Janet Love Morrison’s father, Ewen Morrison, didn’t talk much about his experience fighting in the Second World War.
In fact, she can only recall one story from her childhood—and it stuck in her mind for decades.
It was about an Indigenous soldier from an Ontario reserve named Reggie who “taught my dad a lot of skills about being behind the lines: how to run quietly and watch for omens,” Love Morrison says. “That helped keep my dad alive.”
One night, according to the story, Reggie had a vision. He was going to die that night, but Ewen would survive the war.
“When you get back to Canada, please go visit my mother on the reserve,” he told him. “Reggie did die that night and my dad did make it,” Love Morrison says.
Ewen—originally from Saskatchewan—dutifully made that trip to see Reggie’s mother. She had had a vision he was coming and asked which of her sons he had been with. She ultimately lost two.
Love Morrison—with help from her father’s war diaries, regiment records, several historians, and other experts—decided to expand this story into a novel, called The Hawk and the Hare, in part to celebrate this friendship, but also to acknowledge and remember all of Canada’s Indigenous soldiers who fought in the war. (There were an estimated 4,000 Indigenous, Inuit, and Metis soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces, though those numbers were likely much higher than what’s on record.)
While Love Morrison—who called Whistler home for 15 years and contributed to both Pique and The Whistler Question—has written a fiction book, The Crazy Canucks: Canada’s Legendary Ski Team, and a children’s book, Radar the Rescue Dog, based on a real-life avalanche rescue dog, she decided to take a novel approach for this project.
“The reason why we had to go with a novel was I had to create the dialogue,” she says. “We couldn’t find the real Reggie … I wasn’t even 100 per cent sure he was from the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve [where the book’s character is from].”
But still, she put in an impressive amount of legwork to keep the book as accurate as possible, and travelled overseas for research.
“I spent five years researching and travelling to Europe,” she adds. “I followed exactly where my dad’s regiment fought—Juno Beach to Northern Germany. Every place I went, I met local historians and people that would kindly give me a lead to the next step.”
Perhaps most memorably, she found herself in a town called Groesbeek, in the Netherlands, home to the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery.
“I wanted to spend Christmas 2018 where the regiment spent Christmas 1944 … and one of my friends there, he can read military maps. He said, ‘You won’t believe it, but where you’re staying is exactly where the regiment spent Christmas’—literally in the woods where I was,” she says.
That’s when she decided to spearhead a plaque at the Groesbeek cemetery to acknowledge both the contributions of Indigenous soldiers and celebrate the friendships like those depicted in her book. The unveiling took place in February, with several dignitaries in attendance.
“It was just lovely,” Love Morrison says.
The writing process wasn’t without its hardships though. The further she delved into the logistics and day-to-day lives of the soldiers, the more she was able to imagine their suffering.
“It was tough sometimes,” she says. “You’re standing there thinking about those poor guys. There were times I would get overwhelmed and the research was just so dark. I thought, ‘No, if I start to get affected by this, then I’m making it about me. It’s about remembering and celebrating them.’”
Janet Love Morrison will be signing copies of The Hawk and the Hare at Armchair Books on Sunday, April 9 from 2 to 4 p.m.
The book is also available on Amazon.
