Dealing with your settler history and honouring Indigenous ancestors in your ancestor veneration practice: a personal meandering
@usmarine had a really good question, and seeing as it's a deep part of me, I needed to write a good long text post on it. Thank you for this!
Q: also, as a fellow descendant of indigenous people [mi'kmaq and abenaki in my case], how do you honor them without encroaching indigenous identity? im not indigenous, but they're my ancestors and i want to honor them
You've popped open my can of worms, so sit in!
My genealogical research on my family tree started back in 2015. I was asking my maternal grandmother questions about our family. With a last name like Gagnon, there was a lot of information already published by historians, ethnographers, and archive centres. She pulled out a big book of all the Gagnons in Saguenay, and we found our line. I’ve heard rumours of Scottish, Irish ancestors, an unknown Ilnu or Algonquin distant relation, the usual stuff you hear when you ask a French Canadian family member what our tree looks like.
My grandma pointed to the following names: Marie-Louise Tremblay (1862- ?) + Alexandre Gagnon (1858-1931). She then said that Marie-Louise, her great-grandma, had Ilnuatsh ancestry. Like many French-Canadians, that sparked interest. Fact or fiction? And like many people who find rumours or an ancestor with an Indigenous background, your mind asks a ton of questions. And that’s ok. It’s been ten years since I’ve known that name, and she’s intrigued me ever since. What was her life like? Who were her parents? Did she have any cultural knowledge, any ties to her roots? What was it like for her in 1882 when she got married? It’s answers I’ll never find definitive answers to. Hell, I’m still trying to schedule a time where I can travel to Mashteuiatsh, and the Saguenay archives to dig even deeper into Peter McLeod Sr. and what role he had in that community, as I heard his son (such a distant cousin) founded Chicoutimi. What is that history and that person to the Mashteuiatsh Pekuakamiulnuatsh First Nation? How did his wife teach her children? Did she integrate into the settler society, or did she keep teachings and connections with her Ilnu family? We'll never know. Thanks to the university library, I’ve found sources on Peter McLeod Sr. (1785-1864), a prominent figure in Saguenay history in the HBC, and mentions of his wife, Marie-Madeleine Manitukueu-Tshirnish (1789-1849), and was able to piece together that that was Marie-Louise's grandmother. 8 generations ago if you count me in.
At the University of Ottawa, I took the intro to Indigenous cultures class, the Metis Geneses on the Northern Plains 1790-1890 seminar, and other courses on Canadian history. In all these classes, I used the tools and books they provided to help my search. And it also taught me of the nuances of living in Canada as a white person of settler descent. I remember a guest speaker coming in, an Anishinaabe elder. She told us of her days spent berry-picking, and that her mother would just send her back to the woods if the pail wasn’t full enough. As a kid who also harvested blueberries to bring back to my grandmother, I chuckled to myself. A similar feeling of 'oh my god, I have to go back and pick all the berries or else' in two cultures. My teacher in that class also said that "white people claiming an Indigenous identity need to be honest with themselves." That comment stuck in me ever since. And for good reason.
Nowadays, we know the Internet allows folks to have tools to advocate for their needs, and for their community’s wellbeing. Cultural knowledge is shared by those who feel comfortable doing so, and I see many amazing Indigenous artists being included now in music programs on Quebec tv variety shows. (Ie. Elisapie, Florent Vollant, Samian and many more at the New Years’ Eve show), and I adore finding documentaries, making of’s, interviews, films and of course, books from Indigenous, Inuit and Metis authors and creators.
On the flip side, with tensions in Quebec right now with their desire to have a Constitution, and not even consulting the more than 40 First Nations and the Inuit that live there… and the myriad of other human rights violations that happened and continue to happen there (the 60s scoop, the residential schools, forced relocations, sterilizations, hospitalizations in sanatoriums far from the community, potable water access, birth alerts, starlight tours, police brutality, missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, the discrimination Indigenous patients face in Quebec hospitals). AND the fact that many people who have the same ancestors as me are claiming Indigenous identity, and insist that the word “métissé” is still an acceptable term to use to identify themselves and grab "benefits". People, like me, who have had no contact with present-day Indigenous peoples in their immediate and extended family. Many don’t go out of their way to visit communities, much less ask just how belonging and family looks like within a First Nations context, and still insist it’s theirs to take and flaunt. (That was a whole other post I did earlier).
All this to say, how do I deal with this internal back and forth knowing who my ancestors were and what they might have gone through, even the Ilnuatsh and for lack of better record-keeping “Algonquine inconnue” within an ancestor veneration practice?
You hear in some internet chains that ‘white people have no culture’. That’s simply not true. White supremacy kills everyone it touches, including white people. It alienates you from your roots, washes them down to bare ivory, and insists you have nothing but mainstream popular WASP culture to claim. I refuse to participate. Even if most of my ancestors came here in the 1600s from France, it’s ok to acknowledge that while they were settlers, they were human beings living in the landscape and the seasons. France is very different from Canada. The trees, the seasons, the animals, nothing is the exact same. I don't feel at home in France, where many inflamed people on the internet debate forums tell settlers to go back to. It’s just not what my known ancestors saw. We lived on another continent, and grew into our own branch of French dialects and cultures informed by our environment and those we met. My ancestors adapted, learned how to survive, ALL thanks to the Indigenous peoples that lived here already. Some made alliances, some went fur trading and got to meet people they wouldn’t have met had they stayed in their villages. Some had unsavoury trading relationships, others took to the woods and never looked back. Some hid together from British forces and fought side by side. Quebec’s many iconic cultural elements, like the entire maple syrup harvest season, snowshoes, the ceinture fléchée, the flying canoe legend, my family’s forest guide work history, we all got influenced by the Indigenous cultures we met. Saint Anne, venerated in some Indigenous Catholic spiritual events, just like in my great-grandmother’s Acadian fishing village. For all the harm we caused, we also shared. It is ok to feel angry, sad, remorseful, uncomfortable and exasperated, but then you have to act. This is a daily emotional state for me, not gonna lie.
Point is, I honour my roots known and unknown in the following ways. And none of them are cultural appropriation:
To honour your ancestors, known and unknown, settler and especially Indigenous, is to be there for the people who are here today. Your ancestors branched off elsewhere and impact someone living in an Indigenous community today. Use your genealogical knowledge as your compass to show up for those that need it most. If you just do that, that’s all that’s needed. I try to show up in my allyship every day, confronting my biases, consulting books and research when I’m met with new information, and I voice out if I hear something racist and untrue. Even in the current climate of pretendians, it’s still not my job to police people’s identities. All I can do and control is how I show up for the Indigenous, Inuit and Metis coworkers, friends and community members I meet today. At my work, I’m the Engagement Lead for the Indigenous Employee Resource Group. I share the ERG’s features and support networks, I answer questions about participation in meetings, and make a space where people feel comfortable asking questions, and present information with my Indigenous peers that attendees can engage with. Some of our events invite allies from all over to share and compare their cultural knowledge. There’s been times when I brought my Acadian and French-Canadian legends and knowledge to those meetings, and I learned teachings from Indigenous colleagues. Keep learning. Remember, you are not “reconnecting” if your ancestor was from the 1600s-early 1800s, and your family hasn’t had lived experience in your great-grandmother’s lifetime. You are simply learning about your ancestral cultures, but you are not a part of it. Be humble.
2. Learn how your present environment functions, with an Indigenous/Metis/Inuit lens to help you contextualize. Listen to elder stories and what they know about the land and its animals. Also, look into Indigenous, Inuit and Métis consulted and participating environmental studies. There was a lovely documentary about a research team from DFO and the Coast Guard taking STEM students on their boat, and partnering with Inuit knowledge-keepers in the Arctic to assess climate change. I have a book that describes important animals in Ilnuatsh culture from the Mashteuiatsh Ilnu museum. Clément, Daniel. Le Bestiaire innu 1. Les Quadrupèdes. Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012, 530 p. ISBN 978-2-7637-9680-2. It describes Ilnu animal knowledge and pairs it with scientific descriptions and behaviours of notable animals in our forests. From there, I connect with the land and the animals. It’s ok to have frames of reference to animals based off of what you’ve learned from other cultures. What differentiates it from cultural appropriation, is that you’re not going around talking about your “spirit animal” and taking it out of its very real and intimate cultural context. Avoid sources that don’t specify which nation the knowledge comes from, or simply state it as 'Amérindien' in origin. Specificity and context matter. Cultural appropriation is when you take rituals like say, the Ilnuatsh "Shaking Tent" ceremony and making it 'your own'. Taking things out of their context hurts the culture. Cultural appreciation is learning teachings that are offered to you (it's not a right to receive them), and to change your perspective on the world you see because of them.
3. Attend ‘open to all’ events and workshops at your local Indigenous friendship centre. The Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in Halifax hosts Mi’kmaw language classes, open-to-all gatherings, and their partnership with Everyone Everyday Halifax hosts a lot more workshops for allies and Indigenous folks alike. Make friends! Also, take time to sign up for language classes open to allies, listen and learn more than you speak, and thank your teachers. Learning the languages your ancestors knew is a beautiful link to have, and a vehicle with which to see the territory with new eyes.
4. It’s fourth on the list, but by no means the least, ok? You have to know when to give people space. We don’t know how someone is feeling internally, what they went through, what trauma they carry. “I know how you feel” is not the phrase to use. Rather, “if it were me, I would be feeling this. Is this how you are feeling?” Opens us up to empathy and holding space for someone. Also, to paraphrase Chelazon Leroux (Dene drag performer, comedian, model, and activist, season 3 Canada’s Drag Race, who talked to our ERG for National Indigenous History Month and Pride Month) You must laugh with us. We’re tired of having our stories be ones of only trauma and loss. Celebrate our wins, fight alongside us, allow us to show you our vibrant cultures, and make space for our voices.
I also remember fondly when I briefly spoke with Stephen Kakfwi (former premier of the Northwest Territories, a proud Dene, and environmental, cultural activist for his people and land) and he noticed my ceinture fléchée. His face lit up and we talked about his family's fur trade post, how he loves the taiga forest, and how he loved meeting French-Canadians who wear those sashes proudly. It's a little moment I'll treasure always.
