Thérèse Sauvageau, Memory Keeper

If today we can tell the story of Grondines, its territory and its people, we owe it in large part to those who passed on the history to us.

Thérèse Sauvageau at the Grondines 300th anniversary festivities, 1980.

I want to give the most accurate account of our life, of the love our ancestors passed down to us for hard work and striving for a better life. I want to do justice to the legacy they left us.

Thérèse Sauvageau (1915–2012) dedicated her life to writing down oral history in order to better share it. After devoting 36 years of her life to teaching, this self-taught artist and writer made no fewer than 97 paintings depicting her village and rural Quebec as she experienced it.

She loved history and how it was passed on, she had a keen and kind eye, and her work was fuelled by testimonies she had mindfully gathered through the years. The description of small, everyday events found in the three volumes she has published is proof of her great attention to detail.

Her body of work has been donated to the Musée de la civilisation de Québec in 2008.

Des pinceaux pour raconter (Brushes for stories), excerpt (subtitles available in FR and EN) – Enjoy this video with a translated transcript.