My First Nations anthropology class is going quite well, I think. Sure, there are times when it feels like I am learning a foreign language and get really, really overwhelmed by it all. But now that I am catching on I am finding that I enjoy it. Last Tuesday I met up with a few classmates at the campus library, which was a good move. If I haven’t already mentioned it, the class is online so meeting face-to-face with people who have been equally confused and overwhelmed was so comforting. Two of them were aboriginal. Like, braided hair and all. Such beautiful women. One of them walked in and immediately noticed my City of Abbotsford name tag which I so often forget to remove and exclaimed, “Your last name is Marand?!” Clearly this was a rhetorical question. I smiled and nodded, and she went on to say that we might be cousins. I wanted to laugh. I have enough cousins. Like hundreds of them. No joke.
She asked if she could explain the coincidence, and no one seemed to mind. Turns out that last year her family had hired a genealogist to trace their ancestry, and he managed to take them back to the year 1100, according to her. A few hundred years ago the family name had been LaMarande. She explained that along the way the ‘e’ had been dropped off the end, and eventually the ‘m’ had been reduced to a lower case letter. So now her last name is Lamarand*. She immediately knew that I was Metis. No one has ever come up with that assumption before.
It felt good. It felt like a piece of the puzzle fell into place. It felt like I belonged.
I may have a very small percentage of aboriginal blood in me, but at that moment all that mattered was that I had some at all. She started calling me ‘hon’ and ‘sweetheart’, and not in a degrading or condescending way. In a “I care about you for real” kind of way.
Yes, I am Metis and my last name is Marand and my hair is really thick and looks good in braids. When I was little, my mom made me moccasins and gave me a papoose so I could carry my favorite doll on my back.
Ask any of my closest friends and they will tell you that never in our friendships have they ever heard that come out of me. I’m sorry it hasn’t. But it will from now on.
Meeting new people is always an adventure in itself, and meeting my new classmate who is beautiful and claims to be twenty years behind in school and whose last name is Lamarand was no exception.
Here’s hoping for more exciting discoveries along the way. : )
~C~
*For the record, I was given permission to use her real last name.
