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The religious community of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate was
founded in France by Eugène Mazenod in 1816, with the goal of
evangelizing the poor. To do so, it was necessary to proselytize
in the language of the country, beginning with provençal, spoken
in the regions of Marseille and Lyon, and as the little
community spread further afield, the different dialects of
France were employed.
The Oblates soon took on missions abroad, in places as
diverse as Sri Lanka, Texas, Southern Africa and Canada.1
At the request of Bishop Bourget of the diocese of Montreal, in
1838, Bishop Mazenod sent several missionaries to Canada to
work in various regions of Quebec.2 When Bishop Provencher began
seeking aid for his vast territory which spanned from Hudson Bay
to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, two young missionaries
Alexandre-Antonin Taché and Father Pierre Aubert were sent to
him. The former was to spend his long career in the Northwest,
and Aubert, who was named parish priest of the St. Boniface
parish, visited the Oregon missions and then returned to
Montreal in 1859.3 Two nuns accompanied the Oblates to
Saint-Boniface. Usually known as the Grey Nuns, these were women
from the religious community of the Sisters of Charity of
Montreal and came to establish a convent in St. Boniface, where
they taught school and tended to the sick and the poor. From
these humble beginnings, religious orders continued to
proliferate, with ever more members joining the effort of
Christianizing the Aboriginal peoples, as well as offering
educational services and social services all over the Canadian
Northwest, subsidised mainly by the Lyon based organization of
the Propagation of the Faith, and in part by the Hudson’s Bay
Company (HBC).
The Métis, Father Lacombe, and the first French Oblates.
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The initial progress was made more to the North than to the
West. At the time, life on the Plains was most precarious due to
the incessant conflicts between the various tribes, but in the
Boreal forest, where there were abundant furs (particularly in
the Athabasca drainage) there was much interest in having the
missionaries visit. It is true that missionaries had been sent
to Oregon to tend to the families of about 20 French-Canadian
voyageurs, and visits had also been made to Fort Edmonton, Lac
St. Anne, Cold Lake and Lac La Biche. After these visits, a
permanent mission was established at Lac St. Anne, where
approximately 200 Métis people lived. The Métis were also glad
to have missionaries in the Red River, Qu’Appele and Lake
Winnipeg regions, where the two groups often accompanied each
other on buffalo hunts. At the same time, the Northwest
missions, particularly those of the Athabasca, Peace and
Mackenzie basins, which the Oblate missionaries called the
Vicariat of the Athabasca-Mackenzie, developed particularly
rapidly, most certainly because of the powerful influence of the
old French-Canadian voyageurs and their Chipewyan, Dené, Cree,
or Métis children.
In 1846, Father Taché established a permanent mission at
Île-à-la-Crosse, on the path of the famous Portage-la-Loche,
where the HBC has a trading post. In 1850, Father Henri Faraud
establishes Nativity Mission, near Fort Chipewyan on the west
shore of Lake Athabasca. Their initiative is almost quashed at
the outset as the 1848 revolution in France considerably reduces
the revenue of the charitable organization of the Propagation of
the Faith in Lyon, the principal benefactors of the Oblates in
Canada. The Superior of the Order in Canada attempted to recall
his missionaries from the far reaches of the Northwest
Territory, but by the time his message reached the young
priests, they were making significant progress and begged to be
allowed to stay, pleading for their missions. Upon
reconsideration, it turned out that the funding situation was
not as bad as was initially thought, and the missionaries were
allowed to stay.
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