Charleen Touchette

- a novel by Charleen Touchette and S. Barry Paisner

It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl
ISBN: 0-9746545-0-7 PD 2004
Library of Congress Control Number:   2004100228
by Charleen Touchette
TouchArt Books
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Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505
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Meanwhile, I was welcomed into a Jewish family and introduced to Judaism where I discovered a religion that supported its families and helped create peaceful homes. When Barry took me to my first Passover Seder, I repeated, "I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I was a slave in Egypt."
I delighted in sampling Eastern European recipes that bubbies had carried in their memories while fleeing pogroms in Russia clutching their little ones, with precious Shabbat candlesticks, Kiddush cups, and Siddurs hidden in shawls thrown over their backs. They settled in Canada because there were quotas to keep Jews out of the United States. Barry's Baba Rachel Feldman was well educated and spoke thirteen languages fluently. She fled the Ukraine after the Red Army seized her family's brick factory in Zhitomir near Kiev during the Russian Revolution. Rachel got typhus and lost all her hair. The Red Calvary was about to hang her oldest brother when a handsome lieutenant stopped the hanging saying he was not their enemy. Field Marshall Lieutenant Budenny later became a Russian general in World War II who fought Hitler's Army. At eighteen years old Rachel left Russia alone headed for Fargo, North Dakota to meet the man her parents had arranged for her to marry. En route through Poland, she fell asleep, and the Polish women slit her skirt and stole the gelt her mother had sewn into her hem. Somehow she got to Winnipeg, where she learned that her fiancé in America had died while she was on her way to wed him. Rachel stayed in Canada and worked in the garment factories until she met an older man from a nearby shtetl in Russia.
Barry's grandfather Morris Pevsner had fled Russia, the Czar's Cossacks, and his family's pressure to become a rabbi during a pogrom decades before. When he and his brother Louis arrived in Montreal, the customs agent renamed them Paisner. Morris journeyed to Northern Manitoba and trapped with the Cree before opening a trading post on the edge of the remote Way-Way See-Capo Reserve. Morris' first wife had died in childbirth leaving an infant daughter, who he had been forced to put in an orphanage.
After Rachel and Morris married, they retrieved the baby girl. and at the end of winter in 1927, they had a son. Rachel's life on the Canadian frontier was grueling. The trading post was near the southern boundary of what would become Riding Mountain National Park when Barry's father Hy was two years old. Their cabin had no indoor heat, electricity, running water, or plumbing. Rachel helped Morris run the trading post, chopped wood, and burned toast on the wood stove each morning. Hy grew up speaking Cree, as well as Yiddish and English, and still loves the taste of burnt toast.
Nurtured by his intellectual mother, Hy graduated first in his class so he could be one of the few Jews admitted to medical school. There were quotas to keep Jews out of medicine too, even in Canada. In Winnipeg, Hy fell in love. Sheila was a city girl at the University of Manitoba. Her mother Lillian was a small child in the early 1900s when she hid with her family in ditches by the roadsides as they fled Russia by night. Sheila's father Henry was a first generation Canadian whose Orthodox dad forced him to quit school and go to work to support his thirteen children so he could study Torah in shul all day. Henry did not have much patience for organized religion, but he liked Hy as soon as he found out the earnest young man with horned rimmed glasses was a medical student. After they married, Hy and Sheila departed Estevan where he practiced as a country doctor, and she gave birth to their first two sons. They moved to Minneapolis when Barry was a boy, so his dad could study at the University of Minnesota and specialize in otolaryngology. There they connected with a group of expatriates who had moved south to Minneapolis for opportunity and the "warm weather." Surrounded by the smiling faces of Barry's extended family, I felt at home at last. Visits to Minneapolis soon became more frequent than to Woonsocket.

L'DOR v'DOR
The mémères would smile to see Liesette cuddling with her daddy. So many generations of pain, secrets, and rage paid the way so my daughter could sit safe and protected in her daddy’s arms. I was not the first girl to be abused in my family. Many lived through much worse. Some did not survive. When I remember what my French mémères and pépères, and Indian grandmothers and grandfathers endured, I can understand why some unleashed their hurt on their families.
How did love and cruelty become so entwined, so inextricably connected that they were like right and left hands, or even right and left sides of the same face? How did cruelty become such a natural part of the family that love was used as the excuse to hide it? How did loyalty become defined as refusing to tell? It would be easy to say it started with my father’s drinking, but that is too simple. The damage started long before Archie took his first drink.
It could go back to my father being sent away to boarding school when he was barely twelve years old – or when Maman opted to exchange the cruelty of poverty for that of my father’s temper – or when her maman, encouraged her to marry the tall handsome up and coming dentist. It could have begun even earlier when Mimi, desperate for a better life for Colleen than her own as a millworker’s wife, painted her daughter’s thirteen-year-old face and entertained her suitors. Or maybe it was when Mémère Louisia never quite recovered from childbirth. She was always on some kind of medication for her nerves. Maybe Mémère had a bad reaction to some of the pills she popped, or the bottle of red wine she drank alone in the dark. Maybe she lost her temper and turned her rage upon her only son without warning.
It is not just about my family. It is tied to all my relatives and ancestors who suffered oppression. The women of my lineage connect me to five hundred years and twenty generations of French Canadian culture in North America, countless centuries and lifetimes of Indian wanderings on this continent, and innumerable ages of peasant life in France. Along with a legacy of dysfunction, I can draw on rich cultural traditions from all my ancestors French, Blood, Québécois, Eastern Woodland Indian, and Acadian. Though rife with struggle, each strand of my peoples’ history was also a tradition of fortitude.
Although merely an unrecorded footnote in the bigger history of the meeting of French and indigenous people, my story can not be complete without considering the intimate personal moment when Pépère Lambert met his Pied Noir beauty and convinced her to be the mother of his children. Through her, I am linked to her mother and grandmothers who foraged and cared for children and valiant horse stealing husbands while they set up and broke camp season after season, year after year, in their strenuous nomadic life following the buffalo across the Northern Plains. And back through time from daughter to mother to grandmother in an unbroken line of Indian mothers who faced the same struggles birthing, nurturing and protecting their children through centuries of wanderings.
The sorrowful part of my grandmothers’ legacy goes back to those women of the Blackfeet Confederacy who were kidnapped and raped, stolen far from their territory as spoils of war in the continual battles against the Cree, Flathead, and Crow, and to those taken as prisoners of war who were traded into slavery to warriors from other tribes or French Voyageurs. And to the wives whose dignified faces were mutilated when their husbands cut off their noses to punish infidelity. The heartbreak can be traced to the pitiful mourning of the clan mothers and grandmothers who wept and keened cutting their hair and slashing their flesh and clothes repeatedly throughout 1819, when the Coughing Epidemic killed a third of the Blackfeet. And to their daughters who mourned inconsolably in 1837 when smallpox infected trade goods brought in by whites wiped out two-thirds of those who had survived, and any hope of retaining their land and resisting Western Expansion.
My grandmother also came from generations of proud Blood women who helped create a society where a woman could divorce an abusive husband simply by removing his belongings and placing them outside her tipi. And through her I draw inspiration from those virtuous women who fulfilled their vows to put up the Medicine Lodge for the Sun Dance Ceremony. And from those who gathered sweetgrass and sage on the endless plains for the ceremonies and trudged deep into the steep mountain forests to find flat cedar and herbal medicines. And from the humble ones who took on the grave responsibility of caring for the Medicine Pipe Bundles and their painted tipis. And spinning back through the generations ultimately to the brave girl who married Thunder and patiently learned the songs and ceremonies of the Pipe he gave to her as a gift to the People. And even to those animals who offered their skins and medicine songs to be remembered in the ceremonies. Ultimately connecting everyone back to Oki, the Creator Old Man who together with Old Woman made the people from lumps of clay, determined how they would live, and taught them what they needed to know to survive. To Oki, who decided that they would not live forever so they would learn compassion for one another.
My story is also connected to my Aucoin, Hébert, Lavallee, and Lambert ancestors who were among the three hundred “picked men” and “engaged bachelors” from Brittany recruited by order of Cardinal Richelieu in the 1600s to settle Acadia because of their reputation as strong, hard-working, religious people. I am descended from the settler Martin Aucouin and five generations of peace-loving Acadians. And tied to the untold stories of the Indian women and the French Filles de Roi who married the picked men who left France and braved the Atlantic voyage to settle in Port Royal in Acadia, the home of the legendary Evangeline immortalized by Longfellow.
In Acadia, the pépères and mémères worked and lived together, fishing, trapping, and cultivating fields communally and sharing equally the fruits of their work. They reclaimed the marshlands for farming and became experts at building and repairing dykes. Only a few knew how to read or write, but they knew how to live cooperatively. The women welcomed orphans into their modest clean homes and cared for the needy and elderly. Their communities were relatively free from crime for generations. They lived in a simple state of innocence and equality and were opposed to war and violence.
Five generations of Aucoin women strove to create a peaceful life in Nova Scotia in little Acadian towns like Grand Pré and Cobequid until the Expulsion of 1755 when all Acadians who refused to deny their heritage and swear allegiance to England were expelled. They left behind mementoes of our Acadian family history that are lost to their descendants forever. When they sought justice and compassion on both sides of the Atlantic, they found it nowhere and left us with a new history of bitter exile.
So naturally, to understand how Mémère Louisia, who was so proud of her Acadian heritage, could raise her hand against Little Archie, I must also remember what happened to my gentle Acadian ancestors on that fateful day, September 5, 1755 when they were ordered to congregate at the Catholic Church at Grand Pré at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon. Huge ships were moored in the harbor. British soldiers surrounded the church to prevent escape. Those who refused to take an oath of allegiance to England were herded onto the waiting transport ships with bayonets at their backs, deported immediately, and permanently banished from their beloved L’Acadie.
I am tied to the pépères and mémères who stood helplessly as the British separated families, and took them away forever from each other and their tranquil homeland. And to those who saw the glow of the flames and great billows of smoke rise from their church, mills, homes, and barns burning to the ground on the receding shore as they sailed out of the sheltered harbor.
Pépère Pierre Aucoin was among the two thousand Acadians who escaped into the woods. I imagine he survived by hiding in the brush by day starving on what little he could forage in the Canadian forest in late September. Pursued doggedly by soldiers who hunted the fugitive Acadians like animals, he fled, bushwhacking through the dark forest at night until, clothes in tatters barely concealing his nakedness, feet frostbit, and bleeding, he finally found refuge at the village of St. Pierre Les Becquets in Quebéc.
I am also tied to those who stayed behind hidden deep in the forests protected by their Indian friends, who watched while everything that was left behind was burned or stolen by the British soldiers and settlers. They saw their enemies plow the land they cleared of boulders, harvest the fields they reclaimed from marshland, let the dykes they maintained crumble into ruin, pull the nets they made in from the sea, and sleep in the beds where they conceived and pushed out their babies.
My heritage is also connected to the ones who were shipped back to exile in France, unwelcome and shunned in their motherland as well as betrayed repeatedly by the French government. And to the countless cousins like Ann Aucoin who drowned when the overloaded ships sunk to the ocean floor. I am also tied to the even unluckier cousins who were sold into slavery in the West Indies. And to the ones who died in the unbearable heat of Santo Domingo where they emigrated after the colony of New York refused to welcome them. And to the one hundred and thirty-eight who left exile in France only to die in the tropical inferno of French Guiana on the coast of South America. And to the ones who fled slavery in the Deep South with the Blacks on sugar and cotton plantations in Georgia. And to the two hundred and thirty seven Acadians who died of smallpox when they sat captive aboard transport vessels for three months in Philadelphia’s harbor. And to the brave ones who were taken as prisoners of war to England and held in concentration camps in port cities like Liverpool. And to the more than two thousand Acadians who were deported to Massachusetts and labored like slaves under the harsh treatment of the Bostonians. And to the sixty brave families who left Boston and marched eighteen hundred miles back to Acadia on foot, pregnant women, children and all. And to those few broken souls who survived the trek home, only to be forced to continue wandering like ghosts of a quickly fading past from village to village finding refuge in none.
I can trace my lineage directly to cousins who sailed on some of the seven ships carrying Acadians back to the States, like LeBon Papa with Francoise Aucoin tightening sails and swabbing decks as a seaman. And to the Aucoin, Touchette, Lavallée, Lambert, and Hébert cousins who were carried from exile in France to Louisiana to rebuild lives shattered by their exodus from Acadia in communities like Lafourche, St. Landry, and St. Martinville where they came to be known as Cajuns. Their descendants’ names now clutter the phonebooks of Lafayette and other Louisiana towns.
But understanding my heritage would not be complete without considering my Woodland Indian ancestors’ contribution to my gene pool. My Voyageur pépères’ Indian wives passed down genes that had no defense against smallpox, influenza, diabetes, and alcoholism. But we also benefited from their genetic legacy. Their distinctive facial structure is echoed in our faces and classic hawk-like noses. Their legendary fierceness in battle is evident in my son Sage’s fearlessness as a wrestler. The deep connection to the earth and clan survived among the ma tantes and mon oncles at the camps around Pépères’ Lake. The trail linking us to our Woodland ancestors was blurred and nearly erased by cultural genocide, but they etched their legacy onto our genes and determined who we are.
So, my roots, as with so many other Canucks, may be connected to the Abenaki and Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy whose matrilineal structure and Council of Clan Mothers selected the chiefs and kept them accountable to the tribe. And to the clan mothers who raised strong capable girls and taught them to make every decision guided by the wisdom of the previous seven generations always considering the impact it would have on the next seven generations into the future. And to the families who were entrusted with caring for and feeding the False Face and Corn Husk entities. And to the shamans who danced and sung their ceremonies bringing the world into harmony for healing, ensuring the return of spring, the success of the harvest, and the proper sequence of the seasons. And to the mothers and grandmothers who cultivated the fields, carefully planting the Three Sisters together as their ancestors taught them so the beans’ vines would wind around the sturdy corn stalks and the broad squash leafs would shade the roots. And to the women who tanned deerskin and fashioned moccasins so their men could move noiselessly through the forests and return home safely to the longhouses. And perhaps even to the Ojibwe who paddled silent canoes on woodland lakes and rivers braving mythical creatures to bring huge lake trout and sturgeon home to their wickiups.
It is linked to the fierce warriors who allied with the French and fought the French Indian Wars from the late 1600’s until 1763 to expel the British invaders from their ancestral lands, and lost. But it is also tied to the healers who gathered medicinal herbs in the forests and the beadworkers who beaded the secrets of the plants into decorative patterns to teach their daughters and granddaughters herbal medicine.
Just like it took generations to make a man like Archie, it took generations of mothers and grandmothers to make women like Philomêne and Mimi. Generations of strong women came before us, like Philomêne’s maman, Mémère Philomêne Lambert, and her full blood mother who married and became Suzanne Lambert leaving her Kainah name behind. From Mimi’s stories, I imagined her stuffing her Indian name deep into her memory until she could barely remember its syllables as she traveled thousands of miles from home and each year passed without hearing the sounds of her native language. Having no one to speak with, she probably forgot, word by word, until the only time she heard it was when she dreamed of her grandmother telling her Blood stories of Oki. When she awoke from these dreams she would smell a trace of burnt sage and sweetgrass. When Suzanne’s babies were born, she probably sang Blackfeet lullabies to soothe them to sleep and tried to teach them simple words as they grew. But there were no adults to talk with, and when her children grew older they were embarrassed by her strange words. Eventually, she spoke only French.
I wonder how she felt when she packed her belongings on a travois and left her tribe to follow her Frenchman East. Was she in love with the dapper stranger with the dark mustache and eyes who spoke a curious melodious language and was clad in buckskins with curling floral beadwork made by Indian women of the People of the Dawn she heard about in warrior’s tales? Was he as exotic to her as she seemed to him? Was it love at first sight? Did his difference attract or repel her? Maybe she was a practical girl who noticed his rifle and saw a good hunter and provider for her yet-to-be-born children. She may have chosen to marry outside her tribe because she thought the future was with the newcomers with their powerful weapons and strange ways. Or maybe she was an adventurous girl who wanted to see what lie in the land where the sun rose. She could have gone unwillingly too, wrenched from her family as a bartering chip in the new economy the Voyageurs imposed on the Plains. Or worse, she could have been raped, if not by Pépère, then by other drunken Voyageurs, or by warriors from rival tribes who raided villages for slaves and horses. If she were one of those battered ones, she hid her sorrow well, and kept her secrets as she prayed her rosary and walked down the hill to Mass each morning until her one hundred fourth year.
It did not start with my family or with Mimi’s either. It must be linked to the generations upon generations of oppression back to the explorers and adventurers who trudged and portaged the uncharted forests, rivers, and woodland lakes trapping and trading with the Abenaki, Mohawk, Iroquois, Ojibwe, Lakota, Cree, and Blackfeet - back to the Voyageurs who met and married, seduced or raped the Indian women who bore their children. Sojourning in towns throughout French Canada along the Rivière Saint-Laurent, they married and birthed their babies in places with mysterious names like Yamaska, Sorel, St. Hyacinthe, St. Damase, and St. Robert. I wonder how many of those women made love matches, and how many cowered in the face of their espousés, and how many half breed children got the brunt of their parents’ despair.
Or it may be rooted farther back in the struggles of the starving ancestors from nearly every province and all four directions of France who tired of trying to pull nourishment from that land and left the Haute-Pyrénees, the provinces of Anjou, Poitou, Champagne, Normandy, Provence, Bretagne, and the Rhone Valley to take their chances sailing to New France, seeking cultural and religious freedom, adventure, and economic opportunity. And back to p’tite Marie Touchet spreading her legs for King Charles IX on brocade sheets so her family could eat cake while an ocean away, Abenaki women greeting Voyageurs with gifts from the sea and forest received love or betrayal in return, on back through the generations to the first molested girl and raped woman.
Always it goes back to the women, struggling to put food in the stomachs of their many children, to keep warm clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet. And to the men, who labored with no relief to feed their large families in the unexplored Canadian wilderness. To the pépères who broke their backs tilling infertile lands, trapping, and hunting in the piercing solitude of frozen forests, or fishing, trawling, and laying lobster traps from fishing boats on the frigid maritime seas. And to the fathers who were so downtrodden by political oppression and poverty that every vestige of their self-esteem was destroyed. Feeling powerless, beleaguered by the wailing of too many hungry mouths to feed, they tried to dull their anguish with alcohol and gambling, but often ended up venting their frustrations on their wives and children.
Ultimately, it goes back to the Catholic Church that gave them all solace even as it created, supported, and benefited from the conditions oppressing them. Patterns -patterns of oppression and reacting to oppression and internalizing oppression until men are drinking and beating women and children to forget the humiliation of their lives, and women are manipulating and sacrificing those children to have some semblance of control over theirs.
All those centuries produced Archie. The miracle was that he wasn’t worse. Suddenly the image of my father’s angry monster face was transformed into his maman’s raging lipstick red mouth, and it was little Archie cowering defenseless instead of me, and I understood we were both just links in an unending chain of cruelty handed down generation to generation on back through the decades with the Lavallée girls vainly clenching their thighs closed against their daddy, the workers sublimating themselves to the mill bosses, the Acadians herded and separated with bayonets, the Québécois fleeing persecution in Canada, the Blackfeet dying of smallpox wrapped in US Army blankets, the Mohawk women and warriors dispersed from Six Nations in another diaspora, and the French peasant women struggling to feed and protect their daughters from rapists, marauders, and marquis.
Like my French and Native ancestors, my path led me far from my birth home and culture. Like my Indian grandmothers, I met and married a handsome stranger and adopted his ways and religion. But unlike them, I found a sweeter way of life to bequeath to my daughter.
How did it get to the point where men and women are at war, and their children are the swords they wield against each other? It is not just about my family and my ancestry. I don’t know when it started, but I do know where it is ending. It is stopping right here with me. I choose a different legacy for my children to pass generation to generation. I was not the first girl to be abused in my family. But I will be the first to say, c’est fini. No more. It stops here with me.