Damn it….it’s just another opportunity to exclude Acadians from the conversation.

I didn’t know to whom I was speaking or why it angered me so. But it was a high seas of emotion that tossed me as I tried to remember why I hadn’t written in my journal for several days. Then I remembered. I’d signed up for a Zoom training about historical trauma, and, for whatever reason, the gremlins who reside in the ethernet never sent an invite to connect, to tie in.

How’s that for a real-life metaphor for exclusion from the conversation? Heh, it wasn’t even about a conversation; it was about listening to someone else’s story. I was excluded from even that.

In a slice of Acadian response (you do with what you’ve got) that Maya Angelou’s grandmother would have understood (if you don’t like the road you’re on, step off and create a new path), I decided to use the time I’d set aside for training to poke around the Internet to learn about generational trauma. It is a subject that has haunted me for at least 20 years. How long does a social or political trauma – the Wars of Religion, the Grand Derangement, the migration to New England mills, the KKK burning crosses on Franco-American lawns in Maine – influence, shape, or direct family beliefs and behaviors and, eventually, the me that emerged from the ancestral pipeline?

Online, I find teachers and trainers talking about the legacy of indigenous massacres and the taking of unceded North American lands by white Europeans and their descendants. Epigenetic changes and the transmission of anxiety like a virus among Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Tulsa massacre and slavery horrors. The likely germination of generational trauma among Rwandans, Uighurs, North Africans living on Paris streets, sex-trafficked blond white girls, Armenian survivors of genocide, and the relatives of disappeared Chileans.

Finally, I find a Canadian site that includes a more direct and personal connection – the recently written stories of ordinary women, and one story in particular by Stephanie Pettigrew https://www.unwrittenhistories.com/ordinary-women-jeanne-dugas-of-acadie/

Among the ordinary women are Jeanne Dugas and Marie Marguerite Rose https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/24584/28525 — a privileged Acadian woman (with whom I share ancestors I know about) who navigated through the Acadian genocide, and a freed slave (with whom I share a deeper ancestry that I don’t know about) who navigated through her kidnapping from Guinea, West Africa to running her own inn with her aboriginal husband. For part of their lives they lived across the street from each other in Louisbourg (Nova Scotia). Why their endurance, survival, and lives are categorized as ordinary befuddles me.

Pettigrew includes commentary about Acadians owning slaves. At least elite Acadians. She writes about the refugees from British pillaged, burned, and ravaged Acadia who themselves ticked off Restigouche tribal chief Joseph Claude when they set up camp on land he governed.

Even when the subject is an Acadian genocide, the story includes the harm done to others.

What is it about Acadians? Is this an example of cultural transmission, a way of seeing the world that weaves its way through the generations?

Through the years in my Little Canada neighborhoods, I often heard – “stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something to help someone else,” or, “that child isn’t from around here so make her/him feel welcome. Go play.”

This from my mother.

But, not my father or older male relatives. They lived a vocally prejudiced version of relations with just about every ethnicity and color of person they came into contact with. If there is such a thing as equal opportunity prejudice, they practiced it.

I think about a phrase from Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town that continues to haunt me: to be Acadian is to be silent. And another observation from the dim recesses of memory that came from an article in Le Forum (https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/francoamericain_forum/) about French mores — you do not promote yourself and your accomplishments. That’s an invitation to the gods to put you in your place, to knock some humility into you.

Are these reasons why the Acadian/French-Canadian/Quebecois/Franco ancestral experience is not part of the mainstream social conversation about atrocities, or at least rotten social interactions?

My husband asked me one night how I felt about reparations. Mixed, I answered. People need to do right by each other. But I don’t know how that looks in the now when one is trying to repair the then. I have yet to sort out how the then is even affecting my own now.

In my personal ancestral history on this continent, there’s an English child kidnapped from his Maine home and marched by the Abenaki to Quebec where he was adopted into a French Canadian home. There’s a male progenitor killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Another is an aboriginal mother whose name is lost to me.

The small group of relatives in ancestor Helene Desportes’ world https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8nes-World-H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-Desportes-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0615738591 included an African youth and indigenous daughters.

French soldiers became habitants. Filles de roi and filles a marier left France to broker their own marriages across the Atlantic sea. Couples cleared indigenous lands and set up farms. At least one ancestor accused a neighbor of witchcraft.

Whole Acadian limbs of the family tree were deported or battled their way into the relative safety of Quebec. In a subsequent generation, Quebecois emigrants were resented by the now settled descendants of Acadian refugees in the no-man’s corner that straddles Quebec, New Brunswick and northern Maine.

More recent ancestors joined the Canadian migration to the mills of New England where, as I once wrote in a poem, my mother was a drop-wire girl spinning cotton picked by sold-men’s sons (in http://www.womencrossingborders.com/HeliotropeFrenchHeritageWomenCreate.html, which Rhea Cote is making available free to libraries and non-profits rhea.robbins@maine.edu).

As a U.S .citizen, I feel a social push to weigh in on reparations for atrocities committed on these lands before mine and me had any stake here. Up bubbles a memory – the observation from one historian talking about Acadia and how the deportation there became the model for the deportation of the Cherokee during The Trail of Tears.

What am I to do with this collision of history, knowledge, and experience? For reconciliation and reparation, do I need to apologize for the ancestors? Do others need to apologize for their ancestors to me? How far back in the then do we go? How much do we focus on the now of individual actions?

Following the ethernet exclusion from the training about historical trauma, I found another program offered through Michigan Blue Cross. In a virtual breakout room after a session on African American historical trauma, four of us shared thoughts. I needed time to formulate mine, so I wrote them down while others talked. The thoughts condensed much of what I’ve been saying here.

Dead silence.

I said “the end,” wary that mentioning Acadians and the complexity of offender and offended might have set a barrier rather than a connection among us.

The woman from England broke the ice. “That’s deep,” she said.

If I tell you that her appearance suggested African roots, would you feel her comment differently?

Our conversation shifted into questions and wondering more than answers and conclusions.

Except for one: we still need to do right by each other.