The Family History Hidden Between the Lines
The more I research my family history, the more I realize how easy it is to misunderstand the past if we expect people to fit into the neat categories we use today.
My ancestors lived in a very different Pacific Northwest.
There were Indigenous nations, French-Canadian voyageurs, fur traders, missionaries, Métis communities and people who had travelled enormous distances through the fur trade.
Families formed across those communities.
People married.
Children were adopted.
Names changed.
People moved.
And then governments came along and began demanding that people fit into categories that had never described their lives very well.
My family is part of that story
One branch of my family connects Iroquois, T’Sou-ke and Kalapuya ancestry.
And for a while, I had the pieces in the wrong places.
I knew there was a connection to Sooke.
I just couldn't find it.
I kept looking down the wrong branch of my family tree.
The connection was through Joseph Brulé's mother.
Joseph Brulé
Joseph was born around 1831.
His father was an Iroquois man identified in the records as Jacques Iroquois.
His mother was Marguerite, a woman of the T’Sou-ke people of Vancouver Island.
After Jacques died, Marguerite married Jean-Baptiste Brulé, and Joseph took the Brulé surname.
That explains something that can otherwise look confusing in the records:
A man can have an Indigenous father and carry a French surname.
The surname does not tell the whole story.
Joseph married Mary Ann
Joseph later married Mary Ann Miranda Brulé, also known as Marianne.
Mary Ann had Indigenous ancestry too.
Her father, Louis Miranda, came to the Oregon Country in 1816 and spent many years at Fort Vancouver.
Mary Ann later testified that her father was Louis Marchelle and that her mother was a Kalapuya woman from the Marysville area.
As a child, Mary Ann attended the Catholic boarding school at St. Paul in French Prairie.
She was only 15 years old when she married Joseph.
So look at what came together in this marriage:
Joseph: Iroquois father + T’Sou-ke mother.
Mary Ann: Iroquois father + Kalapuya mother.
Their marriage brought together Indigenous family histories from different parts of the Pacific Northwest.
Then they went north
This is the part I had been trying to find.
Joseph and Mary Ann went north toward Vancouver Island.
And historical research gives us an important reason.
Joseph's mother, Marguerite, wanted to return home to the territory of the T’Sou-ke people.
There was also growing unease about remaining in American territory as the political boundary between the United States and British territory became established.
So the family moved north.
Eventually Joseph died in the Victoria/Sooke area.
And suddenly the Sooke connection I had been searching for made sense.
It wasn't Mary Ann's mother who was from Sooke.
It was Joseph's mother.
My family tree had been telling me the truth.
I was simply looking in the wrong branch.
But there was something much bigger happening
The families in this story were not unusual exceptions.
The fur trade created enormous networks of people across the Pacific Northwest.
Iroquois, Cree and Delaware men travelled west as independent traders and engagés.
Some married local Indigenous women.
Their children could become members of their mother's community through marriage, adoption and kinship.
The result was a network of blended Indigenous communities.
One historical account describes Iroquois descendants being accepted into local Native communities through marriage or adoption, even when their parents had come from somewhere else.
This is important because it challenges our modern assumption that Indigenous identity has always been recorded according to today's categories.
It wasn't.
Grand Ronde shows us how complicated this became
The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde brought together people from 27 different tribal communities, including Kalapuya, Chinook, Molala, Umpqua, Yoncalla Kalapuya, Southern Molala, Rogue River and Chasta Costa communities.
People whose families had lived together and intermarried could find themselves being categorized by governments in completely different ways.
As American settlers increasingly restricted Indigenous people's ability to own land, some descendants of fur-trade families were forced to demonstrate or assert their Indigenous identity in order to remain within Indigenous communities and obtain land.
And even the records changed.
Grand Ronde records continued to identify some people as Iroquois into the early twentieth century.
Then, around 1910, tribal affiliation was no longer recorded in the same way. Census takers increasingly classified people simply as members of the Grand Ronde community rather than recording the tribe from which their families originated.
Imagine trying to research your family today.
One record says Iroquois.
Another says Kalapuya.
Another might say Grand Ronde.
Someone has a French surname.
Another person has an Indigenous name.
And somewhere along the way, someone may have stopped identifying an ancestor's specific tribal affiliation altogether.
The people didn't necessarily change.
The paperwork did.
And there was a reason people sometimes hid their ancestry
This history is also painful.
Indigenous people and people of mixed Indigenous ancestry faced discrimination.
Some people were denied land.
Some were excluded from citizenship.
Some concealed their Indigenous ancestry because they believed it would give their children better opportunities in the colonial society being imposed around them.
Others did the opposite.
They had to assert their Indigenous identity to remain connected to their communities and obtain recognition or land.
Imagine being forced to make decisions about which part of your own family history was safe to reveal.
That is something we need to remember when looking at old records.
A missing word does not necessarily mean a missing ancestry.
So what does this mean for me?
I am descended from people whose lives crossed these histories.
Iroquois.
T’Sou-ke.
Kalapuya.
French Canadian.
Fur trade.
Oregon Country.
Vancouver Island.
These aren't just labels on a family tree.
They are people.
They were mothers and fathers.
They were children.
They travelled.
They married.
They lost loved ones.
They adapted.
They survived political changes that were completely beyond their control.
And eventually their descendants became part of the people living here today.
Am I T’Sou-ke?
This is where I want to be careful.
I can say that I have T’Sou-ke ancestry because my ancestor Marguerite was identified as a woman of the Sooke people.
I would not claim membership or citizenship in the modern T’Sou-ke Nation simply because of ancestry. That is a matter for the Nation and its own laws and community relationships.
But I can honour the fact that one of my ancestors was T’Sou-ke.
And I can learn her story.
Perhaps that is one of the most important things genealogy can give us.
Not a label.
Not a box to put ourselves into.
But a connection.
The history is bigger than my family
My ancestors were living through the transformation of the Pacific Northwest.
The fur-trade world was changing.
Borders were being drawn.
Missions were opening, closing and changing.
American settlers were arriving.
Indigenous communities were being displaced.
People were being pushed onto reservations.
And governments were increasingly deciding how Indigenous people would be classified, where they could live and what rights they would have.
Yet families continued.
They adapted.
They crossed borders.
They carried their memories.
And they raised children.
That is what I see now when I look at my family tree.
Not a collection of confusing names.
A network of people.
And a history that crosses what we now call Canada and the United States.
The borders are relatively young.
The families are older.
And sometimes, the truth about where we come from is hidden not because it wasn't there—
but because history became complicated enough that we had to learn how to read between the lines.
