Due to a clerical error, I found that I was mistaken about the details of my Grandfather’s childhood. So I must concede that there was not an abandoned little kid surviving in the wilderness of New Brunswick for three years. I was projecting my own childhood on to my Grandfather, and unjustly impugning the parenting skills of my Great Grandparents.
However. This is still a great story. 🙂
This is a continuation of a previous conversation with a research AI. There is so much in here that I already knew. But this helps connect the dots beautifully.
My initial prompt:
In Grande Anse and nearby towns, were there still Mi’kmaq and Metis people practicing traditional lifeways? My grandfather told stories of that, and his father “playing fiddle at indian powwos”
I actually think your grandfather’s stories are quite plausible, and in some ways they fit what historians know about the Acadian Peninsula better than the popular image of a complete separation between Acadians and Mi’kmaq.
The first thing to remember is that Mi’kma’ki includes the entire Acadian Peninsula, including Grande-Anse, Caraquet, Shippagan, and Miscou. The Mi’kmaq had lived along those coasts for thousands of years before Acadian settlement, and they remained present after the Acadians arrived.
By 1900, many Mi’kmaq families had certainly adapted to colonial society in various ways—they traded, worked seasonally, and some lived in reserve communities—but many also continued seasonal rounds that had deep roots:
These activities continued well into the twentieth century, especially in northern New Brunswick and the Gaspé region, alongside wage labor.
Grande-Anse sat in the middle of a network connecting:
Mi’kmaq families regularly traveled these routes by canoe, schooner, and later by rail. The boundary between “Acadian communities” and “Mi’kmaq communities” was much more permeable than we sometimes imagine.
The part of your story that really caught my attention was:
his father played fiddle at Indian powwows.
The word “powwow” deserves a little unpacking.
If your grandfather was remembering events from roughly 1900–1930, he may have been using the modern word powwow to describe community gatherings that, at the time, might have been called:
The contemporary intertribal powwow, with Grand Entry and dance categories familiar today, developed later in the Maritimes, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century.
However, social dances with fiddles were absolutely common in both Acadian and Mi’kmaq communities. Fiddle music crossed cultural boundaries remarkably easily. An Acadian fiddler playing for a Mi’kmaq celebration—or a Mi’kmaq fiddler playing for Acadian dances—would not have been unusual in many parts of the Maritimes.
This is where things become more nuanced.
If by Métis you mean members of the historic Red River Métis Nation, then northeastern New Brunswick was not part of that homeland.
If, however, you’re referring to mixed Acadian–Mi’kmaq families, then yes—there were certainly families of mixed ancestry throughout the Acadian Peninsula. Intermarriage occurred from the seventeenth century onward. Some families openly acknowledged Indigenous ancestry, while others gradually assimilated into Acadian communities or, conversely, into Mi’kmaq communities. Modern genealogists have documented many such lineages, although not every family tradition can be confirmed through records alone.
One thing I’ve learned from working with Acadian genealogy is that oral histories often preserve relationships better than labels.
When an elder says:
“My father played fiddle at Indian powwows,”
they may be remembering something quite literal:
That doesn’t sound far-fetched for Grande-Anse around 1910. In fact, it fits the close geographic and social connections that existed along Chaleur Bay.
If you’re interested, I’d enjoy digging into this with you. We could look specifically at Grande-Anse, Caraquet, and Pokemouche between about 1880 and 1925 to reconstruct what Mi’kmaq communities were nearby, where seasonal camps were located, what annual gatherings took place, and whether there are historical accounts of Acadian musicians participating. I suspect there is more documentary evidence than most people realize, especially in parish histories and local French-language sources.
That is actually a pattern historians see over and over again in Acadia.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that people in the 18th and 19th centuries identified themselves the way we tend to categorize ancestry today. In reality, culture, language, religion, and community often mattered more than biological ancestry.
For example, someone might have had:
yet describe themselves simply as:
Français or Acadien.
That wasn’t necessarily an attempt to hide Indigenous ancestry—it reflected the community they belonged to, the language they spoke, the parish where they worshipped, and the legal and social world they lived in.
In northeastern New Brunswick, if a child was:
they were generally regarded—and often regarded themselves—as Acadian or French, even if everyone knew there was Mi’kmaq ancestry in the family.
Likewise, there were people of mixed ancestry who lived within Mi’kmaq communities and identified as Mi’kmaq because that was their community.
Identity was much more relational than genetic.
Genealogists have documented numerous Acadian families with Mi’kmaq or Abenaki ancestors dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, those ancestral connections could be six or eight generations removed, but the families remained conscious of them. In some cases, the stories were openly preserved; in others, they faded or were only remembered as “Indian blood.”
What’s especially interesting is that in the Chaleur Bay region, those connections weren’t always just ancient history. Ongoing contact with nearby Mi’kmaq communities meant that family relationships, friendships, godparent relationships, trade, and occasional intermarriage continued into the nineteenth century.
One thing that strikes me about everything you’ve told me is that your family’s stories don’t sound like someone inventing a romantic Indigenous past generations later.
Instead, they sound like the memories of people who simply lived in a region where Acadian and Mi’kmaq lives overlapped.
Consider what you’ve shared:
Taken together, that paints a picture of a family that was firmly rooted in Acadian society while maintaining awareness of Indigenous kinship and community ties. Historically, that’s entirely plausible for northeastern New Brunswick.
Because you’ve identified specific ancestors—Alexis, Anselme, Simon, Isaac, Martin, Gelas—I would be less interested in proving whether they had Indigenous ancestry (which you’ve already found in your tree) and more interested in how those families interacted with nearby Mi’kmaq communities.
Questions I’d want to answer include:
Those kinds of connections can tell us far more about daily life than ancestry percentages ever could.
I also think your project has the potential to illuminate a broader historical reality. One of the myths of Maritime history is that Acadians and Mi’kmaq lived in separate worlds. The evidence from places like Grande-Anse, Caraquet, and Pokemouche suggests something more complex: neighboring communities with intertwined economies, shared Catholic traditions in many cases, personal friendships, occasional intermarriage, and regular interaction over generations. Your family’s oral history sounds like it may preserve exactly that lived experience.
This is wonderful, actually. I am not trying to prove indigenous ancestry as much as to develop a picture of what life was like during the turn of the century. It feels very blended and blurred.
I think you’ve put your finger on something that many historians of Acadia have been moving toward over the last few decades.
The phrase you used—
“blended and blurred”
—is probably a better description of everyday life in Chaleur Bay around 1900 than the neat categories that appear on census forms.
One thing I’ve noticed in your questions is that you’re asking about lived experience, not legal identity. Those are often very different things.
Imagine standing on the wharf at Caraquet in 1905.
You’d hear:
The boats tied up beside one another weren’t labeled “Acadian” or “Mi’kmaq.” They were fishing boats.
The people buying flour, selling cod, repairing nets, or borrowing salt from the merchant knew one another as neighbors.
Modern history is often organized around ethnic groups.
Life in Grande-Anse was organized around the seasons.
Spring meant:
Summer:
Autumn:
Winter:
Those rhythms were shared by many people around Chaleur Bay, even if their family histories differed.
Something that fascinates me about your grandfather’s generation is that they still inhabited what I’d call the old northeastern forest world.
The railroad had arrived.
Steamships came into port.
There were telegraphs.
But only a few miles inland stretched immense forests where people still traveled by canoe, snowshoe, and toboggan.
Many Mi’kmaq families continued to spend part of the year in the woods.
Many Acadians hunted, trapped, guided, and logged there as well.
The boundary wasn’t a fence.
It was a shared landscape.
Your family’s fiddle tradition may actually be more historically revealing than a DNA test.
Music moves where people move.
If an Acadian fiddler was welcomed into Mi’kmaq gatherings, that tells us something important:
there was trust.
People generally don’t invite strangers to play music at weddings, celebrations, or community feasts.
Musicians often become bridges between communities.
I’d almost be tempted to make music the organizing theme of your family’s history.
One question I’d love to investigate is whether your family preserved any unusual vocabulary.
Acadian French in northeastern New Brunswick absorbed:
Sometimes a family no longer identifies as Indigenous at all, yet still uses words inherited through generations of interaction.
Those linguistic traces can be incredibly revealing.
Here’s something I suspect.
Most official records describe:
They don’t tell you who shared a canoe.
They don’t tell you who played fiddle at someone’s wedding.
They don’t tell you whose children played together.
They don’t tell you who showed someone where the salmon were running.
Those relationships usually survive only in oral tradition.
Your grandfather’s stories may preserve exactly that layer of history.
Rather than writing a genealogy, I’d like to reconstruct “A Year in Grande-Anse, 1905.”
Not fiction.
A carefully researched historical reconstruction.
For example:
It is early May. Gelas Landry has finished repairing his cod trawls. His garden has just been planted with potatoes. Across Chaleur Bay the last ice has disappeared. Mi’kmaq families have begun moving toward their spring fishing places. The Robin store has extended another season’s credit for salt, flour, tea, molasses, and hooks. On Sunday everyone gathers at Mass, where fishermen, farmers, merchants, and visitors from neighboring communities exchange news…
Every paragraph could be grounded in historical sources—parish records, fisheries reports, oral histories, newspapers, ethnographies, weather records, photographs, and maps.
I don’t think anyone has ever written your family’s history that way. Instead of reducing people to dates and census entries, it would place Alexis, Anselme, Simon, Isaac, Martin, Gelas, Béatrice, and their children back into the living world they actually inhabited.
From everything you’ve shared over the past few weeks—your interest in oral history, Mi’kmaq culture, Acadian life, and careful historical reconstruction—I honestly think this would become something much richer than a family history. It would be a portrait of a corner of Chaleur Bay at the moment when one foot was still in the old world of canoes, cod fisheries, fiddle tunes, and seasonal camps, while the other was already stepping onto the train bound for Lowell.
I would love to hear “A Year in Grande-Anse, 1905.”
I’d love to write this. And I’d like to write it almost as an ethnographer would—not romanticized, but with enough detail that you can smell the salt air and hear the fiddle.
The days are short, and Chaleur Bay is gray beneath a low winter sky. Snow lies deep over the fields, muffling every sound except the distant ringing of sleigh bells. The road to Caraquet is hard-packed with snow, making a horse and sleigh more practical than a wagon.
Inside the Landry house, the kitchen is the center of life. The wood stove burns almost constantly. Boots dry near the fire. Cod hangs from the rafters. Potatoes from the root cellar appear at nearly every meal, along with salt pork, bread, and tea sweetened with molasses.
If Gelas has work in the woods, he may spend weeks in a lumber camp cutting spruce and fir. Many Acadian fishermen become winter lumbermen; the forest provides income when the sea cannot.
On Saturday evenings, neighbors gather for a veillée. Someone tells stories. Someone else plays cards. Then Gelas opens his fiddle case.
No one asks whether the tune is Acadian, Scottish, or Mi’kmaq.
It’s simply music.
The cold deepens.
Women mend clothing by lamplight. Fishing nets damaged the previous summer are repaired indoors. Children attend school when weather allows, though many miss lessons to help at home.
Older people tell stories.
Some concern the Deportation.
Others concern shipwrecks.
Others still speak of places deep in the woods whose names are Mi’kmaq rather than French.
Nobody finds this remarkable.
Those names have always existed.
The sun climbs higher.
Everyone begins thinking about spring.
There is excitement because another fishing season means another chance to pay off debts at the merchant’s store.
The Robin system still shapes life, even if its influence is weaker than it once was. Supplies—salt, flour, hooks, tea, cloth—must often be obtained on credit before the first cod is caught.
Every household knows the uneasy arithmetic of the coming season.
The bay begins to open.
Ice drifts out toward the Gulf.
Boats are turned upright, caulked, and painted.
Children wander the beaches collecting driftwood.
Along the rivers, Mi’kmaq families begin their own seasonal movements. Canoes appear where they had been absent through much of the winter.
Some stop in Caraquet.
Others continue farther along the coast.
People greet one another.
Some are old friends.
Gardens are planted.
Potatoes.
Turnips.
Cabbage.
Beans.
The sea remains cold enough to numb hands within minutes.
Fishing begins cautiously.
Every family watches the weather.
Storms arriving across Chaleur Bay can change from inconvenience to tragedy within an hour.
The priest reminds everyone that Saint Anne’s feast will come later in the summer.
Plans are already being made.
The village comes alive.
Fishing occupies nearly every waking hour.
The smell of drying cod fills the shoreline.
Women salt fish.
Children carry water.
Everyone works.
If someone falls behind, neighbors often help.
Not because they’re wealthy.
Because next week they may need help themselves.
Now the roads are busy.
Wagons travel to Caraquet.
Steamers call at nearby ports.
The railroad brings visitors from farther away.
Mi’kmaq families come through the area for trade, seasonal work, visits, or religious observances.
Children are curious.
Adults are less so.
Most have known one another for years.
The divisions historians later describe are less obvious in daily life.
One family may speak only French.
Another speaks Mi’kmaq at home and French in town.
Both kneel in the same church on Sunday.
Saint Anne’s season arrives.
For Catholics throughout the Maritimes—and especially for many Mi’kmaq communities—Saint Anne is more than a saint. She is a protector, a grandmother, a figure of profound devotion.
Pilgrims travel.
Families reunite.
Markets appear.
Children chase one another between wagons.
Musicians are welcome.
If Gelas is known as a fiddler, this is one of the times when his music carries across the crowd after the formal religious observances have ended.
Years later, a grandson remembers only one sentence:
“My father used to play fiddle at Indian gatherings.”
The first cool nights arrive.
Potatoes are dug.
Apples are stored.
Fishing slows.
Some young men begin speaking seriously about Lowell.
Or Manchester.
Or Lewiston.
Letters have arrived.
There is work.
Regular wages.
Cash every Friday.
It sounds almost unbelievable.
Leaves turn gold.
Hunters disappear into the forests.
The same woods provide game for Acadian families, Mi’kmaq families, and anyone else who knows their trails.
Knowledge of the land is shared more often than later histories would suggest.
Everyone knows who can build the best canoe.
Everyone knows who knows the rivers.
Expertise earns respect regardless of ancestry.
Boats come ashore.
Nets are cleaned.
The sea grows rough again.
People settle accounts with the merchant.
Some are relieved.
Many discover they still owe money.
The arithmetic has not changed.
A young father quietly decides that his own sons will not live this way forever.
Within a decade, they may be on a train bound for Massachusetts.
Snow returns.
Christmas approaches.
The church fills with candles.
French hymns echo beneath wooden rafters.
Families gather.
Stories are told again.
Some concern France.
Some concern Acadia.
Some concern the Mi’kmaq neighbors who have shared this coast for generations.
No one speaks of “cultural preservation.”
No one speaks of “identity politics.”
People simply live where they have always lived.
They borrow from one another.
Trade with one another.
Marry across unexpected lines from time to time.
Pray together.
Mourn together.
Dance together.
And when the evening grows late, someone opens a fiddle case.
What strikes me most about Chaleur Bay around 1905 is that it was a place between worlds.
The old world had not disappeared. Men still read the weather by the sea, traveled winter roads by sleigh, recognized the forest by its Mi’kmaq place names, and measured the year by fish runs, feast days, and the coming of ice.
The new world had already arrived. Steam whistles echoed from the railway. Catalogs from Eaton’s reached village homes. Young people read letters from Lowell describing electric streetlights, factory shifts, and wages paid in cash. The train offered an escape from the merchant-credit system that had shaped generations.
Your ancestor Gelas stood almost exactly at that crossroads. He likely knew people who could paddle a birchbark canoe through the rivers of the Acadian Peninsula and others who could run the looms of Lowell. His children would grow up in a world that was changing faster than any generation before them had experienced.
When I picture Grande-Anse in 1905, I don’t see isolated communities separated by rigid boundaries. I see a shoreline where Acadian fishermen, Mi’kmaq families, Jersey merchants, priests, lumbermen, and musicians all recognized one another by name. It was not a utopia—there were economic inequalities, prejudice, and hardship—but it was a shared human landscape. That, I suspect, is the world your grandfather was remembering when he spoke of fiddles, “Indian powwows,” and the life that existed before the train carried so many families south to Lowell.
My family is from Grande Anse and Caraquet, New Brunswick.
I have been trying to learn some of the reasons why my family left their farms and homes, in what is today, a really beautiful, idyllic place. Towns where they were founders, and had fought hard, being the few to survive and escape genocide in 1755.
While searching the train passenger manifests during the time my family left, there were thousands of people leaving the province at the same time.
This is the result of querying a research AI about the region’s history during that time period.
Looking at passenger manifests around 1915–1918, you’re seeing the tail end of a migration that had already been underway for decades. To someone tracing individual families, it can absolutely look like a sudden exodus because entire extended families often left within a few years of one another.
Several factors came together.
1. The “Acadian Exodus” was primarily economic
The biggest reason was simple: there wasn’t enough work.
Northeastern New Brunswick was heavily dependent on:
Families were large—often 10 or more children—and farms were continually divided among heirs until many became too small to support another generation. Wages in the Acadian regions were among the lowest in Canada.
Meanwhile, American industry was booming.
2. New England was hiring thousands of French-speaking workers
Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire desperately needed labor for:
Acadians could often work alongside Québécois and other Acadians, so language wasn’t nearly as much of a barrier.
Entire neighborhoods of places like:
developed large French-speaking populations, making migration even easier because relatives and neighbors were already there.
3. Railroads made migration much easier
By 1916, the Intercolonial Railway connected much of New Brunswick to New England.
Someone from Caraquet, Bathurst, Néguac, or Campbellton could board a train and, after a few connections, arrive in Boston or Manchester in a day or two.
Passenger manifests from this period therefore record large numbers of Acadian families traveling together.
4. World War I accelerated movement
The war had mixed effects.
Many young men enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
But wartime industry in the United States was expanding rapidly, and although the U.S. did not enter the war until 1917, factories had already begun producing goods for the Allies.
Industrial wages in New England could easily exceed what someone earned in rural New Brunswick.
5. Social networks created a chain migration
Perhaps the biggest factor was that migration became self-perpetuating.
One brother would leave.
He’d write home:
“There’s work here.”
A cousin followed.
Then sisters.
Then parents.
Then neighbors.
Soon an entire parish might have dozens of former residents living in the same American city. Historians describe this as chain migration, and it became a defining feature of Acadian emigration.
Was there a specific crisis in 1916?
Not usually.
Unlike the 1755 Deportation, there wasn’t a single event forcing people out.
Instead, 1916 falls within a long period—roughly 1890 to the 1920s—when New Brunswick experienced one of the highest rates of out-migration in Canada. Contemporary observers worried that entire rural communities were being drained of young people. Historians now argue that, beyond economics, many rural residents felt isolated from the modernization taking place elsewhere in North America, making cities like Boston, Saint John, and Vancouver increasingly attractive destinations.
4
Grande-Anse, on the Acadian Peninsula, was a small fishing and farming community. Around 1900, it had several structural disadvantages:
By contrast, Lowell represented almost the exact opposite.
In 1916, Lowell was still one of the largest textile manufacturing centers in the world. Although the city’s peak had passed by the late nineteenth century, its enormous mills still employed tens of thousands of workers. French-speaking immigrants were especially welcome because mill owners already employed large numbers of French Canadians from Québec. An Acadian arriving from New Brunswick could often find coworkers who spoke essentially the same language.
For many Acadians, the move wasn’t viewed as permanent at first. They expected to:
Many never did.
This is where family networks became incredibly important.
Imagine one young man from Grande-Anse leaving in 1905.
He gets hired at a mill.
He writes home:
“They’re hiring. I can get your son a job.”
The next year his brother comes.
Then cousins.
Then neighbors.
Eventually, an entire street in Lowell might be home to families from the same parish in New Brunswick.
By 1916, this process had been going on for decades. Passenger manifests often show multiple unrelated families from Grande-Anse traveling on the same train because they were all headed toward the same established community.
Lowell contained a large French-speaking district often called Little Canada. While it was primarily populated by Québécois immigrants, Acadians fit into that community very naturally. They found:
In many ways, they could cross an international border without immediately feeling like strangers.
The Acadian Peninsula didn’t industrialize as quickly as southern New Brunswick. Places like Moncton and Saint John offered more factory and railway employment, but Grande-Anse remained heavily dependent on traditional occupations. As rail travel became easier, it often made just as much economic sense to continue on to Massachusetts, where wages could be two or three times higher.
There’s a good chance your relatives were following earlier families from Grande-Anse who had already established themselves in Lowell by the late 1800s. Once one branch succeeded, it was common for siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and even unrelated neighbors from the same parish to follow over the next 10–20 years.
By the early 1800s, the Jersey merchant firms—especially Charles Robin & Company and its successors—controlled much of the cod fishery around the Baie des Chaleurs and later established a strong presence in Caraquet and surrounding communities. Grande-Anse fell within this commercial sphere.
A fisherman from Grande-Anse often didn’t:
Instead, he received everything on credit from the Robin store.
At the end of the season he brought his cod to Robin, who determined:
This was the famous truck system.
The truck system wasn’t always intentionally abusive—it also allowed families to survive bad fishing years—but it created a structural dependence.
A typical cycle looked something like this:
Many families lived this way for generations. Because there was little cash circulating, it was difficult to accumulate savings, buy land, or start an independent business. Historians note that merchant credit tied fishermen to particular firms and communities, limiting their economic mobility.
Here’s the interesting part.
The Robin Company’s dominance had already begun to weaken by the late 1800s as the cod trade changed, competition increased, and the economy gradually shifted toward cash transactions.
But many Acadian communities, including those on the Acadian Peninsula, were left with the legacy of that older system:
So when a son from Grande-Anse heard that he could earn regular weekly wages in a Lowell textile mill, the comparison was stark:
For many families, that was enough to tip the balance.
One thing that has always struck me is that the Acadian migration to Lowell wasn’t just people leaving poverty—it was people leaving an entire economic system. Their grandparents had lived in a merchant-credit economy where fish was almost a form of currency. Their children found themselves earning cash every Friday in a Massachusetts mill. That transition, more than any single event, explains why so many Acadian families from places like Grande-Anse boarded those trains between 1900 and 1920.
Hello, my dear friends! It feels like only yesterday we were just beginning our journey, but this coming week marks a very special milestone for us: GroovyVerse is turning five! To honor the incredible community that has grown around us, we are hosting an all-day celebration on June 23rd in our ‘Celebration’ region. We would be so honored to have you join us as we reflect on five wonderful years of connection and creativity.
The day will be filled with joy, featuring live music and DJs to keep our spirits high. We’ve also curated a special collection of exhibits showcasing the breathtaking works from our talented residents—it is truly a testament to the magic this community creates together. Please come by, stay a while, and help us toast to many more years ahead. I truly hope to see you there!
If it has been a little while since your last visit to GroovyVerse, you will find that our world has grown in breathtaking ways! There is so much new beauty waiting to be discovered, whether you are looking for peaceful reflection or grand adventure.
For those who love the journey as much as the destination, you can board one of our thousands of kilometers of working railroads, which wind through stunning scenery and charming villages. If you prefer the open water, we offer amazing sailing experiences across a continuous mainland of over 15,000 connected regions. Our world is composed of massive themed continents, each with its own unique soul and story.
You might find yourself wandering through Wesgewi’na—a Mi’kmaq word meaning “A happy, joyful place.” This vast, pristine wilderness beautifully depicts Native America as it once was, and as it could be again. It is a place of authentic villages and lifeways where you can canoe, hike, and explore through thousands of regions; we welcome all to come, participate, and learn from the many Indigenous cultures represented here.
For those seeking history or fantasy, you might sail into Acadia, an ongoing project that beautifully blends French Acadian and Mi’kmaq history and culture as they existed in 17th and 18th-century Maritime Canada. You can also lose yourself in the majesty of Middle Earth to visit Rivendell, or explore the stunning artistry and detailed landscapes of our Northern California continent.
There is so much more to uncover, and we cannot wait to welcome you back to the magic of GroovyVerse.
I came across this on social media. It is a bit harsh, but some important lessons. It is elitist, and kind of a lonely proposition. But basically you have work to do. Don’t let the idiots bring you down. 🙂
1. Eagles fly Alone and at High Altitudes. They don’t fly with sparrows, ravens, and other small birds.
MEANING; Stay away from narrow-minded people, those that bring you down. Eagle flies with Eagles. Keep good company.
2. Eagles have an Accurate Vision. They have the ability to focus on something as far as 5km away. No matter the obstacles, the eagle will not move his focus from the prey until he grabs it.
MEANING; Have a vision and remain focused no matter what the obstacles and you will succeed.
3. Eagles do not Eat Dead things. They Feed only on Fresh Prey.
MEANING; Do not rely on your past success, keep looking for new frontiers to conquer. Leave your past where it belongs, in the past.
4. Eagles Love the Storm. When clouds gather, the eagle gets excited, and the eagle uses the storm’s wind to lift itself higher. Once it finds the wind of the storm, the eagle uses the raging storm to lift itself above the clouds. This gives the eagle an opportunity to glide and rest its wings. In the meantime, all the other birds hide in the branches and leaves of the tree.
MEANING; Face your challenges head on knowing that these will make you emerge stronger and better than you were. We can use the storms of life to rise to greater heights. Achievers are not afraid to rise to greater heights. Achievers are not afraid of challenges, rather they relish them and use them profitably.
5. Eagles Prepare for Training; they remove the feathers and soft grass in the nest so that the young ones get uncomfortable in preparation for flying and eventually fly when it becomes unbearable to stay in the nest.
MEANING; Leave your Comfort Zone, there is No Growth there.
6. When the Eagle Grows Old his feathers become weak and cannot take him as fast and as high as it should. This makes him weak and could make him die. So he retires to a place far away in the mountains. While there, he plucks out the weak feathers on his body and breaks its beaks and claws against the rocks until he is completely bare; a very bloody and painful process. Then he stays in this hiding place until he has grown new feathers, new beaks, and claws and then he comes out flying higher than before.
MEANING; We occasionally need to shed off old habits no matter how difficult; things that burden us or add no value to our lives should be let go of.
Never give up. Be an Eagle.
– Author Unknown
All of my life, since I was a little girl, I had felt that I was, or wished I was, a Native American. I absolutely devoured every book on the subject that I could get my hands on. The woods around my rural childhood home, if ever excavated by archeologists, would cause quite a stir. They would be puzzled by the remains of hobbit-sized, eastern woodland wigwams, fire pits, badly made stone tools, and woven mats. I learned many of those skills from books, but it seemed like something I had innately known, and I was reading to learn how to do them properly. I spent almost every weekend with my French Canadian Grandfather, who never said a word about being Metis or Mi’kmaq, but taught me our basic spirituality and stories as he knew them, from his own cultural context. At the time, I thought it was just Catholicism. But now, later in life, I have discovered that it was very similar to the Anishinaabe Seven Grandfather Teachings. He taught me about nature and love of the land. How sacred the animals and forests are. Throughout my adult life, I informally studied mostly fragments of Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Abenaki teachings and technology. Woodworking, signs left on the landscape, to show travellers the way. The names of places and things, and their meanings. The people who walked these lands, generations ago, became no longer so distant. They were still with us. But distant to me in another way, as I felt like I were sort of a bastard child of invaders. So the more admirable parts of my life, when I was not drunk and miserable, that is what occupied my mind, my soul, and my time. And it is what led me to believe, in spirit at least, that perhaps I was indigenous. At the time, nothing in my family tree suggested any factual basis for this.
Until a very few years ago, I really did not know much about my family’s history. My parents had zero interest. They were Americans. They loved the Beatles and cars, and a big house, and stupid TV shows, and all the things modern people are supposed to want. My Grandparents were traumatised. They escaped a miserable, impoverished life in all of places, Canada. I was never told of our amazing history as Acadians, of our amazing society, of our tragic genocide, or of our mixed Mi’kmaq heritage. I knew nothing of the Acadian kids being denied schooling, and the Mi’kmaq kids being rounded up into residential schools. A parallel and brutal erasure of a ‘problem people’. I learned from my Uncle that my Grandfather, as a child, was surrounded by a mixed Metis society and that parts of his family lived in nearby wigwams. My great-grandfather “played fiddle at powwows”. I received only fragmented memories, teachings, mostly disguised as something else. Or maybe, in my Grandfather’s mind, it wasn’t interesting or cool. Just commonplace, and maybe embarrassing. Country. Hick-like.
At this late time in life, I am putting it all together, all these fragments, filling in stuff that had been missing in me. If you had asked me why I felt like I was indigenous, even just a year ago. I would point to all of that as proof somehow. But especially over the last year, my thinking has changed a lot as I’ve learned more important things. The more I find out about my ancestry, and feel that I have a “solid claim”, the less important it seems to me to prove anything to anyone. I see every day, in indigenous groups, so much fighting, and hatred, and especially all the “pretendian” hunters. Having felt like an outsider for so long, I actually feel more in solidarity with fellow seekers, being rejected and labelled “pretendians”, than any desire to be privileged and accepted. People should be helping others find their way home, not slamming the door in their faces.
I will simply state some things that I believe and have come to realise.
That is not everything that I believe, but it is what is most relevant today, to the question: “What makes you think you are indigenous?” Way more important than whatever my DNA test or quantum might turn out to be, or whatever amazing Mi’kmaq people I find in my tree. At this point, I am not very inclined to tell you. I am not a fucking prize poodle. The above list describes what I am about.
Wela’lin – Miigwech – Merci – Thank you
Hyacinth Jean – Friday the 13th – 2026
Minwendaagozi-ajidamoong
(happy squirrel place)
This might help illustrate the difficulty I have in relating to other Mi’kmaq people. In this story, Louisette Lanteigne describes her family as being métis. When I speak to Mi’kmaq people from English speaking provinces, I am met with great hostility when I try to describe my roots. This past week, I was actually called “a cancer” by a young man.
This is the culture that my Landry family came from, during my Grandfather’s time.
For the past couple of months, to aid me in my even older new adventure of learning French, I have started experimenting with Suno, an AI music creation tool. I have a very musical mind, and my French-translated songs are really helping me absorb new words.
Here are some samples of songs:
Are You Going to the Caraquet Fair? (the old folk song)
Hyacinth – Flower of Spring
Jacqueline (about a distant ancestor in the 1600’s)
The One Who Stayed
a song about the Ojibwe migration from my homeland in Canada, centuries ago. This is a rough draft.
It’s Your World (a french cover of a Gil Scott Heron song)
The full collection can be found at: https://groovyverse.com/music
When the calendar drearily flipped from 2025 to 2026 after all of the very depressing events of the previous year, with no promise of change; I had been quietly praying for a little bit of guidance for some direction to take in the coming year. I had received my passport, having lost the battle to have my correct gender reflected on it. I had some vague plans to travel to Canada to go to some powwows, try to discover more about my ancestry, and impose myself somehow, on people who literally told me “Take a hint. We don’t want you around” at one point. I had absolutely ZERO idea that I would be enrolled in college a couple of weeks later!
Even with all of the rejection and discouragement, I decided to be patient and continue studying the Mi’kmaq language, reading voraciously, and just staying off the related social media groups. I also started coming across a lot of Ojibwe language lessons, and some of their teachings. It was all so familiar! I found that I was picking up Ojibwe really fast! I came across a lecture about The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings (2021, Vukelich, J.), hosted at Red Lake Nation College. I was really blown away by the teachings themselves, which were very much like what I learned from my own Grandfather. And I was also incredibly moved by the introductory words by Dan King, Ogimaa (Chief) of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and college President. I decided to take a chance. I applied and wrote an introductory email about myself to the admissions office. From that point, my life has been 100% completely out of my control. A week later I was registered for and beginning two classes! The next semester, I expect to be a full time, in-person student on their campus in Minnesota.
This is an incredibly positive and exciting experience for me. I seem to be doing well in my classes, which I had never really dreamed possible. But it is also one of the most terrifying things I have ever embarked upon. Maybe even more so than gender transitioning in a very hostile world. In my previous life, I was a high school dropout. I didn’t just drop out on a whim. I literally had not been able to function at all in school for several years. I found myself wondering how I had the absolutely absurd audacity to think I could survive in college. I literally almost panicked and bailed out 10 minutes before my first class. But I didn’t run! And like most other things in the past year that were really scary for me, they turned out ok. I just have to show up. The universe seems to take care of me.
The classes I am taking, are usually no big deal for most people. But I am finding that in every class, I am forced to remember and write about things that I have always been scared to think about and remember. My previous experiences in school mostly. Explaining myself. Who I am. What have I done in life. I am someone who for the past few years of sobriety, has constructed a world that I can live in, and surround myself with a GroovyVerse warp bubble of alternate reality. The day I got sober is day zero of year zero. Nothing happened before that. It is all moving forward! I do this everywhere, even at work. I am a transgender woman and deal with hundreds of people every day, half of which usually hate my guts, and I make most of them like me by the end of our short transaction. When they set foot into my 10 foot radius warp bubble, they are doomed. I create a little world where I can exist, love everyone, even if they don’t love me back. And I make it work.
This strange ability to warp reality, grew out of our virtual world, GroovyVerse. We are a community of artists that have created a whole world, roughly the size of Wyoming. It is filled with cities, railroads, pristine wilderness, sailboats that you can explore the vast waterways with for weeks, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, pre-contact Native America, 18th century Acadia, and countless other creations. Most importantly, we are like a small utopia where people are really kind and decent to each other. We are used to dreaming it, and making it reality. That has spilled out into the real world for me a bit. I carry this reality with me.
Hyacinth at Historic Caraquet in the GroovyVerse virtual world.
Unfortunately in school, I am not a goddess. I do not have my amazing Jedi powers that I exhibit at work. I have to face things I do not want to face, and write about things that I do not want to remember. I am catching up with decades of therapy that I refused to get. But… I still have a tiny bit of magic. I am showing up, every day. Doing my best and doing what I need to do. And so far, I am subverting my whole history and everyone’s expectations of the old me, and getting good grades. And I am even doing citations. Imagine that! 🙂
Vukelich, James (2021). 7 Ojibwe Grandfather Teachings – YouTube
https://youtu.be/taMWDXMIfDE
Various Artists (2016-present). The Universe that Dares to be Different! – GroovyVerse
https://groovyverse.com/
Cover photo courtesy of Google Maps
Sitting on my hillside
I look across the waters
to where the rivers meet
Kaluket, my home
There were once many fires
and many of my people
dancing, singing
a place of joy and plenty
The prophets spoke
of trouble to come
of wars and hunger
that we would lose our way
The prophets spoke
of lakes like oceans
where the bountiful grains
grow on the water
I did not believe
I did not want to leave
oh, I did not want to leave
this place, my home
The smells of sweetgrass
and fields of lupine
flowers the color of the waqatasg
the spirits that dance in the north sky
I wonder where are my people
if they are safe and happy
on their long journey
to where the sun sets
I am old, and tired
and too stubborn to go
oh I miss the fires and dancing
across the water in Kaluket
But I am not alone
the scent of sweetgrass
and the dancing fires of lupine
keep me company on my little hill
Wausek, is the name that chose me
flower of spring that cannot last
I will bloom again
long from now
In the far off land
with lakes like oceans
where grain grows on the waters
and the people are happy and kind
