“Marie” is a Catholic baptismal name, reflecting the reach of French Jesuit missions into the central Plains and river corridors of North America.

“Aioe” is understood to be a transliteration of “Ioway” — the name of her people.

The name both documents and records the collision of two worlds: Catholic missionary culture and the Indigenous community into which she was born.

The Ioway, or Iowa, people are a Chiwere Siouan-speaking people of the Great Plains and upper Midwest whose homelands centered on the region that is now Iowa and the surrounding states.

They were farmers, hunters, and traders who occupied a position of considerable cultural and political complexity in the fur-trade networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.