Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel's Grandmother.

Norma Hall is a historian who specializes in colonial era settlements in
Newfoundland and Manitoba at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Siggins makes the case that, apart from being grandmother to the extraordinary Louis Riel, Marie-Anne Gaboury deserves recognition for embarking on a life that marked a first in Canadian history. In 1807, age 25, she married fur trader Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière and left her home community of Maskinongé to follow him west. She thereby became the first woman in French Canada of non-Aboriginal ancestry to begin a family on the plains and in the valleys of the North West. For five years after her arrival, all of the women Marie-Anne met were Aboriginal—First Nations and Metis.

In three parts, Siggins recreates historical contexts in which the lives of Marie-Anne and contemporaries in her vicinity unfolded. The first six chapters detail the 3,000-kilometre journey from “small-town Quebec” to Fort Pembina. Part 2, in four chapters, describes the turbulent relations among First Nations and fur traders during years of deadly competition in the territory that Marie-Anne travelled through to 1810. The last five chapters focus on the Red River Settlement to 1818. A short epilogue outlines this home base up until Marie-Anne’s death in 1878.

Although Siggins employs creative imagining to place the Lagimodières within these historical contexts and lend to dimensionality to their personalities, it is clear that the biographical record base is thin. Fortunately, Western Canada has a rich history of extraordinary past moments that the main character and her spouse “might have been” involved in, heard about, or seen, so that Siggins succeeds in crafting an interesting read.