Québecadie Sorcellerie

Got to enjoy some traditional loom weaving at the Farmers’ Wives Circle of Québec’s community centre back home, and I caught the weaving bug for sure 🩷 might make a vest out of my cloth once I receive it :) I made 43 inches of cloth in 9 hours. For those with experience, they can do dishcloths in 2 hours.

It’s at the end of the roll, so other weavers will add their works on those warps and they’ll all get cut once the roll is filled!

The Leclerc loom company also makes tabletop looms too, for smaller handicrafts like scarves and coasters, and I’m sure, woven ceintures fléchées! They go about 1500$! All the more reason to start saving up! Lord knows I don’t have the space for the big ones, but my mom’s saving up her money for one. Just imagine all the cool witchy things I could end up making, all while following a time-honoured weaving tradition.

My great grandma and grandma were both regional presidents of their circles, and my mom was like please, come home to get into it! I’ll visit as often as I can, budget permitting. I really needed this vacation, to finally get to reconnect with my roots.

Le Cercle des Fermières du Québec: a homemaking and heritage knowledge hub

Founded in 1915, this organisation allowed women in rural Québec communities to pass on traditional crafts, recipes, working bees and community fundraisers. It helped create a cooperative community space where the care of children, the household well-being, and the household budget could be worked on together; through the sale of crafts, baked goods, household items and more. It helped circumvent the increasing industrialization, urbanization and reliance on outside foods (like fast foods etc) that pushed many of their children into cities, where knowledge would then be inevitably lost.

The first circles were located in Chicoutimi, Roberval, Champlain, Saint-Agapit et Plessisville. Thanks to the department of agriculture, even today, circles receive small financial supports, which help fund all the traditional crafts supplies. Farmer’s markets, Christmas markets and more also help with the yearly budget. They also fundraise for foundations like MIRA among others with raffles for their most prized blankets or ‘catalognes’.

I also finally got my hands on some two ply Québec wool that are ideal of weaving sashes!!! I’m in heaven.

Today’s the Great Upheaval Remembrance Day, and I read in some communities of Prince Edward Island, some Acadians would wear black stars on December 13th for Acadian Remembrance Day (commemorating and mourning for those lost at sea that day during the island’s deportation convoys aboard the Duke William, the Violet and the Ruby on that day. Entire families drowned in these shipwrecks).

So, to unite those two days, I made my own black star pin! It’s made of cotton velveteen and a flowery cotton back, and I beaded the borders to give my thoughts to my Mi’kmaq and Acadian ancestors that fought, escaped and sometimes, were deported together. A pewter Acadian Deportation Cross graces its centre.

I found the perfect frame for my one Saint-John’s Wort harvest of the year! It’s a great way to have protection year-round thanks to the summer solstice’s and the saint’s energies!

I gave the first speech, and was honored to share to an audience of three different congregations in attendance, just how much she did:

How she shared with me what ministry is all about, and with the Passing of the Peace, how she gave us an opportunity to take up that mantle. Not only that, but to all volunteers in the Church events and social justice committees.

How she invited Truth and Reconciliation commissioner Dr. Marie Wilson and her husband Stephen Kakfwi from NWT for the Sept 30th service, and in turn they gave us the tools we needed to keep fighting for Indigenous rights and social justice.

How she facilitated drag shows on the church sanctuary stage in open invitation to parishioners for attendance, and helped facilitate/organise queer services for our local 2SLGBTQIA+ folks. She ministered my wedding, baptized me in my new name and gender, all in a month’s time.

At every single Sunday service, without fail, she opens with a true message of wholehearted welcome to all (no matter if you are a regular attendee or a curious first timer). I pulled, in front of that congregation (2/3rd of whom never met me before), a Tarot card I had pulled while writing the speech: the High Priestess (very fitting for her!). The congregation applauded and laughed in genuine heartfelt awe!

At least 15 people afterwards told me to get into ministry. No gasps about Tarot, no scandalized older folks. Just sincerely curious, genuinely loving, emotionally available people worshipping together and adoring how other people approach faith. And almost everyone who spoke to me afterwards were so thankful for my speech and how it helped them reflect on their own pain points with their faith, and how moving and raw it was.

I’m so so lucky to have this community, no matter what I’ll end up doing.

I pray and I hope other believers get the same insane luck I did in having her and others like her, as a minister. May other ministers strive to represent that kind of radical love and acceptance.

The vibes I bring to the function vs the energy I got back:

It’s coming along! I worked on the pleats of the skirts, the sleeve assembly (not yet set into the body), and the back lining. I also assembled the pocket flaps, shoulder wings. I’ll keep the front closures on that selvedge to honor the blanket coat’s history (sometimes being made from blankets). God I love working with wool.

Let's use the apothecary work sheet on an iconic herb in the Acadian pantry, the Summer Savory (Sarriette d'été). This page can help you get some spell-work correspondences due to associations you write within.

I got to know summer savory when I moved to Nova Scotia. Outside the Maritimes, it's not an herb you see often in supermarkets, and if you do, thank you, Farmer John's Herbs! It pairs great with potatoes, different meats, and other root vegetables, and is a staple in the Acadian pantry. How did it become a staple among our people? It's a story emblematic of our displacement and resilience.

The lore often points to the town of Burnt Church, New Brunswick, and the Robichaud family.

The herb made its way from Europe with our French ancestors, and thrived in our 17th century kitchen gardens. Following the capture of Louisbourg by the British in July 1758, Col. James Murray was sent to destroy Acadian settlements in the Miramichi region. On 17 September 1758, Murray reported spending two days in Miramichi Bay looking unsuccessfully for Acadians, but destroying anything he found; one of them being the first stone church built in New Brunswick. No Mi'kmaq or Acadian was safe from those raids. My own family sought refuge in Camp d'Espérance, along the Miramichi River. It's a region that was rife with starvation, hiding out, and great suffering. (1).

Through the Acadian Expulsion, our gardens were scorched to the ground, and we were forced to either live out in abject poverty and forced service in the American Colonies, or find a way to come back home in secret. Once we did come back to the Maritimes (when we were legally 'allowed' to come back), we were given poor land for cultivation (our previous fertile lands occupied by New England settlers brought in by the Crown and their N-E Protestant co-conspirators), or did subsistence fishing on the isolated coastlines. (1) The sturdy, hardy summer savory plant was still growing in the ditches of neighbouring farms and on rocky highland cliff sides of coastal communities, helping sustain us through the consequential poverty we endured in the nineteenth century into the early-twentieth..

A descendant of the deported Acadians, Jean Prudent Robichaud (1867-1958) supposedly acquired the seeds from a Mi'kmaq woman from the Esgenoôpetitj First Nation at Burnt Church, NB, while he was working on Mi’kmaq farms with his draft horse. (2) Both Mi'kmaq and Acadians were forced to compete for meagre resources following the Seven Years' War and the Acadian Expulsion, and as a result, that pre-deportation cooperative relationship soured. It's something I'm hoping gets remediated, as I see examples of really terrible racism and vandalism (I think of the Baie Sainte-Marie lobster fishing rights being challenged by some Acadian/settler fishermen, causing loss of catch/materials/livelihood vehicles in the Sipekne'katik First Nation in 2020, and ongoing to this day.) (4)

This shared history of loss, oppression, forced subsistence agriculture, and the intimacy and comfort of Acadian cooking make it a powerful herb to recall your Acadian ancestors, and to start allyship workings.

It's a plant that is so closely tied to Acadian culture, I wanted to share just how soul-sustaining and cooperative our culture is, courtesy of the University of Maine's Culture Focus page on the Acadians and our cultural values:

Spirit of cooperation; some Acadians say its from cooperatively building and maintaining miles of dykes; others say it is evident in the number of successful fishing, farming and other economic Co-ops.

Adapting to and thriving in new circumstances, as evidenced by the maintenance and evolution of Acadian culture in all areas of the world where Acadians live.

Joyful pleasure in family gatherings and festivities, as evidenced by vibrant music and performances, and by summer family reunions attended by thousands of relatives. (3)

With those key features in mind, Summer Savory can be used in holiday cooking to incite warmth and love, help you in social justice and community efforts to replenish your strength (it being such a hardy plant), and doing spells for adaptability and embracing change.

The following care instructions are taken directly from the Albert County Museum & RR Bennett Centre.

Culinary uses: Summer savory is a common herb in Atlantic Canada and associated with holiday food. For example, turkey stuffing for Thanksgiving is made with summer savory rather than sage. Summer savory plays a significant role in Acadian food culture. The herb is the main seasoning in fricot (rabbit or chicken stew). It is also a component of the Herbes de Provence mix.

Crop description: Compared to modern varieties of summer savory, Ancienne d’Acadie is a short, stocky plant with a strong flavour. It grows 8-12 inches in height and is more cold-resistant than modern varieties. The plant is quite beautiful with delicate small leaves and a profusion of light purple blooms, which attract bees and other pollinators.

Growing: Direct-seed in the spring after threat of frost has passed. During the season, tip-propagation can be used to acquire new plants. It can be harvested throughout the growing season or just cut in the fall. It pairs well alongside onions and beans, enhancing their flavours, and keeps aphids away.

Seedsaving: The variety must be isolated from other varieties of summer savory in order to keep the variety pure. The seeds are tiny and care must be taken while processing seeds to avoid losing the seeds with the chaff. Norbert Robichaud harvests the small seed pods in early November. He crushes and winnows these in a light breeze. He cleans the seeds by rolling the rest of the seed on a sheet of paper, and gently blowing the remaining chaff of the seed. (2)

Another Traditional Seed-Saving Method: Women of the household would cut the twigs from the summer savory bush to dry them for winter. Once cultivated, the leaves of picked off the stems. The stems have little seeds attached to them. The seeds would then be dried, and placed in glass containers for winter storage. Once all the foliage was consumed, the seeds would always be found at the bottom of the glass for sowing in spring!

You can grab your seeds here at Écoumène Édaphon in Saint-Damien, Québec, once they're back in stock:

So, here's the page example in English for all of you lovely folks, but I'll write things by hand in French for my own records:

Sources

John Mack Faragher. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland. W.W Norton & Company, 2005. 562 pages. 

Albert County Museum & RR Bennett Centre. Summer Savory: The Herb of Acadie.

https://umaine.edu/teachingcanada/culture-focus-acadia-acadians/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/commercial-lobster-fishing-indigenous-rights-dfo-9.6995262