Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
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Bay. There was no escaping the toxic winds of religion and politics.
Hilaire, meanwhile, had other pressing concerns. Marriageable women were in short supply—most girls wed in their teens—and here he was, rapidly scrolling through his thirties. So it must have been with considerable relief that, in June of 1691, he married a thirty-year-old named Louise Paradis, a mother of four, who had been widowed earlier that same month. Through this fortunate liaison, he connected his lineage even more deeply with the history of New France, since Louise’s line went back to the very beginnings of French settlement. The couple never became wealthy—for a time, Hilaire worked as a carter for the municipal government—and they likely resided in a modest house. The experts tell us that the average home in Québec at the time had a footprint of around 750 square feet, with a large room on the second floor shaped by the pitch of the roof, not unlike the one in Saskatoon where his great-great-great-great-great-grandson would one day live. Into these narrow confines, Hilaire and Louise would welcome four more children, two daughters and two sons, all of whom would survive to raise families of their own.
The Sureau dit Blondin line was now firmly established among the pioneers of New France. From those roots came a stream of begats that spanned the centuries, as Hilaire’s son Charles (1695) fathered Pierre Simon (1727), who fathered Pierre Simon fils (1752), who fathered Simon (1799), who fathered Augustin (1821), who fathered Cléophas (1844), who fathered Napoléon (1879), who ended up on the northernmost edge of the Great Plains. Generation after generation, these men allied themselves with good canadienne women named Marie Anne, Marie Élisabeth, Marie Amable, or Rose Marie, each of whom bore ten or a dozen children, sometimes even more, and took them to the parish church for baptism or burial. The family was so exuberantly French Catholic that, in the course of time, it would even produce a saint, Esther Sureau dit Blondin, canonized in 2001 as the Blessed Mother Marie-Anne, a not-so-distant cousin of Napoléon. “Plus un arbre enfonce profondément ses racines dans le sol,” she once wrote, “plus il a de chances de grandir et de porter de fruit.”1 The more deeply a tree sinks its roots into the soil, the greater are its chances of growing and bearing fruit. You could never accuse the Sureau dit Blondins of having shallow roots.
IN SASKATOON, THERE’S an unwritten rule that any house more than eighty years old ought to be torn down. I think of this dictum every time I sweep the floor in our crumbling basement or watch frost crystals sprout from the electrical plug-ins beside the kitchen sink. Over the years, Keith and I have done what we could—replaced most of the rattly old windows, added insulation to attic and walls—but there’s no getting around it. The place is old, approaching its tenth decade, and it embodies standards of efficiency and comfort that belong to another age. It’s easy to understand why so many of our neighbors have opted for the newer, infill houses that punctuate our block, some of them tastefully harmonious with the street’s period aesthetic, others frankly not. Recently we have lost two more “heritage” houses on our side of the street, a block distant in each direction. Every time a house is demolished it represents a kind of forgetting.
Knowing what I now know, I walk from room to room in my house and seem to see portraits of all those Sureau dit Blondin ancestors hanging on the walls. The images are painted with broad strokes, black and white with vague faces, posed singly or in couples or clustered in tight family groups. And in one of the frames—something suitably ornate and gilded, I’m thinking—there is a map of Canada, with Saskatchewan and Québec highlighted in full relief.
Despite what it says on my passport, I have never felt fully Canadian, not in the a mari usque ad mare sense of the word. When I was a child, my world was bounded by my limited experience, first of the Norwegian-speaking community in northern Alberta into which I was born (though we were in no way Norwegian), then of the succession of small, multiethnic, English-speaking prairie towns to which we subsequently moved. When I became an adult, my map stretched northward to include Yellowknife—still, by some definitions, within the geographical province of the North American plains—and then homeward, to Saskatoon. With each move, my identity became more firmly rooted in the ragged gestalt of the Canadian prairies, “east of the Rockies and west of the rest,” to borrow from a Corb Lund song. Although I had ancestors and presumably even relatives in Ontario, they belonged to another world. As for Québec, my stilted, schoolgirl French marked me indelibly as an outsider.
But now this unassuming little house had opened its doors to a story that transcended petty barriers and boundaries. Small as it was, it encompassed solitudes and centuries.
GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH IS addictive: every discovery, no matter how insignificant, induces a pleasure rush. Look here—this maternal great-great-grandmother was a genuine Fille du Roi, one of the women (orphans and adventurers) sent out from France in the seventeenth century as wives for the colonists. And this fellow, he was a soldier in the famous Carignan-Salières Regiment, French army regulars deployed to New France in the 1680s to impose an uneasy peace on the Iroquois. As long as the sugar hits of satisfaction kept coming, it was tempting to go on and on.
But there was a purpose to this research, two questions I had set out to resolve. First, taking them in reverse order of appearance, was the mystery of the two Napoléons. Was there, or was there not, a connection between the Blondins of Saskatoon and their Métis namesakes in the Qu’Appelle? Such a linkage is entirely plausible since, in the early days of New France, marriages between Indigenous women and French men were encouraged. “Our young men will marry your daughters,” Champlain told a gathering of Hurons in 1633, “and we will be one people.”2 A few years later, Marie de l’In-carnation and her Ursuline nuns established a school for girls in the town of Québec, and their graduates, many of whom were Indigenous, frequently went on to marry settlers. Intermarriage was also integral to the fur trade, especially as voyageurs began to venture farther into the country around the Great Lakes, le pays d’en haut. These men often learned Indigenous languages, married into Indigenous families, and adopted their wives’ customs.
Although Hilaire does not seem to have been involved in the fur trade, several of his descendants certainly were, including his eldest son, Charles. We know this thanks to a database of voyageur contracts co-curated by a historian at the University of Saskatchewan. (Where else would this arcane knowledge reside but ten minutes’ walk from this house?) But no matter where or how hard I looked, I could not find any Indigenous women in the Sureau dit Blondin line.
So what about coming at the problem from the other direction? What if I started with the Blondins in the Qu’Appelle Valley and searched for their canadien forefathers? At first, the hits came thick and fast. There were Métis Blondins written all over Western Canadian history—a Paul in the Edmonton district, a Julia at Cumberland House, an Édouard Pierre at Saint-Boniface, all in the nineteenth century—and each of them held the promise of linking back to ancestors in French Canada. But the documentation turned out to be spotty, pocked with disappointing gaps, and all too quickly, the trail petered out, leaving me stranded on the shores of Lesser Slave Lake in the 1790s with a Pierre Blondin, parentage unknown.
Fortunately, I did find an answer to my second question: How had the Sureau dit Blondins ended up on the prairies? It turned out to be quite easy to map the family’s serial displacements. Perhaps succeeding generations had taken their cue from founding father Hilaire, who, having moved from Poitiers to Montréal to Québec, returned to Montréal. Whatever the reason, the entire line of Sureau dit Blondins had remarkably itchy feet. If you’ve ever read Louis Hémon’s classic novel Maria Chapdelaine, you will remember the closing scene, in which the long-suffering heroine hears “la voix du pays de Québec” echoing through her thoughts like the tolling of a bell. This is a nation, the voice informs her, where “rien ne doit mourir et rien ne doit changer”—where nothing must die and nothing must change. “Alors je vais rester ici . . . de même,” Maria concludes, choosing to stay where she is, “patient and without bitterness,” certain that this is the Québécois way.3
The Sureau dit Blondins clearly weren’t