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Mikhail Polyakov

DNA from a cemetery in colonial Montreal: what 45 skeletons showed and why this is not enough for conclusions about the whole city

Level: BeginnerReading time: 5 min

Topics: History, Science

Old finger bones and a jaw fragment on dark cloth beside an empty test tube in a rack, with the stone wall of an old church in the background

The short answer: scientists read the DNA of 45 people buried at the Notre-Dame cemetery in Montreal in 1683-1796. All of them turned out to have French European ancestry, and no traces of recent mixing with Indigenous people of the Americas or with people of African origin were found. But the authors themselves warn: the sample is small and comes from a single cemetery, so the study does not prove that such unions never happened. Below: what was done, what was found and which conclusions remain cautious.

What was done

There is one source: a Live Science article about a study published on 5 October in the journal PNAS. I have not read the scientific paper itself.

  • Where. The Notre-Dame cemetery in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). It was founded in 1683, and Catholics were buried there until 1796.
  • Context. Based on earlier studies of the skeletons, specialists disagreed about whether the people buried there included people of Indigenous, European, African or mixed ancestry. The study's authors turned to DNA analysis.
  • What exactly. The DNA of 45 people was sequenced and compared with the genomes of people from Europe, West Africa and Indigenous groups of the Americas.
  • Who. The first author, biological anthropologist Diana Martin-Moya of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, carried out the work while she was at the University of Montreal.

What was found

According to Martin-Moya, all 45 people had French European ancestry, with no signs of recent Indigenous or African admixture. The DNA helped identify several family lines stretching across several generations. At the same time, the graves were scattered across different parts of the cemetery. From this, anthropologist Raquel Fleskes of Dartmouth College, who was not involved in the work, suggested that in 17th-century Montreal the dead may not have been buried in strict family plots.

In the view of the study's author, the result calls into question a widespread story of cooperation and marriage between the French and Indigenous people in the early period of colonisation. In Quebec, she says, family stories of an Indigenous ancestor are very common, and commercial genealogy and DNA tests have reinforced such beliefs. She adds that distant or claimed Indigenous roots can undermine the rights, resources and recognition of Indigenous peoples.

The authors' caveats

These caveats matter more than the headline.

  1. The sample. "Our sample is small and comes from a single cemetery, so this does not show that such unions never occurred," Martin-Moya said. According to her, the result is consistent with genealogical and genetic studies in which the share of Indigenous ancestry among present-day French Canadians is very small.
  2. It does not mean the people were not there. The absence of traces of admixture in this sample does not mean there were no Indigenous people or descendants of people of African origin in the city.
  3. Who ended up in the sample. Those buried inside the church, most often priests and wealthy residents, were more often exhumed and moved. Poorer people were buried outside, and later their graves ended up under the growing city. So the skeletons studied may belong to less well-off French colonists.
  4. Reburials and construction. The moving of remains to new graves (reburials) and later construction in the city disturbed or destroyed some of the early graves, and this too could have affected the result.
  5. What belonging means. According to Martin-Moya, biological ancestry on its own does not determine belonging to Indigenous peoples: it rests on kinship, community and connection to the land, not on blood or DNA.

Fleskes assessed the result this way: it offers a view of relations between groups in the colonial period, where there may have been interactions that were not biological, but no kinship was found.

What here is a find and what is a conclusion

This is my own breakdown, not words from the article.

  1. The find. In the DNA of 45 people from one cemetery there is no visible recent Indigenous or African admixture.
  2. The authors' conclusion. The story of cooperation and marriage between the French and Indigenous people in early Montreal is called into question. This is a conclusion from a small sample from a single cemetery, and the authors themselves warn about this.
  3. What the study does not say. That there were no mixed unions at all, that no Indigenous people lived in Montreal, or that belonging to a people can be discussed on the basis of DNA alone. The text directly rejects all of this.

How to read news like this. Look at the size and make-up of the sample: how many people, where they come from, who might not have been included. Here the authors themselves named all three limitations, and they are what determine which question can be answered.

Summary

The DNA of 45 people from Montreal's Notre-Dame cemetery, where burials took place in 1683-1796, showed French ancestry without recent Indigenous or African admixture. This is a reason to treat family stories and commercial tests more carefully, but not proof for the whole city. The authors stress the small sample, the single cemetery and the fact that belonging to a people is not reducible to genes.

See also another piece in this section: A wooden figurine from Baffin Island.

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