DIME Chronicle: franco-manitobain

Showing posts with label franco-manitobain. Show all posts

18 September 2015

Selected Articles From PAX Quarterly Magazine

A Family Pilgrimage*

A few years ago, while I was trying to explain my work to a friend of a friend, I was offered some unusual advice. Calling me an "ancestral scapegoat," he encouraged me to continue the visual history project I was struggling to manifest. He warned that my relatives might not always welcome the stories I would track and seek to share but that I must persist as the one of my generation who was driven to know the truth and willing to tell the tale. He urged me to nevertheless continue the search for my creative and spiritual homeland.

The yearning for a genuine and profound experience led me to formulate a pilgrimage - neither religious nor secular, but personally sacred and tied to a familial landscape I barely knew. By undertaking a quest and vowing to complete it, I am participating in a universal tradition and practice: to seek and experience the presence of God while separating from the everyday.

"The only way out is through," according to Robert Frost. Decide and the doing gets done, so I began to plan a road trip to what is essentially the middle of nowhere, drawn by a spiritual magnetism to the remarkable geographical landscape of Lake Manitoba. In its centre is an intersection between two realms, a liminality called Manitoobaa in Ojibwa - Straits of Manitou, the Great Spirit - and known by the pounding of waves and pebbles on its limestone shores, like a spirit pounding a drum.


Cayer Beach (internet-anonymous, 2011)

My mother was born in the vicinity and a few of her cousins who still live in the region join me on the gravel road journey from Dauphin and Ste. Rose du Lac to Cayer Beach on Lake Manitoba. It is still several hours before summer solstice and within this liminal zone of time, place, and intention, we discuss the spiritual business of the family - from replacing the fallen gravestones of great-grandparents and finding a way to repair the church roof, to assorted graveside stories of kith and kin. For a short while the impediments of distance are suspended and the improbable is imagined. Here, in the smallest of communities and in the most remote of provinces, I find a tangible connection to my ancestors and their stories in the company of the family members who want to know.

We turn away from the edge of the beautiful lake and the church our grandfather built and named St. Jean de Brébeuf. We drive back toward the world of everyday, on the other side of an invisible threshold - but different. We convene and celebrate over a late lunch at the Chicken Chef in Ste. Rose. I commemorate these family rituals by vowing to return as I have done in four previous encounters with this meaningful place were every exploration reveals inner meaning. Perhaps I will return again for the longest day of the year in June, or come back in August when it is good for camping and swimming, or perhaps visit in January because winter is my favourite Manitoba season and this is a special place in the cold. Having a destination and making a vow to reach it fulfill the longing for a meaningful journey, a pilgrimage.


No. 1173 - 20 June 2013 - 13:42:52

23 December 2012

Selected Articles From PAX Quarterly Magazine


No. 0147 - 27 Jun 2012 - 15:31:47 St. Jean de Brébeuf Church, Cayer, Manitoba

The Huron Carol*

   The history of the Huron Carol is a Canadian story that has journeyed over four centuries an,d three cultures, from oral tradition to a place in the hymnals and songbooks of congregatiuonbs and schools across this country.
   In the early seventeenth century, founder Samuel de Champlain envisioned a new people born uniquely of this continent through the intermarrying and sharing of common spiritual and cultural values. It was a long way from the forced conversion and institutional racism introduced and practiced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
   Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, Jesuit missionary to the Huron, penned the original words in Wendat/Huron in 1643 and set them to a popular French song called La Jeune Pucelle. It tapped into Huron traditional values while teaching the Christian story. In spite of Brébeuf's martyrdom and the final scattering of the Huron people during the Iroquois uprising in 1649, the song lived on in oral tradition until its transcription into Wendat. It came alongside a French translation by Paul Picard, a Franco-Huron notary who worked with Fr. Etienne de Villeneuve, S.J. He was the last Jesuit to serve the Huron, and he left behind many manuscripts and transcriptions of their hymns and chants, including the Huron Christmas Carol. The song prevailed in post-conquest Québec, and it was known orally for another one hundred years until it was published in the Noëls Anciens de La Nouvelle France by Ernest Myrand in 1899. In that same year, while working in Québec City, historian, journalist, and choir director Jesse Edgar Middleton discovered the publication and took it home to Toronto. In 1926 he published a free translation of the song from French into English, called "Twas In The Moon of Wintertime, and asked his fellow choir director, Healey Willan, to provide an arrangement from the folk song for the pageant Brébeuf. The version in our hymnal is a later Lutheran arrangement.
   I was very young the first time I remember hearing and singing the Huron Carol at a Christmas Eve service and it was a transcendent moment. The setting of the Nativity scene was familiar and relevant: cold and sparkling in the moonlight and warmed by furs, this child belonged to me.
   Last year I received a family book about my maternal grandmother's ancestry going back over 400 years. Among my many grandparents, a few stand out -- including the Algonquin warrior and clan chief, Charles Secham Packarini, who was nursed by Jeanne Mance in her Hôtel Dieu in the new town of Montréal in 1643. She also sponsored the young warrior at his baptism that year, and he went on to witness the many baptisms and marriages of his clan family, including the marriage of his granddaughter Marie Mitouamegoukoue to Frenchman Pierre Couc dit La Fleur in 1657. Two hundred years later their descendant, and my grandmother's father, was born in La Prairie, Québec. Narcisse Cayer left Québec for Manitoba in 1880 and started a new family chapter. In 1910 he led his growing family and a small band of Franco-Manitoban and Métis families north to the western shore of Lake Manitoba, where a ranching community exists to this day. What remains of my great-grandfather is a headstone in the graveyard of the little Roman Catholic church he built in 1933. The church stands on the prairie landscape, decommissioned and with a crypt still full of water from last year's flood. Its name is St. Jean de Brébeuf.
   Mutual respect for the spiritual and cultural traditions of the three founding peoples of our nation lives in my own family and in this hymn, the Canadian Christmas carol.

27 June 2012

Pilgrimage - Part One

No. 0147 - 27 Jun 2012 - 17:45:30

This is the church that my great grandfather built - St. Jean de Brébeuf.
I was unable to visit the Cayer District, Lake Manitoba last year due to the 2011 flood situation. The strong winds that have been lately will go a long way to drying out the land however the basement of the church is full of water and nothing will be done while it remains de-commissioned.

Nos. 8795, 8826, 8864, 8907, 8911, 8912 - 27 Jun 2012

I would like to buy it and turn it into an art gallery or museum
but the chance of visitors at the end of a 35 km gravel road and
north of the 51st parallel (next stop, Crane River) is slim.