The Story Behind Grandmother: Why a Bison?

When I began writing the story that eventually became Grandmother, I knew one thing for certain.

There would be bison.

I wish I could tell you that Grandmother arrived in my imagination fully formed, wise, strong and very definitely a bison, and demanded that I tell her story. But she did not. The truth is much less poetic.

I wanted to write about bison because of their importance in Métis history.

Why the bison?

For generations, the buffalo hunt was at the heart of life for many Métis families on the Plains. Bison provided food, clothing and materials for everyday life, while the hunt itself helped shape Métis communities, economies and ways of working together.

The great buffalo hunts were remarkably organized undertakings. Families travelled together, rules governed the hunt, and enormous temporary communities formed on the prairie.

The bison weren't simply animals that happened to be there. They were intertwined with a way of life.

And then, within a remarkably short period of time, the great herds were nearly gone. Their disappearance devastated Indigenous peoples across the Plains, including Métis communities whose lives and livelihoods had been so closely connected to them.

So when I began imagining the animals whose stories I wanted to tell in Silent as the Wild, leaving out the bison never really felt like an option.

What I didn't know yet was what her story would be.

Grandmother wasn't always Grandmother

Here's one of those little behind-the-scenes details that makes the writing process sound considerably less organized than writers probably like to admit:

Originally, this was going to be a story about a mother and daughter. Somewhere along the way, they became a grandmother and granddaughter.

Why?

I have absolutely no idea.  Apparently I made the decision, liked it well enough to keep it, and neglected to leave myself a note explaining why.  But looking at the story now, I'm glad I did.

There is something about a grandmother that changed the relationship. A grandmother has already raised her young. She has lived through things her granddaughter hasn't. She carries memories of a world that existed before the younger generation arrived.  And for a story involving bison, that felt right.

The things one generation carries forward

Once Grandmother became a grandmother, the story became less about one bison teaching another and more about the connection between generations.

Grandmother has knowledge her granddaughter doesn't yet have.

She remembers. She watches.

She knows that some things are learned through experience and some are passed from one generation to the next. That idea feels particularly meaningful to me in a Métis story.

So much of our history has survived, because people carried it forward, through families, stories, traditions, skills and memories. One generation knew something and made sure, somehow, that another generation knew it too.

Grandmother and her granddaughter gave me a quiet way to explore that.  I don't think I consciously planned all of that when I changed the characters.  I'd love to claim that I did.

But sometimes the story gets there before the writer figures out why.

And perhaps Grandmother was inevitable

The bison was there first.

Then came the story.

Then, somewhere in the writing, a mother became a grandmother.

Looking back, though, I can't imagine her any other way.

There is something about Grandmother's steadiness that suits the bison. She doesn't need to be loud to be powerful. She has survived. She knows things. She carries the past with her while keeping an eye on the generation coming behind.

And perhaps that's what I was reaching for without quite knowing it at the time.  Or perhaps I simply thought she'd make a good grandmother.

Writing is funny that way.  Either way, she stayed.

And now, when I picture Grandmother standing on the prairie beside her granddaughter, I don't see a character I deliberately constructed to represent Métis history.

I see an old bison watching over someone she loves.

And I think that's exactly where she belongs.