#acadian

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

I'm planning some sealskin boots based on the Acadian brogannes patterns I shared earlier in the month. I also found a PDF of a person from West St. Modeste in Newfoundland and Labrador explaining how the boots were made, from the preparation of the fur and leather, down to the sewing steps. I'm still collecting resources, and happy to share what I find!

INSPIRED BY TRUE STORIES Which will you sacrifice-the father that raised you, or the nation you adore? Acadia, 1755. Jeanne LeJeune has always lived between worlds-the fierce daughter of a French merchant and a Mi’kmaw woman, she is torn between the quiet rhythms of village life and the wild heartbeats of her mother’s people. But when her father is seized by English soldiers, her fragile peace…

INSPIRED BY TRUE STORIES Which will you sacrifice-the father that raised you, or the nation you adore? Acadia, 1755. Jeanne LeJeune has always lived between worlds-the fierce daughter of a French merchant and a Mi’kmaw woman, she is torn between the quiet rhythms of village life and the wild heartbeats of her mother’s people. But when her father is seized by English soldiers, her fragile peace…

Fundamentally anyone trying to “maxx” in a performance of cultural Catholicism in Europe (as it exists in the American imagination) is showing their ass already because it demonstrates they’re too insecure and their mindset is too anti fun to be capable of truly enjoying these basic aesthetic pleasures. They need to be assured relentlessly that the red wine and dark chocolate are actually good for their heart, they need to know how the boeuf bourguignon effects their macros, they need to be told there’s some health benefit to wearing linen or be assured it will make them more attractive to women. The wine and chocolate and stew can’t just taste good and be enjoyed in good company, the linen can’t just be comfortable and fashionable on its own terms.

Note: traditional Acadian words are in bold and italics

As my sewing studio is now set up, I've been turning my attention to recreating historical Acadian items of clothing, as a tangible connection to my ancestors, and for the sheer practical experiment of understanding how things were made in the past. 

While most of us don't do our own hide tanning anymore, or have ready-access to pelts and leather, I'll still try to source my materials from local hunters and communities, and ask around. I have a friend who attends Inuit amauti workshops and she uses seal fur, so I may be in luck.

Jean-Claude Dupont, in his book Histoire Populaire de l'Acadie, has a section just on the making of various footwear, depending on regions, from Beaubassin, the Magdalen Islands, all the way down to Louisiana. The following is what I've loosely translated from that chapter:

In Beaubassin, they mostly relied on cow hides and a few pelts from the fur trade to make their shoes, or they used wooden clogs to not muck up their leather boots in barns. Thanks to the fur trade pelts many trappers brought through Beaubassin in the 1680s, Acadians were able to trade those for their sought-after commodities from Boston merchant ships. Every man of the household knew how to prepare and tan hides, both from farm animals as well as wild pelts. They'd start by drenching the pelt in alum and salt, and after that treatment, roll it in wood ash. Then, they could scrape off the remaining meat from the pelt with a crooked knife. After the first drying, they'd dip the hide in oil, and let it dry again. (1)

Dosithée Léger, 77 years old in 1973, Robichaud west, New Brunswick. 

Vital Landry of Memramcook, New Brunswick, who was 85 years old in 1967, tanned his hides with alum, salt and bark from the haricot (hemlock tree). Édouard Robichaud of the same village used the same tree bark, but used lime and chicken manure, or charcoal from wood. He then used porpoise oil to treat the hide. 

On the Magdalen Islands, my ancestors were commonly using cod oil, and in the spring, loup-marin oil (that designated any type of local seal to the Madelinot Acadians). 

To sew the boots, makers used linen or hemp thread, coated in brai (a resin substance made from vegetable resins from trees like pine or machequoui (bouleau, birch), sometimes, made with tarry substances). There are three usual designs for Acadian boots of this kind: the canisteaux, the brogannes, and the hausses. 

Canisteaux were often made from either moose, deer or cow hide. They were sometimes called caristeaux in Chéticamp. Either way, it’s always made from the hind leg of the animal. 15 to 20 inches of the hind leg’s shank area were stripped from the leg, and pulled away almost like a big sock off the carcass. The hairs would be kept on, and work on the exterior of the boot for some, or in the interior of the boot for others, to each their preference. The piece would then be stretched and molded to wooden molds for the foot shape. Eel sinew would be used to close the toe ends of the stretched toe box (pictured below):

Brogannes were ankle-length boots that was notched in the front for the closure, whereas Hausses were the same pattern, but mid-calf high, and the notch opening at the back. The same pattern for the foot can be used, and the leg pattern differs. For winter, these boots can also be knee-length, and on the Magdalen Islands, was also made from seal fur. (See below):

Note: pardon the 'sauvages' designation for these boots above.. it's what they're called in the ethnographic Acadian books, and how my ancestors would have called them. These boots very much are a borrowing of First Nations/Inuit cultures, and this language wasn't ok then and it's not ok now.

From my family’s memoirs: Seal hunting and making boots

Seal hunting still remains a staple of some Madelinot families. Obviously, that knowledge is lost in my family, due to us migrating away in the 1920s. Seal hunting techniques were passed on from neighbours and family, and of course, the first Acadians on the islands learned not just through experience, but through the help of the Mi’kmaq and the Inuit. My great-great grandfather Dominique would put on his home-made crampon leather boots to hunt the seals in the pack ice just offshore, with other men from families nearby. The elder sons also took part in this annual hunt. It was a timely way for families to make up the yearly budget, and even if one man did poorly, the profits were always split among all. Men would bring back the pelt and meat, stories of their exploits, and render the fat into really useful oil. Seal oil was also used to fry croxignoles (traditional woven doughnuts) as a springtime delicacy still treasured today. The pelts were either used to make boots and other items, or be sold for a welcomed boost to the family purse. The hunt would usually begin in March. Every year, wives would get anxious as the men were out hunting. It was well-known that a group of men from the same family all drowned one year, and accidents and exposure were not uncommon. My great-great grandmother Anasthasie always had lots of anxiety while Dominique was out hunting, and Angèle remembered those days well. 

The Winter Magdalene Mail of 1910

Many supplies to support a whole family were hard to ship all the way to the islands reliably, especially in the winter. The following saga illustrates just how isolated it gets: On January 2 1910, a storm severed the only telegraph line to the island. Getting desperate, locals sent an empty wooden molasses barrel (ponchon) with letters in the direction of the mainland on Candlemas (Feb.2). It floated 96 kilometres to Cape Breton, taking 10 days to get there. The 125 letters inside traveled through the postal system to Halifax, where the alarm was finally raised on Valentine’s Day. A month later, a steamship arrived on the islands for assistance, and since 1912, the islands finally got the Marconi cable installed. My great-grandmother didn’t have clear memories of that episode, but she did remember the family not being able to have flour, which was a sorely needed necessity that the general store couldn't provide because of this outage. For most families, seal hunting wasn't done out of sheer pleasure, or out of community ties and identity (though it did foster admirable teamwork and social cohesion). It was done, because mainland merchants used their workers’ labour intensively, and barely paid them living wages. They controlled everything that was sold and bought on the islands, and that left many families to winter with a lot of debt. Seals helped us get some relief.

Making Madelinot Boots: My Ancestor's Method

Home-made leather boots with double-leather soles were essential for traversing the ice safely, modelled directly from Inuit and First Nations designs like moccassins and mukluks/maklak. Dominique would start at the end of January to cut and sew the hides for boots. He had kept hides from the slaughtering season in October. He would clean and scrape the cowhides of their hairs, and let them dry on the barn door. After tanning them, he’d dip them in a mix of alder (Verne) dye and very hot water. This made the leather take on a beautiful copper colour. To craft the boots, he’d use an awl to make regular stitch holes, and he’d use a cord that my great-aunt refers to as “Corde de brai” (cord that was dipped into a tarry-like substance). At the end of those cords, he’d add some hog hairs to help with easy lacing. He’d sew the cord with the cross-lace method, to further waterproof the boot seams. He’d waterproof them further with cod liver oil, or if he was lucky, seal oil, as a final tanning step. (P.144) Source: Angèle des Iles, Rita Lapierre-Otis. 

Final Notes

All this to say, I don’t have enough money to get myself a good leather cow hide, or even better, a seal hide, but once I do, you bet it’s a project I’m going to start! Right now, I’m waiting on an early fur trade replica blanket to make myself a traditional Capote. 

I also have the DVD ordered for a documentary about modern-day Magdalen Island Acadians, especially young folks, who are keeping the seal hunt traditions of their ancestors alive. "Chasseurs de Phoques", directed by Nicolas Lévesque. I sadly have yet to find a DVD player to finally watch it. You can purchase your copy here:

https://chasseursdephoques.ca