Anahareo - Her Ancestry

In 1810 or thereabouts, Naharrenou, hereditary chief of the Mohawks, led a group of about 300 men, women and children into the wilderness from the Lake of Two Mountains, southwest of Montreal, in order to build up a resistance force against white settlers encroaching upon Indian lands. Naharrenhou was Anahareo's great-great-grandfather and Grey Owl later chose the name Anahareo from the sound of Naharrenhou. Anahareo herself did not know what the name Naharrenhou meant or how it was actually spelt.

The Mohawks led a "hit-and-run" guerilla war against white settlements until Naharrenhou received a gunshot wound in one of those raids. The leadership of the group then fell to his son Kanistonou, Anahareo's great-grandfather.

The Mohawks had a strict rule against taking prisoners for fear of a prisoner escaping and revealing their hide-out. Nonetheless, on one of the raids, a young Scottish settler woman by the name of Mary Robinson fled her village during the attack and eventually fell from exhaustion deep in the bush. This is where Kanistonou found her. Unable to kill her as required by the rules of the war, he had her taken back to the Mohawk camp and with considerable difficulty, he managed to get the council to tolerate her presence among the Indians. Mary Robinson quickly learned the ways of the Mohawks and after a few years, when Kanistonou expressed his desire to marry her, no one objected. Their first child, Anahareo's grandmother, was born approximately in 1812 out of this union.

Eventually, the guerillas became more and more daring and finally the tide turned against them. Soldiers found them, went in and killed most of them, including Mary Robinson, Kanistonou and a new-born son. Her grandmother, just a babe-in-arms, was taken to Montreal and given to nuns in a convent for raising.

Eventually, as a young woman, her grandmother fled the convent and joined relatives at Oka. She married Anahareo's grandfather there and the couple made their way west to an area just north of today's Belleville, Ontario. They farmed there and raised 11 children. After 25 years, owing to the fact that Indians could not own land in those days, they were forced off their land and had to move again. They marched in a north-westerly direction towards the Ottawa River and started a new life in the Mattawa area. This is where her grandmother died in 1920 at the age of 108.