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Series

Tender Ties

Tender Ties fictionalises the life of Marie Dorion, an Ioway woman who crossed the Rocky Mountains with the Pacific Fur Company expedition and survived catastrophe in the Oregon Country. The trilogy follows her from the 1811 journey through Okanogan and French Prairie as she protects her children amid fur-trade rivalry, war, disease and rapid colonial change.

Marie’s cultural position gives the series an unusually complex frontier perspective: she is neither simply inside nor outside Indigenous, French Canadian and American communities. Christian faith develops through grief, friendship and unconditional love, while motherhood and survival remain the practical threads holding her life together.

Reading order

Books in this series (3 books)

A Name of Her Own cover

1. A Name of Her Own

Jane Kirkpatrick

4.0(1,859)

Marie Dorion refuses to remain in St Louis when her husband joins the 1811 Pacific Fur Company expedition, taking two young sons across the continent through unfamiliar country and unstable leadership. Along the route she meets Sacagawea, another Indigenous mother whose experience gives Marie friendship and…

Every Fixed Star cover

2. Every Fixed Star

Jane Kirkpatrick

4.2(664)

In 1814 Marie Dorion brings her surviving family to the Okanogan settlement, where fur-trade instability and the disappearance or failure of loved ones make ordinary security difficult to sustain. She has survived catastrophe, but grief leaves her suspicious of every blessing and reluctant to trust the…

Hold Tight the Thread cover

3. Hold Tight the Thread

Jane Kirkpatrick

By the 1840s Marie Dorion Venier Toupin is established on French Prairie as British and American settlers, missionaries, French Canadian families and disease-stricken Indigenous communities compete within a rapidly changing Oregon Country. Public conflict is matched by strain within Marie’s family as daughters question her love…