Sequel to I Heard the Alps Call His Name

Introduction (Synopsis):

      Inspired by my first book, I Heard the Alps Call His Name, it is a captivating and powerful exploration of identity, trauma, and heritage. It explores themes of resilience and the quest for belonging. It is both a personal journey and a broader exploration of historical and cultural contexts. 

     Told in two parts. Part 1: Only Orphans Ride For Free: Stories of our family being torn apart and becoming orphans – growing up with two families and searching for our identity; of how our Indigenous Ancestors, followed by our birth and adoptive families, who crossed an ocean, seeking a better life in ‘Turtle Island,’ and how they influenced our lives.

     Part 2: A sequel to I Heard the Alps Call His Name – continues with our journeys across the pond and back again –  lost between two shores – and myself, influenced by my ever-restless nature – facing the challenges of families in two worlds and making difficult decisions -and finding my happy place.

Excerpts from the book:

 2.  Our First Family 

     The story of the Panzsel family is a tapestry of lives not that different from others of the time – a family making the journey to a new world – my family.

       With promises of a job and a new life in a young country, our birth father, Andreas Panszel, made the arduous journey by ship across the pond in 1901. The nineteen-year-old landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of thousands of young men fleeing Europe in the late 1800s and early 20th century, many leaving due to wars, political unrest and poverty. He likely left Hungary because of the political unrest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had a new job with the Canadian Pacific Railway.

     He eventually settled in Fort McMurray, Alberta, a small town five hours north of Edmonton. The Europeans first settled there in 1778, with the Indigenous people preceding them by a hundred years, and it later became a central point for the Athabasca oil sands and the petroleum industry in Alberta. According to stories, early settlers and the natives used the oil to waterproof their canoes.  

     European men were encouraged to marry young Indigenous women. It was a political move by the Government in hopes that the unions would help solidify the kinship between the new Canadians and the Native people. It was also to improve the very profitable fur trade that was starting up. 

    Andreus, who had now changed his name to Andrew, was forty-nine when he met and married our mother, Anne Caroline McDonald, in Fort McMurray in 1930. Anne, eighteen at the time of their union, was born in Fort Chipewyan, a small hamlet on the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations Reserve, the northernmost group of the Ojibwa. They hunted mainly bison, living a nomadic life and travelled great distances across northern Canada and the prairies for months. Little is known about her childhood; only that nuns raised her after the early death of her mother, and she had two sisters. As a young woman, she moved to Fort McMurray, two hours to the south. 

       Their first child, Louie, was born in 1931, followed quickly by eight more siblings, Otto, Velma, John, Leonard, Alma, Frances, and finally, me and my twin sister, Julie.

      The family lived in a two-room shack on the outskirts of Fort Mac, with no toilet or running water. Our father did his best to support the family as a trapper and fur trader. His trap lines covered large distances, and he was often away for days or weeks. Our oldest brother Louis, by now eighteen, often went with him. He helped set traps, skinning the beaver, fox, rabbit, and weasel hides and trading them to the Hudson’s Bay Fur Trading Company. They, in turn, sold them to the settlers. Many were shipped to Europe. To standardise the terms of the trade, the company established its own currency, known as ‘Made Beaver.’ This currency valued goods by placing them against one prime beaver pelt, which could buy two pounds of sugar or a bag of potatoes. 

     Their hard work put food on the table, but it was said that we often went to bed hungry; eventually, Child Services from the town came to our house, saw we were starving, and took the younger children away.

     During this time, there was a large sweep to alienate the Native and Metis children from their families to rid them of their native culture. It was common for the Governments to use whatever means possible to take them from their parents, either through the courts or by force.

     The three youngest, my sister and me, babies at just two years old, and our sister Frances, who was four, were made Wards of the Provincial Government. After staying in a home for children in Fort McMurray, we embarked on our seatless plane ride. 

‘Run, little Halfbreed, run.’

Beginnings – Indigenous People

         ‘Little Turtle, or Turtle Island,’ was the name given to North America centuries ago by the Indigenous people, namely the Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking peoples in northeastern North America. Its various oral beliefs tell the story of a turtle that holds the world on its back; therefore, the turtle is an icon of life.  Depending on how one looks at the continent and where your imagination flows, a giant turtle can be envisioned on its shores. Canada is the northern part of the Turtle, and the United States is the southern part.  

      It is widely believed that the Indigenous people came from the Bering Peninsula 11,000 years ago, which once joined Alaska and Russia.  New ancestral digs date back at least 30,000 years. Indigenous means any group of people native to a specific region before colonists or settlers arrived; this can apply to virtually any country. 

       Being half-Cree (Metis) sparked my curiosity later in life.

     . Our family were the Plains Cree, the most prominent Indigenous tribe in Canada, who had migrated to the plains from the northern forests of Manitoba, where their origins can be traced. They settled in Alberta and Saskatchewan, parts of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Ontario, and the northern United States.

      Known as great hunters of buffalo, deer, elk and moose, the Cree also fished in the numerous lakes and rivers. Their first known contact with the white man was with the Jesuit missionaries in Hudson’s Bay around 1640, although other tribes knew of the white man long before this date, especially in eastern and northern Canada. The Cree sold their furs, hides and jewellery to the settlers at the trading posts for the ever-growing fur trade. 

     In the late 1800s, the government, under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, actively withheld rations and hunted the buffalo almost to extinction to force starving Cree and Indigenous peoples into signing treaties and relocating them to reserves.  

     If this were not enough, many Indigenous people were subjected to further cultural destruction through decades of trauma endured in the residential school system.

     Much has been written lately about the residential schools. They were government-sponsored religious schools run by priests and nuns and were established in the 1800s to assimilate all Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture.

    Until the 1970s, approximately one-third of Aboriginal children were removed from their families, sometimes forcibly taken, where they were housed and educated for most of their childhood. 

     Over three thousand children died while students at Residential Schools, the biggest killer being tuberculosis, where overcrowding and unsanitary conditions fueled the disease. Many deaths were never recorded, and the victims were buried in unmarked graves. 

     It was all about cleansing native children from their culture who were thought of as inferior to the ever-growing white immigrants from other countries, mainly Europe and labelled as savages, untamable and needed to be ‘purified’ for a better chance of survival in Western culture. Others had more malicious views, trusting that this process would invalidate the claims of Indigenous peoples to their lands and quickly taken over by the government.

     Whatever the truth is, whole generations of children were brainwashed into losing their native languages and culture and forced to take on the white man’s way of life. This is no less than cultural genocide – the inhuman way of eliminating an entire race – they almost succeeded. 

      Similar findings were revealed in the United States, where more than five hundred residential schools operated simultaneously.

      The last of the eighty residential schools closed in 1996.

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