The monarch and the matriarch

Aashkibagoog, the monarch butterfly.

They represent change and transformation, strength and endurance, hope and resilience.

Monarch butterflies have a north-south migration pattern; a multigenerational migration, which takes four generations to complete.

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I am a collision of two opposite worlds: one upper-middle-class white Canadian, the other working-class Anishinaabe.

My mother grew up in a small municipality in rural Manitoba, went to university and met my father in towns hardly any larger, and raised me outside the city. Her siblings, and now my cousins, are strewn throughout cities and towns in Treaty 1, 2 and 5 territory. 

Nookomis (my mother’s mother) is the most beautiful woman I have not met. She was forty six years old when she passed. She should still be here. 

I miss her often, though I don’t often tell anyone that. Missing a person I have never touched is an ache that evades language. 

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Nookomis grew up on the reserve of the First Nation now listed on my status card. 

Her grandmother, probably due to starvation and forced colonial imposition, signed Treaty 4 and relinquished our family’s ancestral lands to what would later become a white person’s playground, today called Riding Mountain National Park. 

Last summer, I visited Wasagaming, a townsite in my ancestral territory. Though I grew up a four-hour drive away, I intrinsically knew these were my homelands. By becoming a national park, these lands were kept intact - something my mother told me I should be grateful for - but the great presence of my people, interconnected with and interdependent on Mother Earth, was absent. Confronted with this reality, I crumbled and wept. 

The violence of my ancestors’ displacement extends beyond linear temporality. Four generations later, my body remembers.

Colonialism was designed, intended, to make us forget who we are and where we come from. If left unresisted, it can assimilate who we have been for thousands of years in the span of a lifetime. 

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Aashkibagoog resist.

Monarch butterflies travel in swarms, and group together to rest. Many of these sites have become tourist destinations, spectacles of trees temporarily blanketed by black and orange. 

What tourists don’t know, though, is that the most remarkable part of a monarch’s journey happens far from shore.

Flying over Gichigami - Lake Superior - Aashkibagoog fly south, make an abrupt turn east, then continue south again. Considering they must travel over the lake in one unceasing flight, this extension of their journey seems bewildering.

Lake Superior was once a looming mountain over North America; one that tiny monarch butterflies could not climb nor fly above. They used what they had - their tiny solar compasses - and persisted east, making their way around the mountain.

Mountains, often seen as an ageless, concrete structure, have long crumbled into the earth. 

Still, the monarch’s flight pattern continues.

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Aanikoobijigan (my great-grandmother) was a member of one of many proud Anishinaabe communities in Saskatchewan, though I don't know if she would have seen it like that; Canadian borders are a colonial construct that my people have never fit neatly within.

She went to residential day school in Kamsack, maybe. My family’s kinship has survived, but many of our stories have been muddled by colonisation.

What we can agree on is that whatever happened to her and her siblings, it was bad. No one abandons their language for that of their oppressor unless their tongue is forced. 

Three generations have now been separated from Anishinaabemowin; If we aren’t careful to do the work of revitalising our language, the missionaries and governments who sought to erase our very being will win.

But I am learning Anishinaabemowin, even if it is a stretch to call it speaking. I joined an online class last autumn and was delighted to see my aunties and cousins learning it too. 

Together, my family will bring our language back. My great-grandmother has long crossed over to the spirit world, but I bet she’s looking down on all of us, beaming at our breakthrough.

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There is no migration journey compared to that of the Aashkibagoog.

They are tiny, with a four-inch wingspan, weighing less than a gram. Despite this, they are the only butterflies with a north-south migration pattern, travelling a path otherwise reserved for birds.

Neither the larvae, nor the pupae, nor the adults can survive cold winters; so every year, monarch butterflies make the four thousand kilometre trek from Canada to Mexico. 

Each butterfly lives a mere two to six weeks. No generation lives long enough to see the fruits of its own labour. Yet each one flies, mates, lays eggs, and ultimately dies, in the pursuit of a softer landing place for her children.

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Nookomis would later marry a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian. He was a gruff man who always kept a pack of cigarettes in his front shirt pocket.

My maternal grandparents met when she was fourteen and he was twenty-five. My mother thinks they met at a party, but considering Nookomis was in the eighth grade, we cannot be sure. 

Hearing about their age gap makes me squirmy, but in those days, what choice did she have? She was barred from attending high school under the Indian Act, and already pregnant with a baby she never consented to. 

He provided an escape from the poverty life had cruelly handed her. And so, they wed. 

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My mother and her siblings were raised on a homestead near our reserve. Her father operated equipment, and sometimes Nookomis worked in the post office, but mostly, they lived off the land.

In the best of times, Treaty 2 brimmed with the foods my family needed for nourishment; deer, moose, elk, pickerel. During hard times, my family settled on jackfish or trapped muskrat. They picked wiingashk (sweetgrass), mashkode-washk (sage), and miskwaabiimizh (dogwood), the last remnants held onto from the medicine bundle of our ancestors. 

Though they were fortunate not to have been forced into the residential school system, the siblings endured systemic racism. In high school, my mother was barred from joining the other students on university tours. “You’ll never go to university”, her teachers snided, “you’ll always be a poor Indian.”

My mom, ever the scrapper, started teacher’s college later that year.

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Aashkibagoog are adaptable, finding homes on every continent except Antarctica.

Across the world from Anishinaabe aki (territory), Aashkibagoog flutter through Māori territory, known by a different name. In te reo Māori (the Māori language), they are called kahuku. 

Two months ago, I made my own north-south migration journey to Aotearoa. I am spending six months here, alone, in the pursuit of mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge) and mātauranga taiao (Indigenous environmental knowledge) on how to better protect our precious planet.

My journey is worthwhile but lonely. In solitary moments, I look at my garden. There is always a kahuku present, nourishing itself on sweet floral nectar. It is a tender reminder that no matter where I am on this big blue earth, Nookomis and Aanikoobijigan will always find me.

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My paternal grandmother's parents emigrated from Prussia in the 1920s. At the time, the Prussian government was stealing its people's land, sustenance and dignity. Knowing they had no future, my great-grandparents left for Canada in search of freedom to practise their religion, live a good life, and raise a family.

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My paternal grandfather’s parents were German, though they emigrated from Poland. His father learned eight languages as a member of the Czar’s army.

But guarding the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg was not enough to shield the family from religious persecution. My grandfather’s parents fled Europe at the turn of the 20th century, under the promise of a free existence in Canada.

My paternal grandfather was born and raised a farm boy. He finished high school, and later an economics degree. At that time, white people could work their way up the corporate ladder; so he did, amassing wealth, land and a family along the way.

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My father’s ancestors had to persevere in order to make it here, I cannot deny that. 

Yet, their history sits uneasily with me; no matter how perilous the migration journey of an immigrant, they are welcomed by Canada upon arrival. 

While those new here are granted the freedom to be who they wish to be, nestled under a cosy flannel blanket of multiculturalism, it always comes at a cost; the original multiculturalism of Turtle Island is at risk of forever being lost. 

This, of course, was by design.

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My grandparents raised my father and his brother in a small town outside of Winnipeg. They were everything you would expect from a white Canadian nuclear family: my grandfather worked his corporate job in the city, my grandmother stayed home, and the boys spent their free time playing hockey. 

My father grew up with the privilege of being surrounded by everything he could have materially wanted: a big yard to play in, organised sports, and a fancy car to drive.

—

My parents met searching for friends they had lost at a house party in the nineties. They bonded over a mutual love of fishing and country music. Within three months, my father declared that my mother would bear his children. 

These days, my mother works a meaningful job, mortgages a nice home, and spends her evenings in the backyard, tending to her garden and feeding the nenookaasi (hummingbirds) who pay her a visit. 

In some ways, she has reached mino-bimaadiziwin, the good life. The resources she has are certainly better than what her mother, and her mother before her, had access to.

In exchange for these things, she had to make sacrifices no mother should have to. I love my mom, more than anyone, and I think she deserved better.

But I cannot make her want better. I can only take our journey further, and want better for myself.

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In the settler mind - the mind of my father’s family - land is property and capital. But to my mother’s family, aki is everything. Anishinaabe aki provides us our sense of identity, our connection to the spirit world, our plant medicines, our interconnected relations with all living things.

My ancestors oppressed, and were oppressed. Caught in the middle of two opposite worlds, I am their collision. 

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When I was younger, I used to walk through thick prairie fields, picking Wiingashk strands carefully so my mother and her coworkers could braid them. These natural beings, so much taller than I, held me with a scent as comforting as my mother’s touch. Sweetgrass, my medicine and my relative.

Through no fault of my own, I have inherited a responsibility to reweave the frayed ties of my family. It is a task fraught with thankless toil. Despite this, I feel fortunate; my walk may be long, but I can still make it home.

I cannot undo the legacy I come from. I can only act in the spirit of dabadendiziwin (humility), and do as Anishinaabekwe (Indigenous women) have done since time immemorial: providing, protecting, teaching, healing and leading our way towards mino-bimaadiziwin, the good life. The soft landing place.

In doing these things, I reconcile my family’s past, present and future.

It may not be perfect, but it is progress, and it is how I stay true to my Indigeneity.

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Every four generations, there exists a ‘super generation’ of Aashkibagoog. These monarch butterflies are able to live much longer, and travel much further, than their preceding relatives. 

I come from a long line of strong women, who began and persevered through our multi-generational migration. 

I am the fourth generation. The super generation.

Guided by the ancestors who tenderly watch over me, I open my beautiful wings and fly.

References:

Justice, D. H. (2022). Narrated nationhood and imagined belonging: Fanciful family stories and kinship legacies of allotment. In Daniel Heath Justice, & Jean M. O’Brien (Eds.), Allotment stories (pp. 17). University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv2j56zf0.6

Kimmerer, R. W., & Ebooks Corporation. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants (First ed.). Milkweed Editions.