About the Author

Melinda Marie Jetté  is a native Oregonian and a descendant of the French Canadian men and Native women who resettled French Prairie. The recipient of a M.A. in History from Université Laval and a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia, Canada, she is Associate Professor of History at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, USA.

Reviews

Melinda Jetté's absorbing history of French Prairie belongs on every western history bookshelf. It reminds us that the history of Oregon does not begin with the Whitmans or the Oregon Trail. The author "aim[s] to connect French Prairie to the larger history of French-speaking peoples in American history." This she most certainly has done--and this French perspective redraws the map. It turns out that the road from Québec passes just south of Portland, Oregon. --Jay Gitlin, author of The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion

With deep research and sensitive analysis, Melinda Jetté has written a big history of a small place. In the experiences of the 'bicultural' French-Indian families of French Prairie, Oregon, she reveals both the insidious work of colonialism and the inventive ways that individuals--Indians, French Canadians, and other Euro-Americans--adapted to the rapidly changing dynamics of the nineteenth-century American West. A highly satisfying, and often quite surprising, study. --Brett Rushforth, author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France.