katherena vermette is a Red River Métis (Michif) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. vermette received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for her first book, North End Love Songs. Her first novel, The Break, won several awards including the Amazon First Novel Award, and was a bestseller in Canada. Her second novel, The Strangers, won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, named Indigo’s 2021 Book of the Year, and was a #1 national bestseller. Her work in children’s literature includes the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo. vermette lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Lyn and her sister, June, are NDNs—real ones.
Lyn is still suffering after a break-up, but has her pottery artwork and her bubbly kid, Willow, to keep her mind, heart, and hands busy. Happily married June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her husband, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she’d imagine she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg. Close to Lyn, her dad, little sister Yoyo, Grandma Genie—close to family.
But then into Lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had recently begun to top the charts in the Canadian painting scene for having a wholly new take on the Woodlands tradition, winning awards and recognition for her fraudulent work.
The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
With the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers, and The Circle, and in prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones offers us a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story that runs parallel with the long-fought, hard-won battles of Métis people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.
