My heart is in the North

is from Cap-St-Ignace, in the lower St. Lawrence. At 23, she married Jean-Baptiste Gaudreau, surveyor. Did she know at that time that she also embraced solitude and the North?

Thérèse's life as a wife would be marked by her husband's long absences. His surveying expeditions of several months took him to the four corners of Quebec… But mainly on this territory that is now called Eeyou Istchee Baie-James.

Landed in the forest by plane, the teams of surveyors were left to themselves for several weeks. If they sometimes counted on sporadic supplies, this North, it was on snowshoes, canoes and often without means of communication that they traversed it.

by long visits to her husband. Their archives reveal to us the moments of a happy life as a couple in the heart of the forest.

also reveals the place of a woman who played an active role in Jean-Baptiste's team, acting as an aide-de-camp during his stays in isolated territory.

which weighed heavily on Thérèse, announced that great changes were taking place in the North.

the government wanted to better understand the economic potential of the territory. The fur industry was living its last hours. A scramble for resources was brewing. For the Cree population, the following decades will be marked by great upheavals.

Thérèse Bernier resumed her life as a housewife and mother, in her small house in Quebec. Each return home for Jean-Baptiste was only temporary: after a moment of rest, he would return to the key of the woods for a new contract.

for the one who confided that of her first 15 years of marriage, she had only lived in the end for 7 years with her husband.

After 28 years of marriage and 2 children, the couple makes a big decision. They will not rebuild the house. The family will follow Jean-Baptiste into the forest. Good years were ahead of them.

is similar to that of many women: on the fringes of traditional history, which is only interested in prospectors, bush pilots or “explorers”.

without the family records. They reveal to us a relationship full of tenderness, the landscapes of a changing North and a luminous woman.


This is the power of archives: freezing the ordinary and keeping track of the most discreet in history.