Evelyn Eaton was a Canadian, maritime author who re-discovered her indigenous roots of Micmac, Algonquin descent. She wrote her best 3 historical, Acadian novels set in a cabin on the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia between 1940 and 1945. Her most successful novel was Quietly My Captain Waits, along with Restless is the Sails and The Sea is So Wide. Even though she considered Nova Scotia her home, she became an American citizen in 1945.

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Evelyn was born in England but moved as a child to New Brunswick with her parents who were original Loyalists to England. She spent some years in Paris where she apprenticed as a writer, then birthed her daughter, Terry. She wrote Desire, Spanish Version, Every Month Was May and  The North Star is Nearer. Threatened with tubercular illness, she retreated to her Canadian cabin to heal and focus on writing.

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The high point of Evelyn's mid-career was when she was chosen as one of a select group of journalists to tour and report on the war areas of 1945 in the Pacific and Europe for the top newspaper and radio networks of United States. She had high level interviews with Chiang Kai Shek to the Pope. Then in the 1950s, she taught creative writing at Columbia University and Sweet Briar College in Virginia.

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Throughout these years, she was on a spiritual quest that finally led her to a spiritual life she had longed for. In 1962 she had come into contact with the Paiute and Arapaho Medicine People of California. She spent the next 20 years with them, the Shoshone and Washoes becoming a Medicine Woman in their cultures. During this time, she wrote, Snowy Earth Comes Gliding, I Send a Voice and The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel. She can be seen in a photo wearing a Native headdress and buckskin that was gifted to her from a descendant of Wovoka.

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For many years, during the 1970s and 1980s, Evelyn was the beloved Grandmother of Sun Bear's Bear Tribe. She owned land on Vision Mountain, near Spokane, Washington beside the Bear Tribe. She gifted the Pipe Ceremony teachings given to her by her Teachers, along with the spiritual values in how to walk the red road of all Earth Peoples.

 

Evelyn wrote her autobiography, The Trees and Fields Went the Other Way in 1966 when the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston where her extensive works of manuscripts and papers were dedicated in its archival holdings.  In her career, she had written 13 novels,  3 works of non-fiction, 3 volumes of poetry and 2 children's books.   She passed in Independence, California in 1983, nearly eighty years of age, leaving behind her a legacy or love and admiration by many.

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