Marguerite Guilmond, the Métis matriarch of the well-known Métis Boissonneau family, was a Métis woman originally from the English River region in present-day Manitoba. As a young adult, Marguerite fell in love with Joseph Boissonneau. Joseph was born in Lower Canada in 1787 but eventually made his way westward—first to St. Joseph Island in the Upper Great Lakes before continuing farther west, where he met Marguerite. Marguerite and Joseph soon started a family together. By t

Charlotte Turner was born in Moose Factory, in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) Rupert’s Land territory, on or about July 11, 1828. Charlotte’s father, Joseph Turner Sr., was a lifelong HBC employee, who worked for the Company for nearly 70 years. Throughout that time, he and his Métis wife, Emma, had seven children born in Moose Factory. On June 21, 1841, Charlotte Turner married James Harper, another long serving HBC employee, “a la façon du pays” (in the custom of the coun

Elizabeth Turner was baptized at Moose Factory on June 30, 1822, alongside her brothers, Joseph Jr. and Philip. Elizabeth grew up immersed in the rich and dynamic world of the fur trade. Her father, Joseph Turner Sr., was a lifelong and dedicated servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Her mother, Emma, was a skilled Métis woman who raised her children within her Métis traditions on the western shores of James Bay. As the Turner siblings entered adulthood, Elizabeth’s brot

The legacy of the prominent Métis Nolin family began with the marriage of Jean Baptiste Nolin, a French-Canadian fur trader, and Marie Angelique Couvret, a Métis woman. Jean Baptiste and Marie Angelique met in the 1780s at Michilimackinac, an important fur trading post and gathering place in the Upper Great Lakes. Jean Baptiste had come to the island for trade, but it was Marie Angelique’s deep connections to the land, her relations, and the emerging Métis kinship networks

The families which make up Georgian Bay Métis Community have deep and enduring connections amongst each other, as well as with other Métis families and communites in the Upper Great Lakes and throughout the Métis Homeland. Many of these bonds were rooted during their shared experience of relocation from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene, in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Lewis Solomon is one example of a Georgian Bay Métis Community member whose family kinship extends

While Métis people hold diverse spiritual beliefs, many Métis in the Upper Great Lakes— like other Métis communities throughout the Métis Nation Homeland—practiced the Catholic faith. An 1893 visitor to Killarney, for example, described the community as consisting of “many half breeds at Killarney, mostly French and Roman Catholic, and there is a small Roman Catholic church.” With few churches in the Upper Great Lakes during the early 1800s, Métis travelled long distances