My ancestral family name is de la Rivière, Of The River.
When I traced those ancestors back to the time they arrived in Canada, more than four centuries before this moment, I hardly understood.
Of The River. A very straightforward translation. Land owners in Burgundy and further north. Farmers in France at a time when Kepler and Galileo still walked the waterways, Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain raced to see who could take over the new world faster, and the Renaissance came to a close.
Records show that Francois de la Rivière established a commune along the St. Lawrence River in New France. Six men. Six wives. They walked away from their lives, their country, for the chance to discover anything at all. It was 1609. The records proved difficult to find, and even more so in France. So, I stopped looking back toward Europe and kept going with these people some called homesteaders, and more likely had a mind toward a colonialism that did not honour the people whose land they claimed as their own.
An Understanding of A Colonizer Past
Let me acknowledge at this point that my ancestors lived without permission on the land of the Iroquois people. I do not know the stories of their lives or how they came to live in that place, and cannot applaud or condemn them for the centuries of life at the beginnings of what would become Quebec and Ontario. As Europeans who came to North America long before it was divided into Canada and the United States, they could only have been colonizers. It is time that we call it as such, and nothing else.
Why did they come? Stories now take the place of truth. But, there are truths no one needs documents to understand.
We Are Of The River
Some people are of the wind, or the mountains. Others are of the prairies or the highlands. Even more of the desert. My husband’s people, Irish and Polish-Ukranian, are people of the hills. We are de la rivière—people of the river.
Since childhood, I’ve searched for those we left behind. In the mountains of Colorado, I sought their spirits. I found only the grand peaks and the stretch of trees—not understanding that the river below fed and nourished each. My spirit soared at the sight of waterfalls springing from the rocks. Yet, I could not find my people. I could not see the place from which they came.
In the high deserts of New Mexico, I found myself always at the river’s edge. During my years in the American Midwest, only the rivers brought relief. In Washington State, I escaped into the forest every weekend to paddle the waters of the Little Spokane River. I nearly died when our boat overturned in the Snake. The river spat me out five-hundred meters down, bloody and alive. Yet, I remained deaf to the call.
I was born of the river. The mighty Niagara that shook the ground at Niagara Falls tumbled outside my mother’s hospital room. I returned there nearly every summer. At that shore, I first understood the call of the water. Of the grasses that blow, the Queen Anne’s Lace and its delicate white blooms. The mice and dragonflies lingering upon the river’s edge. Along the waterways, standing above the falls drenched in mist, I found home. I stood amongst my people, my actual blood, but there remained a break in the connection.
Decades later, when we took a year and travelled east to Atlantic Canada, there was a point in that journey at which I crossed over into a place I had known before. Not in this lifetime, but long, long before—once again at the St. Lawrence. Then, in Nova Scotia. The sea terrified me, but the rivers called. Still, my people eluded me.
I’ve lived in the west, along the coastal rainforests of the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, for many years now. I’ve settled into a pace, made my way toward the water when it calls. I raised my family here, grateful for each day. Yet, I find myself keenly aware that I stand on the land of other people. Here, no one other than those the land belongs to is really of the river.
Finding My People In France
I had to return to the river banks of a place I had never been to find my sense of belonging. The late October sun laid itself, warm and familiar, upon my shoulder as I walked the banks of the Loire River in France. There, in the tiny commune of Amboise, I lingered. My legs brushed against the Queen Anne’s Lace and its delicate white blooms. The mice and dragonflies lingered upon the river’s edge just as they had thousands of miles and dozens of years earlier in the only other place I ever felt like home.
I sobbed, not in sadness, but in knowing.
Since my arrival in France, the sense that I’d returned to a place which had begun shouting at me to respond to the call overwhelmed me. From the banks of the Seine to the cool touch of the Amasse, the rivers returned to me a sense of being and extra sight, the final link in the lost bond between 1609 and 2019.
There, the eddies swelled and released like breath on the water. There, I stood in the land the people of the river left four-hundred and ten years ago.
Through the magic the Loire Valley bestowed upon me at every turn, its rivers cleared the wounds that I carried from generations ago so that my family might return to the river once again.
In a vision my brother and I shared not so long ago, we were both called to the headlands of a place we had never been. There, the veil between this world and many others hung loosely, allowing those of the river to cross if they knew the way.
Since my first step upon the banks of the Loire River years ago, so much has risen up from and or fallen back into the shadows, the map drawn, the way lit.
I return each time awake and alive, a healer of my own wounds, and connected to source in a more profound way than I could have ever imagined.
This, in the end, turned out to be a pilgrimage home.
Je suis de la rivière—I am of the river.