Missing Branches

Trigger warning: If reading this piece causes any crisis or distress, call the Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419

This pieces serves as an introduction to Jen. Step into her apron in The True Life of Jen.

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As far as we know, my great-grandmother Jeanette, or 'Jen' as she was known to friends, may have been wholly or partially Indigenous Canadian, possibly of the Mi'kmaq or Wolastoqiyik people. Even to those closest to her, the topic of her ancestry was not something she felt comfortable discussing at length openly; whatever the names and memories were on that branch of the tree no one will ever know for certain.

What we do know is as a survivor of a Canadian Catholic-school system in the late 1800's — however or whyever she was forced to attend — her primary lesson had been to hide her identity, and she succeeded spectacularly. The majority of the formal records of her life are either murky or missing, unable to be traced even by professionals, and what little we do know primarily stems from oral histories.

The basic facts of Jen's adult life in early 1900's New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are as follows:

We know that sometime around the turn of the 20th century, she married a Scottish immigrant with whom she had just seven children. I write "just" because seven was considered a small family in New Brunswick at the time, with the most probable explanation owing to my great-grandfather spending long months away from his wife while labouring at various carpentry jobs around the province.

And we know that when it came time for her own babies to attend school, Jeanette somehow convinced the education ministry that their surname 'McDonald' had been documented incorrectly and truthfully it was spelled 'MacDonald,' which was considered to be the Protestant version of the two synonymous surnames where she lived. Thereby cementing once and for all that her children, and those who would come later—including my mother—would be forever free of the school experiences she and her siblings had suffered in their childhoods.

While Jen never spoke more than a sentence or two about the trauma she had endured, one can only assume it must have been profoundly terrorizing to hold such a grip over her that she would take the details, and her real name, to her grave.

But a woman's life is about more than the possibilities of her ethnicity, her aliases, who she married and how many times she gave birth. It's the in-between that makes for good storytelling.

My favourite bedtime stories included learning that my great-grandmother was a local midwife and how she sometimes nursed other people's babies despite having only one breast that produced milk. With rapt fascination, I listened to anecdotes of how she mended wounds with cobwebs, soothed bug bites with mud, and built 'smudge fires' to fend off mosquitoes. I'll forever be in awe of how she saved her middle son, Grover, colloquially diagnosed as a 'blue-baby' by incubating him on the open oven door of her woodstove in a shoebox, lovingly feeding him drops of her milk on the hour until he grew strong.

Her methods clearly raised strong kids: of the three sons that fought for Canada in WWII, all three came home. And though her only daughter to survive infancy, my grandmother Hilda, didn't go to war with her brothers, she certainly triumphed over a heck of a lot of hardships at home, along with the two sons who were ineligible to enlist.

Beyond raising children, great-grandma took pride in her culinary skills. Jeanette regularly treated my mother Ann, her granddaughter, to a tasty piece of sap, believed to have been gathered from spruce trees, which served as a natural type of chewing gum. She was known to artfully bake a porcupine in the ground on special occasions, using a method similar to how other cultures roast pigs. Most famously, she flipped some of the best flapjacks [crepes] on the planet.

As if her life wasn't busy enough, Jeanette managed to find time to pursue arts and crafts. Her favourite project was rug making with materials sourced from her children's clothing scraps. One of those rugs survived long enough to make it into my home as a child. Later, when it started to deteriorate, the rug was returned to New Brunswick to live on in a museum, safe in an anoxic compartment. But, the head curator of textiles never could figure out the exact recipe of the red, black and green dyes she brewed for her rose pattern.

The tale I liked best wasn't exactly your typical bedtime story, however; even if to me, it was the one I most often begged to hear at night when I awoke from a nightmare and couldn't get back to sleep. To this day, it holds the seat of honour as the greatest story I have ever known. I hope, perhaps, it will live on in your memory too.

Trailer: The True Life of Jen

Times were tough in parts of New Brunswick during the WWI years—even before the depression era of the 'dirty-thirties'. It wasn't uncommon for a person of no fixed address to visit a farm or house as he passed through to beg a meal and a place to warm up from a kind stranger.

Unfortunately, the age-old problem with showing kindness to strangers is there will always be those willing to take advantage of the situation. This was one of those time.

Unbeknownst to the traveller, aprons in my great-grandmother's home weren't just for baking and children's tugging. Sometimes, they held a pistol in their pocket.

Unfortunately, this is the only surviving photograph of Jen with her granddaughter.

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