Marie Dorion is not in this canon.

The canon was constructed over many decades through choices made by historians, publishers, educators, and the institutions that determine what is worth remembering.

Those choices reflected the assumptions of their era about what constituted important history, which histories merited detailed documentation, and which figures deserved to be placed at the center of the narratives they were in.

The consequences of those choices are visible in the difference between the historical recognition given to Wilson Price Hunt — who led a badly managed expedition and received a full chapter in Washington Irving’s popular history — and the recognition given to Marie Dorion, who survived the aftermath of that expedition’s failures with a combination of courage and practical knowledge that Hunt conspicuously lacked.

The corrective work of recovering and recognizing figures like Marie Dorion is not an exercise in revisionism in the pejorative sense.