| dc.description.abstract | I need to tell you a story. My name is Denise Petitpas and I am a French-Canadian,
Ontario school teacher. Specifically, I am Franco-Ontarian, and my surname Petitpas, comes
from one of the first forty families to settle and establish the New France
colony in present-day Nova Scotia. I am also a descendant of Marie-Thérèze,
a Mi’kmaw woman censused alongside my 7th great-grandfather Claude
Petitpas II, the 30th family of the Sauvages de Mouscadoubet in 1708 Acadia
(see Appendix A) (Petitpas, n.d). My family knows this genealogy and more
from colonial documents and missionary accounts that my distant relatives,
such as my 6th great-grandfather, Bathélemy le sauvage, Claude and MarieThérèze’s son, had extensive knowledge of the Land, its peoples, Indigenous languages, along
with French and English. My ancestors served as interpreters and navigators to the new arrivals.
As Darryl Leroux’s research has shown (IndigenousStudiesUSask, 2015, 17:28), like many
French-Canadians, I descend from a distant Indigenous grandmother. And this is a story I used to
tell.
Fast forward this story 400 years to today. After generations of exile, persecutions, and
inter-marriages (Petitpas, n.d) out of Indigeneity, only the French language and culture have
survived in me. Through a series of complex “colonial happenings” (Madden, 2019, p. 286), I
am not connected to the land (Mi’kma’ki), the people (L’nu), or the language (Mi’kmawi’simk)
of my distant ancestors. Cree Elder Willie Ermine (Sturgeon Lake First Nation) is right; I am
poor, my memory has been erased, and I need an awakening (NCCIE, 2019, 3:05-4:25). [...] | en_US |
