Learn About Marie-Anne Lagimodiere

Author Maggie Siggins shares the story of an extraordinary woman Marie-Anne Lagimodière with WatchMojo.

Learn About Marie-Anne Lagimodiere Rebecca Brayton: Women are key factors in history but often their stories are not told. Hi, I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to WatchMojo.com and today Maggie Siggins will be telling us one of those stories with Marie Anne, the extraordinary life of Louis Riel’s grandmother. For those of us here we are real rusty on our history can you just give us and idea of Louis Riel’s place in history? Maggie Siggins: He really is the founder of Manitoba and he is considered one of the father’s of Confederation. He led a revolution there in 1869 that was utterly successful. But it was more than that. He was a poet. He was a great writer. He was a great visionary and of course being Canadian what we did for all of that was to hang them and I always thought that there was somebody that influenced him and inspired him and I knew that his grandmother thought them all the Indian languages. They’re in deed of languages and I think that she was the one that really formed this character because she was such an adventurer herself. Rebecca Brayton: Who was Marie Anne? Maggie Siggins: Marie Anne is the grandmother of our famous Louis Riel her name was Marie Anne Lagimodiere which was her husband’s name. She was expected to get married when she was 18 or 19. One farmer after another lion duck but she kept saying no and finally at the right bold age she’s still not married at 26 and this was really something. And suddenly out of the wood comes this great, big hunk of a guy for trader, buffalo hunter, Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière. He had returned home from the west after being way many years and they instantly fell in love. He was supposed to settle down and be a farmer but he announced to her that he was returning to the west. This happened all the time and the women stayed in Quebec. This woman said absolutely no I’m going to live like this and she followed him west. The first white Canadian woman to do this by about 40 to 50 years. So she is an amazing, amazing woman. Rebecca Brayton: Now what else was unusual or unorthodox about Marie Anne? Maggie Siggins: Her adventures of living in the west are so amazing that it’s incredible she almost starved to death. When winter she was attacked by some Indians and they had to run for their lives. She kept having babies. She had a baby one time. She had to learn how to ride a horse of course because they would spend summer out in the prairie and her horse run away chasing after some buffalo and he managed to stop the horse jump at least her husband but she just got off at time and delivered this baby. And maybe the thing I like about her the most is that when she went west she become if you wanted to use the term Indian Ice she had to all of her hands were native women. Everything she did was native style because that’s all that was available and so what she did basically was adapt to the native culture rather than what pioneers did. I don’t even like the color of pioneer was imposed their way of living on the native people. She blended in. She became part of their life. I think she is a hero woman in many ways.