Monday, October 20, 2008 @ 7:30pm
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating.
Reading and Interview with Christopher Moore.

Compulsively readable, this first social history of the opening up of the Canadian West is a triumph of historical detective work and gives us Siggins at the top of her game.

While researching the biography of Louis Riel, Maggie Siggins became aware of a figure lurking in the background who had had a profound influence on the great Canadian reformer. This was his grand-mother Marie-Anne Lagimodière, née Gaboury. As Siggins’ research progressed, she came to regard Marie-Anne as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The perils of Laura Secord and Susanna Moodie paled in comparison, yet she remains largely unknown.

Beautiful and rebellious, Marie-Anne was still unmarried at twenty-five — unheard of in 1800s Quebec habitant society. Furthermore, once she did marry Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière, she insisted on accompanying her fur trapper husband to the uncharted wilderness of western Canada. The year was 1807, and no European woman had yet ventured west of the Great Lakes region. For the next thirty years, she would live among the native people or at fur-trading forts from Pembina to Edmonton House, leading an undoubtedly difficult life but one with freedoms unknown to women in western societies of her time.

Drawing from primary sources, Siggins paints a vivid portrait of life in the West, from survival on the plains and bison hunts to the tribal warfare triggered by the fur-trade economy. Through it all, Marie-Anne survived and thrived, living to ninety-six, the matriarch of a large and diverse family whose descendants still live in Manitoba.

Maggie Siggins is the author of ten books, including Riel: A Life of Revolution; Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed, Tragedy, and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm, winner of the Governor General’s Award; and A Canadian Tragedy: The Story of Joann and Colin Thatcher, on which the well-known miniseries Love and Hate was based. Author photo by Gerald Sperling.

Christopher Moore has been described as Canada’s most versatile writer of history. A winner of the Governor General’s Award and other literary prizes, he writes widely about Canadian history for adults and children. He has also developed historical materials for historic sites, museums, radio, and television, and he speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences. He writes a long-running column on history and historians for The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine. Christopher is also a past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

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