In the Green Bay area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the intermarriage of Great Lakes Indians and French families associated with the fur trade produced a distinctively hybridized culture known as Métis. Domitille Jourdain was a member of Green Bay’s Métis community. She was a daughter of Joseph Jourdain, the Quebec-born blacksmith whose work is also featured in this exhibition, and Marguerite Gravelle, the daughter of a French Canadian man and a Menominee woman.
The needlework sampler Jourdain created as a young woman demonstrates a new influence in her community—Protestant missionaries arriving from New York and Pennsylvania. The building depicted on the sampler is the 1833 addition to the Protestant Episcopal Mission School, which was established in Green Bay in 1826 and which Jourdain almost certainly attended.