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.

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!

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.