Weekly Crossword: Jun 2 - Jun 6, 2025
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Jun 7
- 4 min read
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Upper Great Lakes Connectors: Boissonneau
Upper Great Lakes Métis settlements, like those in Sault Ste. Marie and Penetanguishene share deep enduring connections, including unbroken kinship, political, economic, and cultural ties—with many Métis families flowing between Upper Great Lakes Métis settlements across generations.
The prominent Métis Boissonneau (Boissoneau or Boissineault) family, most often closely associated with the historic Sault Ste. Marie Métis Community’s traditional Métis River Lots, is one such Upper Great Lakes Métis family with meaningful connections across Upper Great Lakes Métis settlements, including Penetanguishene.
In the 1920s, James Bassingthwaighte of the Sault Ste. Marie Historical Society documented Joseph Boissineault’s and his uncle Emory Boissineault’s memories of their community and important life events, including some of their Métis family’s ties between Sault Ste. Marie and Penetanguishene:
“Joseph’s father moved to Penetanguishene when Joseph was about 12 years old. Joseph’s mother’s home had been in Penetanguishene and she had always wanted to go back there. However, the only work Mr. Boissineault could get there was farm work at 75c a day and dinner”
Joseph Boissineault’s grandmother, Marguerite Guilmond, a Métis woman who had been born in Manitoba, had held similar connections between Sault Ste. Marie and Penetanguishene a generation earlier, ultimately passing away and being buried in Penetanguishene in 1839.
The Boissonneaus are just one of many Métis families that hold and have contributed to the rich enduring connections between Upper Great Lakes Métis settlements, contributing to vibrancy and resiliency of this important historic regional Métis community.
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Métis Marriages: Labatte & Berger, Pt. 1
On June 3, 1845, Georgian Bay Métis Community members, Michel (Michael) Labatte and Archange Berger (Bergé), were married at the St. Ann’s Church in Penetanguishene.
In the late 1820’s, both the Labatte and Berger families had relocated to Penetanguishene from Drummond Island, alongside others from their Métis community, following the island’s surrender to the United States by the British after the War of 1812.
Marriages, like that of Michel Labatte and Archange Berger, are important examples of endogamy—marrying within one’s own community—within the Georgian Bay Métis Community that have enabled the Métis of Penetanguishene to remain a distinct, cohesive, and resilient Métis community despite relocation and succeeding generations of settler-imposed assimilative pressures.
Michel and Archange’s 1845 marriage would eventually blossom into a large Métis family of more than ten Métis children, whose descendants are part of the contemporary Georgian Bay Métis Community which continues to thrive in the Penetanguishene area to this day.
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Métis Marriages: Labatte & Berger, Pt. 2
Georgian Bay Métis Community members Michel (Michael) Labatte and Archange Berger (Bergé) were married on June 3, 1845 at St. Ann’s Church in Penetanguishene, further strengthening the already-deep multigenerational bonds between the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s many Métis families.
Michel and Archange’s marriage was witnessed by fellow Georgian Bay Métis Community members, including Marie (Mary) Berger and James Solomon, whose Métis family—like the Bergers and Labattes—had relocated to Penetanguishene from Drummond Island following the island’s surrender to the United States by the British after the War of 1812.
Serving as witnesses to important life events of other Georgian Bay Métis Community members, like James Solomon and Marie Berger did for Michel Labatte and Archange Berger’s 1845 marriage, is an example of fictive kinship—voluntary relationships that a person freely chooses to establish—that demonstrates the richness and diversity of the many deep relationships between the Métis of Penetanguishene.
Métis marriages, like that of Michel Labatte and Archange Berger, provided important opportunities for fictive and affinal relationships to both form and strengthen, and have ultimately enabled the Georgian Bay Métis Community to remain distinct and resilient over generations.
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Métis Marriages: Labatte & Berger, Pt. 3
Michel (Michael) Labatte and Archange Berger (Bergé), of the Georgian Bay Métis Community, were married on June 3, 1845 at the St. Ann’s Church in Penetanguishene, witnessed by other Métis community members including James Solomon and Marie Berger.
In addition to further strengthening the already-deep kinship between the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s many Métis families, Michel Labatte and Archange Berger’s 1845 marriage also represented a landmark moment in their Métis community’s place-based relationship with the Penetanguishene area following its relocation from Drummond Island.
When members of the Georgian Bay Métis Community, including the Labatte and Berger families, arrived at Penetanguishene in the late 1820’s, the future town site was “mostly a cedar swamp” with only a small British military garrison with few permanent residents or structures.
Like many Métis people across the Métis Homeland, much of the Georgian Bay Métis Community, including the Labattes and Bergers, were Roman Catholics.
In 1833, desiring a suitable place of worship as a community, several Drummond Islanders—many of them Métis—including Michel Labatte, came together to build the area’s first Catholic church: St. Ann’s in Penetanguishene. As several members of Penetanguishene’s Métis community would later recount to journalist A.C. Osborne:
“The old church was built of upright posts and the spaces filled in with cedar logs, laid horizontally, and let into the posts by a tenon and extended mortise.”
Like in Métis communities across the Homeland, the church became a cornerstone of the future town that would eventually grow around them.
It was in this original wooden St. Ann’s Church, that Michel Labatte and other Métis worked together to construct, that he and Archange Berger would exchange their wedding vows in the presence of their Métis friends and families—and, in doing so, cement their relationship not just with one another, but with their Métis community’s reestablished home.
