What's in a name

This past Memorial Day weekend I found myself on Newspapers.com, doing quiet holiday research on my great-great-grandfather Charles Bruya, a Civil War veteran who had emigrated from Québec to Vermont in the 1850s. I wasn’t prepared for where it would lead.

Detail from a 1915 Millinery ad in a Vermont paper.

The spelling of our name was changed from Brouillet to Bruya when Charles emigrated - a detail we’ve often joked about in the family because, despite the apparent phonetic spelling, people still mispronounce our name all the time!

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In a family history document created by my father’s cousin, there’s a passing mention of a J. B. A. Brouillet, a Catholic priest described as “a great defender of the Amerindians of Oregon and Vancouver Island.” This, of course, piqued my curiosity.

J. B. A. Brouillet - “a great defender of the Amerindians of Oregon and Vancouver Island.”

I grew up and now live in Missoula, on the ancestral lands of the Salish, Ksanka and Qlispe peoples, and for the past few years I’ve been exploring the histories I wasn’t taught in school: about Indigenous experience and settler colonialism in this region. How, I wondered, did this Brouillet priest “defend” the “Amerindians”?

I’ve learned snippets of family history over the years about how various grandparents ended up in the Northwest. Mostly, stories of poor farmers subsisting on a prayer with too many kids to feed. All the same, involved and implicated in the nineteenth century land-grabbing taking place across the West.

But I was suddenly blindsided to find my ancestral name attached to some of the most shameful history I’ve learned about this country’s treatment of Indigenous peoples — the impacts and enduring trauma created by the Indian Boarding Schools.

Jean-Baptiste Abraham Brouillet (1813–1884) was essentially the architect of the Catholic Indian boarding school system in the United States — the man who grew, and secured government funding for, a network of eighteen institutions in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota, explicitly designed to sever Indigenous children from their families, languages, and cultures.

School on the Indian Reservation at Tulalip, Washington Territory, 1865. Photograph courtesy of Marquette University Libraries, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Collection.

Survivors and their descendants have documented what happened inside these schools: children punished for speaking their languages, preventable deaths from illness and neglect, and systemic physical and sexual abuse.

The full reckoning is still unfolding — federal investigations, tribal documentation efforts, and survivor testimony continue to reveal what was hidden for generations. Among those schools were the boys' and girls' boarding schools at St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation, less than an hour from where I live.

We share an atypical name and a French-Canadian heritage. And that makes this history, partly, my own.

I haven’t yet been able to piece together exactly how I’m related to this infamous Brouillet priest. Our lineage probably connects somewhere back in Québec in the 1700s. Ancestry.com might be a next stop. But it doesn’t matter: We share an atypical name and a French-Canadian heritage. And that makes this history, partly, my own.

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To read about the historical research I’ve conducted to this point, sources, and my own personal reflection, see the .pdf below. I welcome corrections, additional resources, and family responses.

Brouillet write up for family.pdf

Download PDF • 548KB