Like Mouse Woman, her most celebrated creation, Christie Harris has spent a lifetime teaching the young, telling story after story about what she has learned from her own experiences, from the history of the early Canadian West, and, most significant, from the legends of the Northwest Coast Indians.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1907, she immigrated to Canada in 1908, settling with her Irish parents, Edward and Matilda Christie Irwin, in a log-cabin homestead in British Columbia's Lower Fraser Valley. She began her literary career as a high-school student, submitting news and children's items to various local newspapers. Though her marriage to Thomas Arthur Harris in February 1932 concluded her brief career as a schoolteacher, she continued to write, contributing, for more than twenty-five years, hundreds of radio scripts to the CBC, often using the domestic crises of her five children as her subject matter. In 1957 she converted one of...