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Father William P. Maurice, S.J. was born on January 13, 1916, in Lachine, Quebec to Thomas Maurice and Rosa Tenanchuk. The family relocated to Ingersoll, Ontario, where Fr. Maurice was raised and attended grade school from 1920-1933. On September 7th, 1937, Fr. Maurice was accepted into the Jesuit Novitiate in Guelph, Ontario. On September 8th, 1939, he pronounced his first, permanent vows as a Jesuit.

Fr. Maurice completed his two-year Novitiate and two-year Juniorate in Guelph, followed by three years of philosophy at the Jesuit Seminary in Toronto. From 1944-1946, he was a scholastic at Spanish Residential School, Ontario, where he began to learn Ojibwe, and from 1946-1947, he taught grade 8 at Loyola High School in Montreal, Quebec. On the 25th of June 1950, he was ordained a priest. Between 1953 and 1956 he completed summer courses in Elementary and High School teaching at the Ontario College of Education (now the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education).

Fr. Maurice finalized his vows on February 2nd, 1953. His ministry lasted over thirty years, during which time he held various appointments in the Society and in the Church. He was appointed to Spanish Residential School from 1952-1958, where he served as Principal and prefect, and oversaw the school’s eventual closure. He was then a teacher and spiritual director in Regina, Saskatchewan (1958-1960), a parish priest and missionary in Armstrong, Ontario (1960-1963) and a pastor and missionary at the Fort William Reserve, Ontario (1963-1978). In 1978, he moved to the Holy Cross Mission in Wiikwemkoong, Ont., and in 1984, he was assigned to Beardmore, Ontario, where he would stay until his retirement in 1991. During his time in Beardmore, he produced a dictionary of the Ojibwe language, and became a genealogist of the Northern Ontario region – a practice that he continued in his retirement.

Fr. Maurice passed away on the 14th of April, 2008.

Paul Méry, S.J. (né Paul Lechien) was born in Tournai, Belgium, on November 18, 1880. He attended Jesuit school in Tournai and then entered the Society of Jesus in Arlon, Belgium in 1899. Father Méry’s poor health made the completion of his studies difficult, and after spending 1902 to 1912 studying between Tronchienne, Tournai, and Louvain, he was advised to leave the Society of Jesus because of it.

In 1913, Father Méry changed his name from Lechien to Méry and relocated to Canada, where he was hired to teach at Collège Sacré-Coeur in Sudbury from 1912 to 1914 and then at Collège Saint-Marie in Montreal from 1914 to 1916. He reapplied to enter the Society of Jesus, and upon acceptance, recommenced his studies between the novitiate at Sault-au-Récollet and Immaculée-Conception; from 1918 to 1920, he returned to Collège Saint-Marie to study and teach. For the next four years, Father Méry was located at Collège Saint-François-Xavier in Edmonton, where he was ordained in 1921.

Father Méry spent the next seven years teaching and serving as a pastor at Campion College in Regina, the residential school in Spanish, Ontario (1928 to 1929), the Jesuit Parish in Vancouver, and Sault Ste. Marie. In 1932, he was appointed Superior and teacher at the residential school in Spanish, then worked as treasurer at Regiopolis College in Kingston, Ontario from 1937 to 1942. That year, Father Méry relocated to Imaculée-Conception where he spent 25 years in charge of registering parish marriages. He retired to the infirmary at Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, and died two years later, in 1970.

In parallel to the activities of French and English settlers in the region and the military operations during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the Jesuits’ actions drew and pushed Kanien’kehá:ka families and other Haudenosaunee communities south of the St. Lawrence River as new alliances were formed. Kanien’kehá:ka peoples had been active in the territory known as Ahkwesáhsne, “the place where the partridge beats its wings,” for millennia prior to the arrival of families from Kahnawà:ke and the Jesuits from New France. The Kanien’kehá:ka families’ and the Jesuits’ presence in the area marked the first permanent settlement in the region, as a new village was erected. The Kanien’kehá:ka and Jesuit presence at Ahkwesáhsne back to 1752, but the Jesuit mission was formally established on June 16, 1755. The first Jesuits who arrived at Akwesasne were initially stationed at Kahnawà:ke through the Saint-François-Xavier Mission. Antoine Gordon, S.J. is considered to be the founder of the St. Regis Mission, and accompanied the Kanien’kehá:ka families when they first arrived in the Ahkwesáhsne region. The Jesuit mission at Ahkwesáhsne was named after Jean-François Régis, S.J., a French missionary who died in 1640 and was canonized in 1737, and who never set foot in North America. Régis had longed to come to North America to convert Kanien’kehá:ka peoples to Catholicism, but his wishes never materialized.

In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Jesuits pursued their activities at Ahkwesáhsne, despite the mistrust of the British settlers and First Nations population. The first church seemed to have resembled the longhouses typical of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The church, made of wood, was constructed only to burn down in the early 1760s. The fire may have burned the first records of the mission. The church was eventually rebuilt, and, due to the growing community, a stone addition to the church was erected in the early 1790s. Another fire destroyed much of the church in 1866, but it was eventually restored. Several additions and changes were made, but the church—still standing in the early 21st century—includes the original early-1790s foundation.

From 1752 to 1783, the Jesuits managed the St. Regis Mission. Mostly secular priests then replaced the Jesuits until 1937, when the Jesuits priests overtook the mission once again.