The Story in My Blood: T’Sou-ke, Iroquois and Kalapuya

 The Story in My Blood: T’Sou-ke, Iroquois and Kalapuya

I have been researching my family history, and I recently realized that one branch of my family connects several Indigenous peoples and communities of the Pacific Northwest in a way I had never fully understood.

This isn't a story I want to simplify.

It is a story about T’Sou-ke, Iroquois and Kalapuya people, French-Canadian fur-trade families, Catholic missions, migration, changing borders and a Pacific Northwest that looked very different from the one we know today.

And somewhere in the middle of that history are my ancestors.

Start with Joseph

My ancestor was Joseph Brulé, born around 1831.

His father was an Iroquois man identified in historical records as Jacques Iroquois.

His mother was Marguerite, a woman of the T’Sou-ke people of southern Vancouver Island.

Joseph eventually carried the Brulé surname because his mother married Jean-Baptiste Brulé after Jacques had died, and Joseph took the Brulé name.

That matters because a French surname does not erase Indigenous ancestry.

A name is not a DNA test.

And colonial records often tell only part of a person's story.

Then there was Mary Ann

Joseph married Mary Ann Miranda Brulé, also known as Marianne.

Mary Ann's family history is extraordinary in its own right.

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 was sent to the Catholic boarding school at St. Paul in French Prairie.

She was only about 15 years old when she married Joseph Brulé.

Think about that.

A teenage Indigenous girl, coming out of a mission school, marrying a young man whose father was Iroquois and whose mother was T’Sou-ke.

This was not some isolated European frontier.

This was an Indigenous world deeply connected to the fur trade and to the movement of people across what would eventually become the Canada–United States border.

Then they went north

This is the part that stopped me.

In 1849, Joseph and Mary Ann headed north toward Vancouver Island.

Why?

Historical research gives us an answer.

There was increasing unease about remaining in American territory following the settlement of the Oregon boundary.

But there was another reason.

Joseph's mother, Marguerite, wanted to return home to the territory of the T’Sou-ke people.

So the family went north.

They eventually settled in the Victoria and Sooke area.

And that means the connection to Sooke isn't simply a place my family happened to live.

It was home to my ancestor.

So am I T’Sou-ke?

This is where I want to be precise.

I can say:

I have T’Sou-ke ancestry.

I can say:

I am descended from a woman of the T’Sou-ke people.

I cannot automatically claim that I am a member or citizen of the modern T’Sou-ke Nation. Indigenous citizenship and belonging are determined by the Nation and its own laws and community relationships.

Those are different things.

But ancestry matters.

And knowing where your ancestors came from matters.

So does knowing what happened to them.

And the ancestry doesn't stop there

Joseph was descended from a T’Sou-ke mother and an Iroquois father.

Mary Ann was descended from an Iroquois father and a Kalapuya mother.

Their family therefore brought together Indigenous histories from very different parts of North America.

T’Sou-ke.
Iroquois.
Kalapuya.

And then there were the French-Canadian fur-trade connections that linked these families to the enormous network of people moving through the Pacific Northwest.

This is what makes the history of the region so fascinating.

People were not living in neat boxes labelled Canadian, American, Indigenous, French or European.

They were living lives.

They were marrying.

They were travelling.

They were working.

They were raising children.

They were crossing rivers and mountains.

And eventually, governments drew borders across the world they already knew.

The border changed. The family didn't disappear.

The Oregon boundary was settled in 1846.

The United States was expanding.

British territory remained north of the border.

And families who had lived and travelled throughout the region suddenly found themselves living under increasingly different political systems.

For my ancestors, that meant moving north.

And eventually, Joseph died on Vancouver Island.

Mary Ann remained there and raised her children.

She later married again and had more children.

Her life continued through enormous changes in the Pacific Northwest.

This is why genealogy matters to me

When people hear “family history,” they sometimes imagine old photographs, names and dates.

But behind every name is a person.

And behind every person is a world.

My ancestors lived through the transformation of the Pacific Northwest from the fur-trade era into the colonial world that became Canada and the United States.

They were Indigenous people whose families became connected to French-Canadian fur traders and Catholic missions.

They crossed borders that were being created around them.

They experienced the loss of old political and social systems and the emergence of new ones.

And they carried their families forward.

That is my history.

Not a simple category.

Not a neat little box.

A tangled, complicated Pacific Northwest story.

T’Sou-ke. Iroquois. Kalapuya. French Canadian. Fur trade. Oregon Country. Vancouver Island.

And me.

Still trying to learn what happened to the people who came before me.

Because the more I learn, the more I realize:

They weren't living on the margins of history.

They were living through history.