Throughout her youth, Daphnée Poirier crossed the Abenaki reserve of Odanak without stopping, simply because it was a must to get to her home in Notre-Dame-de-Pierreville., in his grandparents’ house.
Was it under the pressure of a maternal grandfather unwilling to reveal the indigenous identity of his wife that all this part of the author’s family heritage was erased? The fact remains that when this grandfather died, Daphnée Poirier’s uncle obtained his registered Indian card, and his mother, a Métis self-declaration card. Daphnée Poirier’s grandmother told her that she had half-brothers and half-sisters living on the reserve.
It is in the light of these events that Daphnée Poirier signs her essay Why am I not an Indian, published by Écosociété. What she demonstrates is that it is not enough for her to prove that she has Aboriginal “blood” (Daphnée Poirier deliberately uses the word Indian, as in the Indian Act) to claim status. You have to know this culture and soak it up. And this identity process is not instantaneous.
“Status cannot give back everything a culture can offer,” she said in an interview from Sutton, where she lives. At a time when the fact that many personalities claim Indian status is called into question — from filmmaker Michelle Latimer to artist Sylvain Rivard, including professor Alexandra Lorange and municipal councilor Marie-Josée Parent — the process identification with First Nations is tricky. “We are suddenly thrown into a climate of distrust, where identity theft is a constant threat,” she writes.
“There is a lot of dissension on this subject even within the First Nations”, she says again, noting the power of the band council, this “contested” authority, which is a creation of the Indian Act.
Belong to a community
However, Daphnée Poirier clearly establishes it, to claim an Aboriginal identity, it is necessary not only to have an Indian genealogy, but also to belong to a community.
“Beyond the arguments of self-declaration of identity, the community to which I claim to belong should also recognize that I am part of it. How can I be recognized when this community does not know me? Who am I to walk up there and say, “Hello, it’s me. I am one of you!” she writes.
Rather than in the Abenaki reserve of Odanak, from which her maternal great-grandfather would have come, Daphnée Poirier seeks in her relationship to the territory, in particular in Sutton, in the Eastern Townships, where she has lived for 14 years, the traces of its lost autochthony. She relates that the Abenakis, a nomadic people, crossed this territory between Odanak and Swanton which is called Missisquoi, from the very name of the “Missisquoi Indians, of the Saint-François tribe or Abenakis”, who would have testified before the Governor of Quebec in 1766.
As though stripped by the years of her forgotten Abenaki identity, Daphnée Poirier examines the values associated with the Aboriginal culture that she wants to appropriate, rather than claiming a hollow legal identity.
First and foremost, it is the defense of the environment that touches her, even if she fears falling into the trap of an overly romantic vision of the Native living in harmony with nature.
“In the Abenaki language, the words ‘human’ and ‘nature’ both translate to alnobawogan, they are inseparable…”
Along the way, she salutes the resistance work of activists from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota, to resist the route of the Dakota Access pipeline, that of the Wet’suwet’en, in British Columbia, against the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline, or those who participate in the Healing Walk in Alberta each year by exposing themselves to the fumes of the oil sands.
For example, it publishes in appendix a letter from the Cree sociologist Angele Alook, of the Bigstone Nation, in Alberta, who protests against the proposals of companies wishing to exploit the oil sands.
Many paradoxes
Whether she claims Indian status or not, Daphnée Poirier highlights many paradoxes surrounding the perception of Native Americans in Canada. Between praise and ostracism, we don’t have, she says in an interview, a “normal relationship” with Aboriginal identity.
“In the past, according to the will of her grandfather, “the mere mention of a potential belonging to an indigenous lineage was quickly ignored and sometimes rebuffed, at least until the death of Grandma’s husband, my maternal grandfather”, she writes.
“However, Mom,” she adds, continually but without overemphasizing, “reminds me that we belong to the Abenaki lineage. »
These contradictions are “not easy to resolve”, she acknowledges. “And it is certainly not me who will provide clear answers. »
These centuries of rejection of Aboriginal people, followed by a certain recognition or even a desire to join them, have left their mark. “It’s going to take time” to untangle all of this, she said.
Perceived by her as a “first pebble” on her identity journey, her essay, in these times of ulcerated identity questions, raises more questions than it provides answers.