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- or Mary Mahoy, or Mahoya
Born to a Hawaiian father and a First Nations mother, Maria (pronounced Ma? Rye? ah) lived her entire life on the Gulf Island of British Columbia's southwest coast. A true pioneer, she lived from the mid 1850s to 1936, bore thirteen children, and now has a variety of descendents including loggers, fishermen, university professors, and a provincial minister of finance.
In Maria Mahoi of the Islands, acclaimed historian Jean Barman gives us a portrait of a woman who was independent, resourceful and proud of her Hawaiian heritage. Maria was also a woman ahead of her times, as she kept her name, protected her interests, and even went to court to contest a will.
Douglas left her in the 1880s.
Her second relationship was with a man who, like herself, would have been uncharitably described as a half-breed. George Fisher was the product of an Englishman's marriage to an Aboriginal woman. Fisher met Maria, who was ten years his senior, around 1885 when he was in his early twenties. They had six children together. He legally married Maria, but not until about 1900, when he had a near-fatal accident. Fisher, perhaps aware of his lack of respectability, was reluctant to marry Maria, except that he wanted his children to be legitimate. It seems he was loath to acknowledge his hybridity; Fisher was enumerated as white in the 1901 census.
Maria and George had a sometimes-tumultuous life together on Russell Island, just off Salt Spring Island. Maria Mahoi inherited the property, lthough her claim to it was dubious. Whether or not she had legitimately inherited it, Russell Island became hers, and the hub of all her family activities. Interestingly, She mothered thirteen children, outlived six of them, married a man ten years her junior, later wrested him away from a love affair that nearly destroyed the marriage, and acquired her own property suggests that she was not so very ordinary. While many women had ten or more children, not all were as resourceful as Maria, nor were many women property owners.
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