Too many more recent traumas are diminished or ignored. And so many people continue to say "that was a long time ago, get over it" when the victims were not allowed to voice their trauma, or seek apologies or restitution.
I had thought that the inhabitants of Beaubassin had all evacuated to Fort Beauséjour when the settlement was torched. I didn't know that some simply moved across the river.
I think Fort Beausejour was on the French side and the fort the British built on the English side of that river, and that the French/Mi'kmac torched the English side in 1750 to drive Acadians living there into French-held lands.
In Paul Surette's Atlas of the Acadian Settlement of the Beaubassin 1660 to 1755 on p. 31, he tells of people in the southern villages seeking refuge to the north of the river. 75 families went to the Upper Lake Valley. Five families on the north flank in the Tintamarre. A few go to Beausejour. "At the Lake, several refugees die from the shock of their upheaval or from the ill treatment they endured." Yet life goes on...at Beausejour Madeleine Bourgeois marries Louis Hugon.
The more I learn, the more complex the story gets.
The more I stay focused on one or a few people, the more the effects of their upheavals hit me. When I go out to the macro level (10,000 people were uprooted), my mind blurs the felt-sense of that.
My father (a psychotherapist) was one of many volunteers part of a Chicago-area project to interview survivors of the Shoah in the 1980s. I believe the taped testimonies are kept at the national archive in Washington. (He was invited to participate because he'd had many survivors in his practice over the years). I asked him if hearing story after story had desensitized him to the horror of it all. He said it was quite the opposite. The cumulative effect of hearing so many individual stories actually made the horror grow. Mere numbers on a page became people's parents, spouses, siblings, children... I can imagine that learning more and more stories of the people caught in this event, and going deeper on their experiences, makes the Deportation all the more terrible.
Your dad’s job is my day job. Totally agree with him. Yes, we have to be aware of vicarious trauma and its effects on our souls. Hence the need for empathetic witnesses all around this/these experiences. Did your dad ever talk about witnessing for the witnessers?
I think it was before we had a language and conceptual categories for this kind of work. He came at it from a traditional psychiatric training. He did feel strongly that all survivors should tell their stories because he saw the impact through the generations of the families in his practice, and also because there was already a strong movement of Holocaust denialism at the time.
Too many more recent traumas are diminished or ignored. And so many people continue to say "that was a long time ago, get over it" when the victims were not allowed to voice their trauma, or seek apologies or restitution.
I had thought that the inhabitants of Beaubassin had all evacuated to Fort Beauséjour when the settlement was torched. I didn't know that some simply moved across the river.
I think Fort Beausejour was on the French side and the fort the British built on the English side of that river, and that the French/Mi'kmac torched the English side in 1750 to drive Acadians living there into French-held lands.
In Paul Surette's Atlas of the Acadian Settlement of the Beaubassin 1660 to 1755 on p. 31, he tells of people in the southern villages seeking refuge to the north of the river. 75 families went to the Upper Lake Valley. Five families on the north flank in the Tintamarre. A few go to Beausejour. "At the Lake, several refugees die from the shock of their upheaval or from the ill treatment they endured." Yet life goes on...at Beausejour Madeleine Bourgeois marries Louis Hugon.
The more I learn, the more complex the story gets.
The more I stay focused on one or a few people, the more the effects of their upheavals hit me. When I go out to the macro level (10,000 people were uprooted), my mind blurs the felt-sense of that.
My father (a psychotherapist) was one of many volunteers part of a Chicago-area project to interview survivors of the Shoah in the 1980s. I believe the taped testimonies are kept at the national archive in Washington. (He was invited to participate because he'd had many survivors in his practice over the years). I asked him if hearing story after story had desensitized him to the horror of it all. He said it was quite the opposite. The cumulative effect of hearing so many individual stories actually made the horror grow. Mere numbers on a page became people's parents, spouses, siblings, children... I can imagine that learning more and more stories of the people caught in this event, and going deeper on their experiences, makes the Deportation all the more terrible.
Your dad’s job is my day job. Totally agree with him. Yes, we have to be aware of vicarious trauma and its effects on our souls. Hence the need for empathetic witnesses all around this/these experiences. Did your dad ever talk about witnessing for the witnessers?
I think it was before we had a language and conceptual categories for this kind of work. He came at it from a traditional psychiatric training. He did feel strongly that all survivors should tell their stories because he saw the impact through the generations of the families in his practice, and also because there was already a strong movement of Holocaust denialism at the time.
Such a terrible time for them. Thank you for telling this story.
Love this <3