And then she lived another 36 years in a changing Northwest, raising more children, forming new relationships, settling in a valley that was becoming American territory, dying in a church whose location was eventually lost to fire.

The story of Marie Dorion is not a simple story.

It is not a triumph narrative in the uncomplicated sense.

It is the story of a woman who navigated genuinely extreme circumstances with specific knowledge, made decisions that kept her children alive, and arrived at a set of outcomes that deserve sustained historical attention.

It is also the story of how a survival achievement of this magnitude, by an Indigenous woman in the context of the fur-trade frontier, could spend two centuries receiving a fraction of the attention that comparable achievements by Euro-American men received.

Both parts of the story matter.