🌱 Part 1 — The Roots: Oregon Beginnings
Every story begins with roots — and mine reach deep into the soil of the Willamette Valley, long before Oregon was a state, when the land was still cared for by Indigenous hands who understood its rhythms.
It is here, around 1834, that my 3rd great-grandmother Mary Ann Maranda dit le Frisé was born. She carried in her blood both the Iroquois strength of her father Louis “dit le Frisé” and the Kalapuya resilience of her mother Louise. Together, these lineages wove her into the fabric of the land — rivers, camas fields, oak groves, and the great mountains rising in the distance.
When Mary Ann was still a child, her family walked the long path of survival. By the late 1830s, waves of disease brought by settlers had already devastated Indigenous nations across the valley. Entire villages were lost, languages silenced, and sacred places scarred. Yet Mary Ann and her family endured.
On July 4, 1839, she was baptized at the St. Paul Mission, a Catholic outpost planted in the middle of Indigenous homelands. That baptism marked more than just a spiritual rite — it was a symbol of how colonial systems tried to claim our people. Yet Mary Ann’s true spirit could not be washed away with water. She remained, at her core, a child of the Kalapuya valleys and the Iroquois traditions of her father.
Mary Ann attended the Catholic Mission school, where the missionaries worked to replace Native traditions with European teachings. By the age of 15, she was married to Joseph Brulé. A child herself, she was thrust into the role of wife and soon mother — a reminder of how quickly Indigenous girls were pushed into adulthood under colonial pressures.
As tensions grew between Britain and the United States, and as settlers surged westward along the Oregon Trail, Mary Ann’s family faced a choice: stay and risk erasure, or move north in search of safety. After the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the border cut through their lives, and many French Canadian and Indigenous families like hers chose to leave.
So the migration began. From the Willamette Valley they moved north to Cowlitz, and eventually across the water to Victoria and Sooke, BC. Each step carried both loss and hope — leaving ancestral lands behind, yet planting new roots in Coast Salish territories.
Mary Ann was still so young, but she was already a survivor. Her life would soon be marked by many more marriages, children, grief, and resilience. But in these earliest years — in Oregon, in baptism, in mission schooling, in marriage at fifteen, and in migration — she became the foundation of our family’s survival story.
She is the root of the tree. 🌳
✒️ Historical Note: Catholic Missions & Residential Schools
The St. Paul Mission where Mary Ann was baptized and schooled was part of a wider Catholic mission system established in the 1830s–40s. These schools were designed to convert Indigenous children to Christianity, teach them European customs, and discourage the use of their languages and traditions.
Although the Oregon missions came earlier than the formal Canadian residential school system, they share the same colonial logic: to assimilate Indigenous children and weaken their ties to culture, language, and land. For Mary Ann, attending the mission meant learning prayers, hymns, and domestic tasks under strict supervision — while at the same time being distanced from her Indigenous ways of knowing.
This context helps us understand how extraordinary her survival was. Despite being baptized, schooled, and married off at fifteen under colonial authority, Mary Ann carried her Indigenous identity forward — through her children, through migration, and through the memory we keep alive today.
🌿 Reflective Questions
- What does it mean that Mary Ann was only fifteen when she was married? How might her childhood have been different without colonial interference?
- How does baptism at a Catholic mission both connect and separate Indigenous peoples from their own traditions?
- What parallels do you see between the Catholic missions of Oregon and the later residential schools in Canada?
- In what ways can migration — forced or chosen — carry both loss and resilience?
- How do the “roots” of one ancestor shape the lives of future generations?
