#acadian

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.

K-Pop Demon Hunters, but (early 1700's) Canada 🇨🇦

I wanted to hop on this trend a while ago, but coming from Canada and its history of colonization made it ~incredibly complicated~

So I treated it like a research project to learn more about the peoples who were here long before my settler ancestors arrived in Canada ~350 years ago. I tried to incorporate said research into this illustration.

Do not get me started on this.

Le grand dérangement was about 1755. In the 1930s and 40s children were beaten by teachers for speaking French, even though it was all they knew. All four of my grandparents, my great-grandparents also, had stories of this happening to them personally. Our language is nearly dead because of this.

I'm Acadian. The French-Indian war was a genocide where the Native led Wabanaki Confederacy was dismantled, lands were stolen, people slaughtered, and cultures were destroyed. The Acadians who lived under it were considered 'too European' to massacre outright so instead they were either forcibly shipped back to France, Louisiana, or forced to flee deeper into Canada. My family fled deeper into Canada. Wabanaki Confederate lands became Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Acadians shipped to Louisiana combined their culture with the local Creole culture and formed the Cajun culture through a shared language of French, and experiences of being uprooted from their homes (Cajun is how Creole people would say "Acadian").

To allow my cultural history to be forgotten for the shared "White culture" would complete the genocide. Lands conquered, History forgotten, Lies adopted. To say the British who committed genocide on my ancestors and my ancestors are actually the same people is an insult and revisionism. That is what white culture is trying to do to European-descendant identities. It is what it did to black americans, cutting them from their history and culture and lands.

Rappie pie is one of those dishes for the Acadians of Nova Scotia. It is not fast. It is not simple. It is a spell disguised as a recipe. You grate potatoes until your hands ache. You squeeze out the liquid. You build broth from chicken or rabbit or whatever your family once lived on. You layer and fold and pour and bake until the whole house smells like history warming itself.

That is witchcraft.

Doing the same work your ancestors did.

Repeating motions they once repeated.

Calling back memory through food.

When you cook something like rappie pie, you are holding the same ingredients they held, feeling the same textures they felt, feeding yourself with the same survival they relied on. You become the link in a chain that refuses to break.

It is grounding. It is honoring. It is spellwork that doesn’t need herbs or incense because the magic is the labor, the heat, and the remembering.

If you want to practice witchcraft through cooking, start with a dish like this. Something messy. Something time-consuming. Something your people made when they needed comfort or warmth or strength.

Food like that does not just fill the stomach.