8 and 13? :D
8. Do you get confused with other nationalities? If so, which ones and by whom?
I’m Canadian and I often get mistaken for British, Australian, or American by a lot of people. When I say I’m from British Columbia, a whole swath of people get confused thinking I’m in South America! It’s usually people who have no idea of geography. I also hang out with a lot of Russians and Eastern Europeans just because... they’re my friends? I dunno why! So a lot of people assume I have any heritage there - I don’t have much blood from that entire part of the continent. I have dark thick hair, a thicker “rural farm worker” type build, and dark eyes, and a complexion that varies but is reddish-medium-pale and a lot of people assume that looks very Slavic stereotypically.
I’m also Métis, which is one of three First Nations groups (so, people who were there before anyone else) in Canadian law and society. I can trace 400+ years of my ancestry, not that many people can - it’s often broken due to how we were treated as less than human. I had no idea I was Métis until a few years ago because my dad was faked as Sicilian by his parents to avoid the Sixties Scoop (a kidnapping and cultural genocide of children in the 1960s by the Canadian govt, which took children from their parents if they were First Nations of any sort and adopted them to white families). My dad never knew his true culture for years and assumed he was Irish and Sicilian - but his mother was adopted, in a similar bent, years prior, TO a Sicilian family. I know, very complex. Basically, she was raised Sicilian, but knew she wasn’t, her husband was Métis, and had to hide it in order to have his three boys stay with them and not be kidnapped. So they really upped the Sicily style culture and never told any of them - a relative had to be the one to break the news years after their deaths. I never met either of my dad’s parents.
So I get confused with Sicilian a lot! I am only a little bit - turns out his mother DID have some in her - but she was also Métis as far as we know. We need to do more research.
My mother gets mistaken, weirdly, for Texan a lot. It’s her speech, she sounds exactly like a Houston accent apparently. I have no idea why. She’s never been there. She’s Scottish, English, Irish, Norman, and we’ve recently found out her dad’s side of the family has black American in there, a few generations back. But she mostly grew up with Australian and Scottish culture.
I think on the street, most people mistake me for “some vague type of ethnic” or completely white which gets... annoying, so I’ve sewn a Métis flag on my jacket.
I am proud of my history. We fought for recognition and never got it for over a century. We were martyred and murdered. So I’m proud of tatt. I’m proud of finding that his side of the family fought for the Union in the Civil War as an artillery supervisor type job, despite being Canadian (it was good money!) - that he also has a WWI vet buried up the hill from me that survived, and that he one day revealed to me his dad did post-WWII stuff as an aircraft mechanic in West Germany, during the occupation to get everything rebuilt. I’m not super pro-military - his family is actually super pacifist.
So, that was a long answer!
13. Does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?
YES YES YES YES YES
In BC, but mostly Metro Vancouver (a big area spanning several cities that link up really closely, like boroughs of NYC) - we set off fireworks on Halloween. They try to ban it over and over. It won’t work. It never has, never will. Halloween in general has a more “mischief” vibe to it, like Halloween USED to be for the rest of North America. We’re the last holdout of actual bastardry on that night. This delights my international friends. I once watched an abandoned model schoolhouse burn down as a small child on Halloween, it was nuts. Another year hedges got set on fire and people just did nothing.
