10/02/2025
When I was a little girl, I spent my summers visiting the Mi'kmaq people in Eskisoni with my father (and stepmother) who was working alongside the people there in his study of ecological politics.
Despite our white skin and fair hair, we were welcomed into the sweatlodges, welcomed into the folds of aunties and cousins and barefoot children of that place. Lessons and lore ribbed through fireside tales, wisdoms woven into the tapestry of their songs and stories. As a child, I wished to be one of them, wished to be cocooned into the warm embrace of an intact culture, wished to have colouring that was Gold and Ash and Amber.
I was a child, spared the details of history, and I didn't know, I didn't know what had been stolen from them in years so close in memory that the scars still bled real blood. That my wish was not a simple one.
I didn't know of the sharp rocks that live in the river of their past. As I grew, my dad began to unravel it for me. I learned of the horror they had lived and died through.
It has become increasingly clear to me as I've grown into womanhood that I still have a murky grasp on the depth of loss and devastion that occurred through the residential school system.
"Invisible Indians", wrenched from the culture to which their great-grandparents were born. White in appearance, but descended from the people of this land. Generations of broken, generations of being forced into forgetting the language of their mother's mothers.
My partner is the grandson of these stories. Owning his own heritage has been a difficult process. How do we honour the people and the beauty and the truths and tragedies from which he is descended, from which our own light-skinned children come?
We grow and braid and burn sweetgrass, All My Relations. We walk the forest, barefoot to connect better to the sacredness there, to appease the spirits. We speak the Old Words I was taught to bless, to connect, with reverence. We hope that this small something is enough.
And on September 30th we remember, in Orange.
