry | Fiction, Nonfiction, Art, & Hybrid | Words Count | Archive | Contributors | Consulting

Connect

IG | Bluesky | Subscribe | Donate | Contact