• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

“Dad, where did the crew get this thing?” I gasped. “It always perched up there, bolted to the crow’s nest in the mast,” he told me. “We never sailed without it.” Having entered service aboard HMCS Quesnel in June 1944, close to the end of the Second World War, Dad knew very little about the origin of the ship’s thunderbird mascot. And in the 1940s, he had not asked many questions about it. That it was an Indigenous carving was not a question, but the new millennium would be upon us before our perception began to crack and the significance of a First Nation carving turned World War II mascot became apparent. But what had happened to it at the end of the war?

Genealogy has led Bev Lundahl down obscure trails that have lured her into hidden places and exposed forgotten slivers of Canadian history. Based on her late father’s experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, “e “underbird, the Quesnel & the Sea illustrates Canada’s challenges in its relations with Indigenous peoples. Her first book, Entangled Roots, the Mystery of Peterborough’s Headless Corpse (YNWP 2014) shares another family story that delves into Canada’s struggles with class and race in 19th-century Ontario.

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