American settlers were transforming the valley’s landscape in ways that were directly displacing and dispossessing the Indigenous communities that had organized life there for thousands of years.

Marie died at precisely the moment when the world in which she had lived her life was giving way to something she had not been born into and that had no assured place for someone with her history.

Her children and stepchildren married into the established families of the emerging Willamette Valley community.

The mixed-heritage, multilingual, fur-trade world that had shaped her life was being incorporated into an American settler society that did not always know what to do with its origins.

Her burial place was lost when the church burned.