In June 1926, my maternal grandmother graduated from grade eight. She was thirteen years old and lived in a two-room log cabin with her Irish father, Mi´kmaq mother, eight brothers, and five sisters, the youngest of whom was child a handicapped girl. The cabin was located near Coxvale, Ontario on several hundred acres of rocky, scrub land on the edge of Crotch Lake.As a “half-breed” in the 1920s Grandma, who at age thirteen was a naïve young girl with few options for making her way into the world. A job offer came to her as a live-in housekeeper with a rich couple who owned a store in a small nearby village. The male homeowner was also an MPP. She started to work in September of that year. In October, the twenty-one-year-old son of her employer raped her. As a young “Indian” girl in the 1920s she felt no one would believe her, that no one would charge the son of such rich, important people.What if?During my research for the Algonquin Quest, a series of books written about Turtle Island during the 1300’s, I realized that before the Europeans came, Indigenous women held important positions in pre-contact Indigenous society. They fought alongside their men, raised children and were responsible for everyday life and decision-making in the community. The women that I write about in this new series of books are strong, decisive, confident leaders. Until contact, Indigenous women were equal partners in their communities.Then came contact. And with it came alcohol, disease, guns, and Europeans who did not treat them as equals. Their children taken from them. Their culture shoved aside and their men treated as subhumans and their lands pulled out from under them. What if?When our mothers, sisters, and aunties started to disappear, law enforcement turned their heads. Communities shed tears for lost children and women.What if?An answer came to me as I was writing the fourth book of The Algonquin Quest Series, Algonquin Legacy, that there could be an answer I realized there might be an answer.What if, there was a secret society of Native women who hunted down human traffickers, and murderers and abusers of their children. Well-educated women: each with either a master’s degree or a PhD. Each one trained in a martial art and holding a black belt. Never wielding firearms, they became efficiently trained in the use of their ancestors’ weapons.What if we called these women The Elk Whistle Warrior Society?What if all the tribes of Turtle Island supplied them with the money they needed to operate their rescue missions, safe houses, vehicles, and computer headquarters? A society in which Indigenous men who were experienced warriors functioned as their aides.What if, these women came from every tribal affiliation on Turtle Island and when pushed they pushed back with a ferocity that centuries of abuse had built up inside them. Read about it in The Elk Whistle Warrior Society. Rick Revelle