When Tara Gereaux first saw the mock-up of the cover for her sophomore novel, Wild People Quiet, she got goosebumps. 

She opened the email to find a prairie scene with a big sky, intricately beaded in several shades of blue, clouds of white and grey beads at the edges. Gereaux recognized the beadwork immediately as the art of Katherine Boyer – a Métis artist who had given Gereaux her first beading lesson several years earlier.

“I was flabbergasted that it all seemed to come full circle in this magical moment,” Gereaux says. 

No one at Simon & Schuster Canada had known about the connection between the author and artist, but that full-circle moment is one of several Gereaux encountered in the process of writing Wild People Quiet – a deeply personal novel that has its roots in her own family’s history. 

Growing up, Gereaux knew her grandfather was Métis, but she was always told to tell people the family was French. Her grandfather never talked about being Métis, and he didn’t let his family talk about it, either. But Gereaux was always curious about this hidden, secret part of her heritage. 

“When I became an adult and I started to explore our family’s Métis background in history and reconnect to the culture myself, I became even more interested in that choice my grandfather made,” Gereaux says. “That was really the seed: I wanted to explore some of the factors that may have contributed to his decision, and I wanted to understand him a bit more.”

She first thought of pursuing this idea in her writing more than a decade ago, but as she was already working on a different writing project (she is the author of one previous novel, Saltus, and the YA novella Size of a Fist) she set it aside and let the idea percolate. 

In 2019, Gereaux started to set down the words that would become Wild People Quiet, which will be published by S&S imprint Scribner Canada on March 3. Set in a fictional small town in Saskatchewan in 1946, the novel introduces readers to Florence, a woman in her 40s who works as a secretary for an insurance agency in the fictional town of Torduvalle and has carefully built a life for herself where none of her neighbours or colleagues know that she is Métis. But when a group of Métis workers from out of town, who have been hired to work at a local farm for the season turn up, everything Florence has spent her adult life keeping secret becomes harder to ignore.

Florence’s choice to hide her heritage and pass as white is one that many Métis made, particularly in the years following the Red River Resistance when Métis were dispossessed of their traditional lands, and later as they were forced from the makeshift road allowance communities where they made new homes. 

Divided into sections based on the four parts of a plant that are incorporated in Métis beadwork (stem, bud, leaf, and fruit or flower), the novel explores Florence’s life in the present and in the past, as she grew up with her family in one of the many road allowance communities in Saskatchewan.

Aside from forming the foundations of the novel’s structure, beadwork features prominently in the story – it is something Florence learns from her aunt as a child and the first way she begins to reconnect with the culture she has chosen to hide for so many years. Gereaux had long wanted to write about beading to tell the story of Metis women, and she spent hours with Métis beaders, both to learn how to bead herself as well as to inform the beading scenes in the novel.

“When I was working on my masters thesis and learning about [Métis] history, you’re taught about the Louis Riels, the Cuthbert Grants, the Gabriel Dumonts – all of the male leaders,” she says. “But women played such a huge role in the passing down of culture, and beadwork is a huge part of that … it was used to pass down stories and teachings and cultural knowledge.”

Gereaux researched beading and Métis history throughout the years she spent working on the novel, and says it was often the “most exciting part” of the project, and encountered another full-circle moment when someone suggested she take on Métis author Wilfred Burton as an advisor. Burton did read drafts of the book and shared his knowledge of Métis and Michif culture, but that was not their first connection – years before, he had been Gereaux’s jigging teacher. 

Gereaux never spoke with her grandfather about why he decided to hide his heritage – he died in 2023 and had been diagnosed with dementia by the time she began to reconnect with her culture and work on this book. But by exploring the time period in which he would have been a young man making his own life decisions, Gereaux says she has gained a deeper understanding of what might have factored into his decision.

“I will never know exactly when and why my grandfather made that decision,” she says. “But I feel like I have a deeper understanding of the history that he was living in and through, and the factors that were at play in that time.”

Photo of Tara Gereaux by Chris Graham.