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.

See Our Sources

• Labatte Family VMFL Document

• Upper Great Lakes Submission to the MNC Expert Panel

• Additional Submissions to the MNC Expert Panel

• The Migration of Voyageurs from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene in 1828

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