This absence is a reminder of the systematic nature of the documentary problem.

It is not that Indigenous women were not present, not that they were not acting, not that they had no agency or significance.

It is that the people who were making the documentary record were not attending to them as subjects worth individual recording.

Marie Dorion is one woman in a world full of women who are not in the record.

The partial recovery of her story is one example of a much larger process of historical recovery that is still, in most cases, not yet possible because the foundational documentation simply does not exist.