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 buying it. As new agricultural frontiers opened up—and despite their passing involvement in the fur trade, the family were farmers first—Napoléon’s forebears had opted for change and a chance at getting ahead. At first, they’d migrated from parish to parish in the vicinity of Montréal: Pointe-Claire, Pierrefonds, Laval. That’s where they were in the autumn of 1759, when the French army fell to the English on the Plains of Abraham, and, a year later, when the entire colony of New France surrendered to the British. Then, in the 1800s, Hilaire Sureau’s descendants made two surprising leaps: first, to the extreme west of the former French province (now known by its British overlords as Lower Canada) and, second, in a shocking breach, across the border into the laps of the English. It was from this toehold on Georgian Bay in Lake Huron that Napoléon and other members of his family would set out for Saskatchewan in 1904, to establish themselves in the wide-open spaces west of Saskatoon.
Some twenty-five years later, Napoléon, by now accompanied by his wife, Clarissa Marie née Parent, and four young children, would finally touch down in this house. Around them spread a grid of streets, laid out by the Temperance Colonization Society fifty years before, that paid tribute to the glories of the British Empire, with streets named Albert, Victoria, Lorne. How had the family coped with being planted in this “foreign” soil? What kind of a welcome had they found in the Last Best West of the Canadian prairies?
As I was wondering how to clothe the bones of fact with flesh and feeling, a promise of help materialized out of thin air. An email message appeared in my inbox offering to put me in touch with an actual, living descendant of Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “Howdy,” it began invitingly, “I just turned up your query for information about my wife’s grandfather via a Google search.” Imagine: a granddaughter. Apparently, by poking around on the internet, I’d left a trail of digital footprints that led directly to my inbox. And it seemed that Napoléon’s granddaughter—her name was Lorena—had also been working on her family tree and was willing to share what she had learned. But would we get to the heart of things? Would she be willing to share family secrets with an inquisitive stranger?
3
Je n’aime pas les maisons neuves: Leur visage est indifférent; Les anciennes ont l’air de veuves Qui se souviennent en pleurant.
I don’t like new houses:
Their face is uncaring;
Old ones have the air of widows
Who remember through tears.
SULLY PRUDHOMME, “Les vieilles maisons,” Les solitudes, 1869
AN EXCHANGE OF messages ensues. When I learn that Lorena and her husband live in Regina, a few hours’ drive to the south, my first impulse is to pack my bag of questions, hop in the car, and turn up in time for tea. In my mind’s eye, I can already see myself ringing the bell, waiting eagerly on the front step—but, no, that would be pushing it. It’s one thing to stalk someone else’s ancestors from a decorous distance and quite another to intrude, uninvited, into her day-to-day routine. Better to phone ahead.
The voice on the other end of the line is low-pitched and restrained. No, Lorena hadn’t really known her grandfather Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “I was born a month before he died,” she says. “They carried me into the hospital so he could see me. That was all.” Mentally, I rifle through my knowledge of Blondin vital stats. Napoléon died in Saskatoon in the fall of 1946. That would make Lorena a couple of years older than me.
But she’d heard about him growing up?
“Yes, of course. My dad talked about him. He was ‘Paul’ in the family, but I always call him N. S. My dad said N. S., my grandfather, was proud of his ancestors. Proud to be French Canadian.”
“And you? Do you speak French?”
The line goes dead for an instant. Have I insulted her already? How would I feel if someone I’d never met called me out of the blue and started asking personal questions about what I could and couldn’t do? But instead of the click of a cutoff connection, there’s an exhalation of breath.
“No French. Not a word,” she says. “Couldn’t get it through my thick head. I remember the French teacher at my high school, meeting him one day in the hall. ‘You should be a natural for this,’ he said. ‘Blondin. You’re French.’ But we only spoke English at home. I couldn’t get it.” Another pause. “Just couldn’t.”
I think of my very different experience: how my schoolteacher father, whose own lost, ancestral language would have been Plattdeutsch, or Mennonite Low German, fell in love with the vision of a bilingual Canada (and possibly, innocently and briefly, with a fellow teacher who was similarly inclined, adding fuel to the flame). We’re talking about the early 1960s, around the time Lorena would have been struggling with French in school. As for me, I was a kid in small-town Alberta, with no opportunity to test myself against the challenge of a second language and no awareness of the storm of French–English tension brewing in
