Strangers in the House. Candace Savage

by the lack of local government and the looming collapse of the buffalo herds. But amid all these urgent worries, one matter topped the list. Their very homes were at risk.

      We the undersigned beseech you, the petition read: “1st, That the Government allow to the Half-breeds the right of keeping the lands they have taken or which they may take along the River Qu’Appelle.”⁸ These, of course, were the French-style riverfront lots that the Reverend Mr. Lake found so incongruous.

      The people waited, but there was no answer, and soon their worst fears began to come true. Several families lost their land to the Ontario and Qu’Appelle Land Company, another private consortium with a vast acreage at its command. In 1882, when the petitioners renewed their appeal to the government, this same Napoleon, or Pollyon, Blondin again appeared among the signatories. But as before, there was no response, not even so much as a routine acknowledgment. Anxious and exhausted, many of the Qu’Appelle Métis packed up their households and left the district, hoping to find a sanctuary to the north and west.

      If I’d known the whole story at the time, with its sequels of violence and loss, I would have been dismayed. But at the time, all I noticed was that thrilling name: Napoleon Blondin. By now, I was used to thinking of my house as a box filled with stories about its first occupants. But what if it held more? What if it was a gateway to a larger landscape and a grander narrative, une épopée des plus brillants exploits, a deep story of French and Métis presence in the Canadian West? With the appearance of this second Napoleon Blondin, the walls of my office melted away to let the past come rushing in, and the room filled with dancing rivers and the songs of the voyageurs.

       Auprès de ma blonde qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon

       Auprès de ma blonde qu’il fait bon dormir.

      But this was no time for sleeping. A story was calling to be explored. Something told me this was going to be important.

2

       TANGLED ROOTS

       Car les racines, c’est aussi les morts.

      For our roots are also the dead.

      ANTONINE MAILLET, Pélagie-la-Charrette, 1979

      WHEN I WAS a kid growing up in Alberta, a camping trip to the Rockies was always the most thrilling part of the summer holidays. There we’d be, packed into the family sedan, spooling across the seemingly endless expanse of nothing-much-to-see until, in a few breathtaking moments, a majestic wall of rock and forest and snow-capped peaks would rise before our eyes. Each time I experienced this transformation, my mind would flash to a lesson we’d been taught (and retaught) in school—how, in the 1700s, a French fur trader with the swashbuckling name of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye had ridden across this same country on horseback, not knowing what lay ahead, and become the first European to see what, in his awe, he called the Shining Mountains. I was awash with wonder.

      So it was disappointing to learn, many years later, that the story was not true. Historians are now convinced that neither Pierre nor his sons and successors ever saw the Rockies, either in Canada or farther south, having reached the limit of their travels in the Bighorn Mountains of present-day Wyoming. And if what I thought I knew about the La Vérendryes was not to be trusted, what did that leave me with? What did I really know about the French presence in the Canadian West? A few other oddments of dubious information were kicking around in my mind. Wasn’t there something about a rascally team called Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers, better known to the wits in elementary school (of which I admit I was one) as Radishes and Gooseberries? But that was almost the beginning and the end of my knowledge. I would be starting my research with an empty cupboard.

      The obvious place to begin was with that enticing name, Napoleon S. Blondin. A little poking around on the internet immediately began to turn up clues. My Napoleon S. Blondin might have been a Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “First & Middle Name(s),” the search page on the Ancestry website prompted. “Napoléon Sureau dit,” I ventured. Is that how it should go?

      “Last Name.” That was easy: “Blondin.”

      I clicked the red button at the bottom of the page, and bingo, there he was. It appeared that my guy had been born around 1880, which sounded reasonable, and was the son of either a Martha E. (birth name unknown) or a Georgina Trottier, and a man named Cleophas Sureau dit Surcan Blondin or perhaps C. S. Hut Blondin. In a world where English reigns as the default language, other tongues merge into an unintelligible parley-voo, even in a nominally bilingual country like Canada. This orthographic whimsy—Sureau or Surcan, dit versus Hut—added an extra degree of bewilderment. I could see that I was in for a challenge.

      And so day after day, I posed as a Sureau dit Blondin descendant, searching for my roots. “Place where your ancestor might have lived,” the website queried. Day after day, I pretended. It did not occur to me to worry that the fathers and grandfathers, the mothers and stepmothers, the aunties and uncles and cousins—the legions of cousins—whose births and deaths I was tracing were not of my own flesh and blood. The walls around me were filled with their descendants; it was tempting to imagine them listening as I worked. The more I learned about their story, the stronger the connection grew, and the more honored I felt to be in their presence.

      RESEARCHING FAMILY HISTORY on Ancestry is like poking around an abandoned house, filled with cobwebs of wishful thinking and littered with errors. Anyone can post whatever he or she likes, with or without proof, and the contributions do not always meet the loftiest standards of historical scholarship. By contrast, clicking onto Le programme de recherche en démographie historique (the PRDH, or Research Program in Historical Demography) at the Université de Montréal is the digital equivalent of entering a clean and well-lighted room. Inspired by the upwelling of national pride that swept Québec in the late 1960s, the PRDH was established with the modest aim of creating a registry of all the original European families of French Canada, including every person who arrived or was born there in the 1600s and 1700s. Anyone whose ancestors are included in this database is definitively Québécois de souche, an expression that means something like “Quebecer from the ground up.” In English, it might be “old stock” or “100 percent” or “dyed in the wool.” In Québec’s darkest moments, people who lack these deep roots are sometimes dismissed as outsiders, part of the “ethnic vote” on which indépendantiste Jacques Parizeau blamed his 1995 referendum defeat.

      And sure enough, here in the PRDH is la famille Sureau dit Blondin, bedecked with fleurs-de-lys. Though really, I discover, that should read la famille Sureau. The rest of the family’s elegant handle turns out to be a kind of nickname that was all the rage in New France. “Dit Blondin” simply means “called Blondin.” (Ah, so it should have been First & Middle Name(s): “Napoléon.” Last Name: “Sureau dit Blondin.”) Just to keep things interesting, the “dit Blondin” tag was also attached to several other lineages, including people carrying the surnames Avon, Berneche, Lapierre, and Leclerc, among others. Thus, there are several lines of Blondins, all early settlers in New France but otherwise unrelated.

      Blondin, from the Dictionnaire universel français et latin, 1743

       Qui a les cheveux blonds, ou une perruque blonde; & figurément les gens qui font les beaux. Les coquettes aiment fort les blondins; ce sont de vrais séducteurs de femme.

      Someone with blond hair or a blond wig; & figuratively people who strut their stuff. Flirtatious women really love blondins; they are real seducers of women.

      From this it is tempting to conclude that the first member of the Sureau tribe to attract the “blondin” nickname may have been a charmer, perhaps even a bit of a ladies’