Description
When I was 10 years old, my grandmother, Marie-Anne (Poirier) Lavoie came to share our home with us. As most children do when they are busy with their own lives, filling their time with material luxuries, thinking about boys, homework and social life, we did not really pay too much attention to the stories that she was trying to pass on down to us. She told us stories about how her ancestors hid in the bushes in an attempt to hide from the British and about how they were sheltered and protected by the Mi‟kmaq Indians for over 50 years. They lived in constant fear of being captured by the British and being deported back to France. Deported to a distant country they heard about through stories passed down from their ancestors who had settled in Canada over 130 years before them; deported to language, customs, and cultures that although France was their mother country, these were all foreign to them.
