Wilting Tree

                                                         

 Wilting Tree                                  Melanie Hewson 0755240

 

 Our first guest speaker in my Indigenous studies class was Bobbie McCulloch, her words spoke to me. I saw my own story in Bobbies experience. Bobbie was reconnecting with her own Indigenous ancestry as a visibly white woman. Bobbie spoke about the stereotyping of Indigenous people and microaggressions she had experienced and feeling not Indigenous enough. I felt longing for what I perceived as braveness on her part. I have had a sense of guilt for not knowing my own Indigenous history but also wanting to reconnect to it, after all having white skin allowed me to hide from indigeneity in a sense without consequence, I did not have to change anything about my life after finding out I had Indigenous ancestry, something racialized people do not have a choice in. They have to adapt, fit into western norms, ideas and still assimilate. When I was nineteen my only sister died, eventually I had a family of my own, as years went on my grandparents passed. These pivotal events made me realize that the knowledge of our family history would someday be gone. In one of our lectures, we discussed how cultural competence is understanding other cultures existing, and having a general idea but not on a deep level this was my early experience. As a child I spent every summer with my grandparents in New Brunswick. Our family is French Acadian/Mi’kmaq.

 I started studying the history of the Acadian people. My grandmother always told us stories about how our people hid in the woods for years to escape “Le Grand Derangement.” My grandmother shared stories of resilience and survival and how her grandmother had passed down knowledge on how to survive the harsh weather and identify edible plants and herbs. My grandfather and uncles hunted, fished and farmed. I can still recall the sting of my mosquito bites from the salty ocean after a long day of picking wild blueberries and field strawberries with my grandmother she was always trying to teach us about nature. It was knowledge passed down from her elders about life and parenting (Davoren, 2016) . The Acadians had come to this land to escape religious persecution, to build a new life, be independent of France. The Acadian people uniquely created symbiotic relationships with Indigenous peoples, built families, communities with the Mi’kmaq people for a century. The Acadians were also known as the Neutrals because they refuse to take up arms to support France or England. The Indigenous people fought alongside Acadians to keep their land and communities independent. In 1755 The British acted and had the Acadians forcibly expelled and deported to the U.S Colonies. The English burnt down their villages, churches, confiscated their lands. Thousands of Acadians died. I can see that this was the beginning of understanding cultural humility, listening, learning, trying to understand and realizing how much I did not know, or understand about my own people.

  Throughout the course we have learned about Residential schools, sixties scoop, and genocide. Understanding my own history has allowed me to connect to those atrocities on a deeper level. There is no comparison to what Indigenous people have suffered, I can empathize with them as an Acadian descendant regarding losing their land, family, identity, culture, and being displaced. I immersed myself in everything I could find about Acadian history, this makes me think of our other guest speaker Zhaawnong speaking about learning to grow tobacco, to not just use it but to understand the entire process of growth and sharing (Webb, 2023). I felt that desire and longing for connection. In the beginning of my genealogy research, I found something strange some of my great grandparents had the same last name, so I asked my grandmother if they were cousins? kind of laughing. Her answer shocked me, she told me her grandmother was an Indian and there were a lot of mixed marriages in our family but in the Catholic faith you were not supposed to marry outside your race, so they just said her last name was the same as his hiding her true identity. It was frequent practice for some Metis peoples to blend traditional spiritual practices and Christian based faith (Paquin et al., 2003). 

    I continued my research; I found many more Census records listing Indigenous persons with

 Christian  names and race identified as savage. Taking away someone’s name deeply affected me,

 as a descendant. I felt cheated because every little clue and piece of information you gather allows 

you to try and get to know your ancestors, I cannot fathom how Indigenous people who went to

 residential schools and were part of the sixties scoop must have felt. I had not thought about how

 Silence can also be a type of assimilation, aggression and weapon even in close loving families.

 This discovery helped me to understand more clearly the erasure of  Indigenous People’s contribution

 and how it diminishes people. This also reminded me of Rosies video about being Metis and how 

the different generations expressed that they went from being proud, shamed, silent to reemerging

 and reclaiming Indigenous identity (Bird, 2021).

 I kept thinking about how my Indigenous ancestor had made a choice to marry a white man and that changed the direction of my existence. How the whitening of my genes gave me so many opportunities, or did it? Because I also began to have a feeling of something lost to me. Moving forward my goal is to continue to educate myself, try and become a culturally safe person in the hopes of inspiring people by example. I want to help people that is a value that has been important in my family. In our classes we often talk about circles, medicine wheels and cycles, it makes me wonder if my ancestors are calling me and this is going to be a full circle moment for me at some point in my life. Something I have experienced as a mature student is we never know what we are capable of until we challenge ourselves, even when it is uncomfortable.    

 This picture is My daughter Juniper who inspired me to become a social worker

 after her adventures in George River and Kuujjuaq.