religious wars. But when an entire continent was tearing itself apart over doctrinal differences, no one escaped untouched. Winners oppressed losers, and the virtues of Christian charity were forgotten. In England, for example, King Henry VIII was so outraged by the Pope’s refusal to annul his first marriage so he could wed again (and again) that he had himself appointed as head of the Church of England. Soon, Roman Catholicism was outlawed as a species of treason, an affront to the Crown. Monasteries were ransacked and looted; priests were tortured and killed. Ordinary adherents who declared their faith were sometimes imprisoned and, always, stripped of their liberties, leaving them unable to own land, receive bequests, graduate from university, or qualify for professions. In 1673, a new law required anyone who applied for governmental or military office to take an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that the Eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Not, one would think, an obvious prerequisite for public service.
The next year, a man named Peter Curricoe stepped aboard an English vessel bound for Maryland, a colony created by Catholics for Catholics and dedicated to religious freedom. He arrived as an indentured servant (essentially a slave), put in the required seven years of work, and received title to fifty acres of land, acquired through the displacement of the Piscataway and Yaocomaco people, as his reward.
Five generations later, when my mother’s mother, Mary Catherine Carrico, was born, she remained as fiercely and irreducibly Catholic as her forebears. By choosing my grandfather Humphrey, she became the first member of her lineage to marry outside the faith, and together, they fed the flames of religious discord around their kitchen table on the Alberta plains.
BUT BACK TO Hilaire Sureau. When we left him, he was a young man of about thirty, engaged by the Sulpicians as a laborer in Montréal. It can’t be mere coincidence that his employers were just then embarking on a major construction project, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, now one of the oldest surviving heritage buildings in the city. Built between 1684 and 1687, it stands as a tribute to the men, likely including Hilaire, who carted the stone and burned the lime and mixed the mortar. With his three-year contract completed, he could have returned to France but instead decided to leave Montréal and take his chances downriver, in the town of Québec. Less vulnerable than Montréal to attack by the Iroquois, Québec had nonetheless recently been forced to repel an attempted invasion by les maudits Anglais, launched from the English Protestant stronghold on Massachusetts 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
