Awakening Ontario educators to treaty stories: exploring the possibilities of disruptive treaty scripting as professional development

Abstract

I need to tell you a story. My name is Denise Petitpas and I am a French-Canadian, Ontario school teacher. Specifically, I am Franco-Ontarian, and my surname Petitpas, comes from one of the first forty families to settle and establish the New France colony in present-day Nova Scotia. I am also a descendant of Marie-Thérèze, a Mi’kmaw woman censused alongside my 7th great-grandfather Claude Petitpas II, the 30th family of the Sauvages de Mouscadoubet in 1708 Acadia (see Appendix A) (Petitpas, n.d). My family knows this genealogy and more from colonial documents and missionary accounts that my distant relatives, such as my 6th great-grandfather, Bathélemy le sauvage, Claude and MarieThérèze’s son, had extensive knowledge of the Land, its peoples, Indigenous languages, along with French and English. My ancestors served as interpreters and navigators to the new arrivals. As Darryl Leroux’s research has shown (IndigenousStudiesUSask, 2015, 17:28), like many French-Canadians, I descend from a distant Indigenous grandmother. And this is a story I used to tell. Fast forward this story 400 years to today. After generations of exile, persecutions, and inter-marriages (Petitpas, n.d) out of Indigeneity, only the French language and culture have survived in me. Through a series of complex “colonial happenings” (Madden, 2019, p. 286), I am not connected to the land (Mi’kma’ki), the people (L’nu), or the language (Mi’kmawi’simk) of my distant ancestors. Cree Elder Willie Ermine (Sturgeon Lake First Nation) is right; I am poor, my memory has been erased, and I need an awakening (NCCIE, 2019, 3:05-4:25). [...]