Meet John Vanek
I am a historian, writer, and cultural interpreter from Minnesota. I am also a descendant of the French-Canadian and Métis communities whose story this book tells. My ancestors include voyageurs among the founders of early Minnesota and industrial migrants from Quebec who crowded into Northeast Minneapolis tenements in the 1870s. This project is, in part, the story of my own people.
Professionally, I spent most of the past fifteen years as a museum exhibit developer and writer. My exhibit work appears across the country, from rural Montana to New York City, and has won national and state-level awards for interpretation and good history. I excel at finding captivating human stories, placing them in historical context, and explaining them in clear, accessible language.
Beyond the desk, I am an active participant in Minnesota's French and Métis heritage communities. I am a member of La Compagnie des Hivernants de la Rivière Saint-Pierre, a fur trade reenactor group, and have offered historical interpretation at Grand Portage and other sites across the state. In 2025, the City of Little Canada named me Grand Marshal of the Canadian Days Festival in recognition of my work to unearth and elevate community heritage. More recently, I organized and led the 2026 French Heritage Corridor Conference bus tour and have been interviewed on KFAI's Bonjour Minnesota and Radio Canada in Winnipeg.
So how did I end up writing a book about a couple of French-Canadian founders of early Minnesota?
Dressed as a voyageur and ready to engage visitors at Grand Portage.
A curiosity became a passion. That passion will soon be a book.
The book tells a story no one thought could be told.
For a school project in sixth grade, I did my family genealogy. It was revelatory. Talking to my grandparents, looking at old photos, and seeing lists of ancestors back to the 1600s opened my eyes to the magic of history and helped me understand my place in it. In the decades since, I have spent thousands of hours researching and endeavoring to understand the lives of my ancestors at a deeper historical level.
Two individuals always stood out as the most interesting: my 5x-great-grandparents Benjamin Gervais and Genevieve Laurence, founders of both St. Paul and Little Canada, Minnesota. Their lives before coming to Minnesota are teased in tantalizingly few sentences in a local history book published in 1876. Once I completed my master's degree, I took it as a challenge to see if I could uncover primary sources that might confirm or add to those few sentences.
Because the Gervaises were illiterate, I expected to find very little. No one believed it was possible to write a comprehensive biography of an illiterate habitant or voyageur—much less an illiterate Canadian woman like Genevieve—because the sources just aren't there to support it. I certainly did not set out to write a book.
Yet what I found astonished me. My protagonists always seemed to be in the middle of—and often shaped—important historical events. Out of sheer good fortune, someone literate was usually at hand to record it. Not only does my research contain a trove of new information about the histories of the fur trade, the Red River Settlement, and early Minnesota — for the first time, we get to see these events through the eyes of an ordinary, unlettered working-class man and woman.
As I began to tell people parts of the story I'd uncovered—including many folks who are not particularly interested in history and who couldn't care less about French-Canadians—I kept getting responses like, "That should be a TV mini-series" and "You have to publish that!"
So that's what I'm doing. I am writing a double biography that is brimming with historical insights, but one that reads like a novel.