"En 1742, ils virent les montagnes. En 1905, leurs descendants devinrent des étrangers dans leur propre pays."
— On the La Vérendrye brothers and the arc of French presence in the West
In 1743, two French Canadian brothers buried a lead plate in the snow near the Rockies — bearing the coat of arms of France and the date. It was found in 1913. By then, New France had been gone for 150 years.
Joseph and François Lamoureux arrived in 1872 — two decades before organized colonization, thirty years before the province. By 1895 their sawmill was the most productive in the entire Edmonton district. The hamlet of Lamoureux still bears their name.
Father Morin's first Quebec families and Ivan Pylypow's first Ukrainian family arrived in Alberta in the same year: 1891. Two founding waves, touching the same land simultaneously, each invisible to the other's history.
The laws that followed 1905 did not require malice. They required only indifference — and indifference was abundant. A family farming in French in 1895 was, by 1920, raising children in a province where English was the language of everything that mattered.
Some descendants of those 1891 wagon train families — the great-grandchildren of the Champagnes and Desmarais and Boissonnaults who arrived speaking French — have grown up to hold contempt for French Canada. The contempt has no memory of what it is resenting.
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Follow on Substack →Quebec parish registers are digitized and searchable through the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). Homestead files are held at Library and Archives Canada. The Lamoureux family fonds — 580 photographs, letters in French, a handwritten family tree — is Accession 79.218 at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, open to any researcher. The 2025 Alberta sovereignty court ruling draws on the decision of Justice Colin Feasby, Alberta Court of King's Bench.