I Am L'nu (Mi'kmaq Acadian)

Elder Dr. Daniel N Paul’s American Indian History Archives

Warrior Kids Podcast with Mi’kmaw Teacher Pam Palmater

Warrior Life Podcast with Mi’kmaw Teacher Pam Palmater

Who are the Mi’kmaq?

Our Language Is Endangered. Learn and Share.

I am a non-status L’nu Mi’kmaq Acadian, and I choose plural language choices, as a Puoinaq (Two-Spirit) person. I am L’nu, Irish, Italian, Polish*Jewish diaspora.

But what does that mean?

For me, it has always meant listening to as many perspectives as possible as to why colonization and genocide of all my branches of the family continues, and where it came from, so we can empower All Our Relations to be Free and Autonomous through Returning the Land so that those now, after, and before can be healed.
Everyone’s experience with their Indigenousness is different, despite what colonialism will tell you. My experience as an Urban Indigenous Non-Status Two Spirit Mi’kmaq Acadian child in Pastung (“Boston, MA”) as well as other areas of the North Western Hemisphere are a symptom of 1980’s racism and bigotry that is still seen and experienced today in the form of:

  • violence and erasure

  • lack of affirming visibilty

  • lack of rights or care

  • lack of healthy resources

  • lack of local or stable community

A Glimpse of My Indigenous Childhood

As a Mi’kmaq Acadian Martin [-Mitchell-Moniak-Murphy], I grew up in and outside of Pastung on stolen, unceded Massachusett Nation Land (“Boston, MA”). Nukumij, my Nana Patricia, had retained her Martin last name until marrying my Bumpa, Philip [of whom I took on the name for my middle name after his passing].

Our large family has always been full of Martins that retained their last name (cue images of a pile of martens romping about loudly, which is what most large family gatherings were like). Nana always made it clear we are Martins even if it was excessively dangerous to talk about what that means, and

”Wait, excessively dangerous?" What?”

Growing up a Martin in the 1980’s in Pastung, or making it aware to anyone I knew growing up that I am “an Indian”, landed me with

  • verbal abuse (“go back to the wolves”, “terrorist”, “savage”, “stupid Indian”, “stupid squXw bXtch”, “rXdskin”) from children that were supposed to be my friends, parents, teachers, the history books “teaching” me, and society as a whole

  • beatings that would fracture my bones and break all but 5 of my teeth in my top jaw

  • detentions

  • suspensions

  • threats of expulsion (maybe you can imagine how expulsion sounds to an Acadian)

Many folks who know what it’s like being the eldest sibling and cousin to a large family understand that an inordinate amount of responsibility is often entrusted to you.
As a Mi’kmaq Acadian individual, I was denied the ability to be authentic about my heritage. Family Tree day? Wow that went badly. Talk about my people day? Yikes. While knowing I not only had to protect my sibling and cousins while helping them “blend”, “mask”, “code switch”, etc, I also constantly defended my Mother, my Nana, and our heritage. For an adult, this can be suicidally exhausting, but for a child? There are reasons the Indigenous median age of suicidal attempts is 10, for being Mi’kmaq Acadian meant defending myself and my family against what every town still practices today against it’s Indigenous (and all BIPOC) people:"

  • Kill the Indian, Save the Man brainwashing that gave me detentions, suspensions, threats of expulsion, and teachers that would award me horrendous grades for talking truth in class or my schoolwork, while giving me just as horrendous grades for “being a drain on the staff” for not talking and having a ridiculous amount of disciplinary time shoveled on me to get me to shut up. Triple detention? How about 3D on repeat? And yet folks in 2022 say we don’t need Critical Race Theory..

  • Erasure. I grew up in one of our “Arlington” homes next to Wigwam Circle, two streets over from Mohawk Lane, on Turkey Hill Reservation. Yet despite this, the only Indigenous folks I knew outside my family was a racist bronze statue known only as The Menotomy Hunter (still there, last time I checked), and the racist renditions of it I was forced to “tolerate” through out town, all over school, and on my sports uniforms (E’e cuz, I was that basketball and “soccer” 2S in the gym shorts and tank until white kids damaged me so badly I could only ref and coach). Our school team was literally “The Indians” before I got into high school, and the change to “Spy Ponders” was literal to mean “The Indian Spies at the Pond”.

  • Beatings. I was jumped so many times starting in elementary school all the way up to graduating HS that I have no memory of ever just having fun as a child without being on high alert for someone’s racism to show in violence. Ever.

    This left me with fractures, breaks, and PTSD before I left elementary school. I gave up telling my parents about this extremely early, as my mother understood and my father absolutely did not understand that colonial social programming was not going to make this any better.

  • Threats of Trafficking. Eurocentric Hollywood still eroticizes the image of the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The link that this statement takes you to is to Carina Raven’s discussion about surviving these horrors. Further example: Tiger Lily, who’s fictitious nation is a racist word for Black Indigenous Children, is loosely based after the racist eroticization trope put on real MMIW who died at the hands of white colonists like Pocahontas. As late as 2022 I’ve had to ask friends to get their Peter Pan with Tiger Lily tied up in a boat left to drown away from me. “Henrico, VA” to this day keeps the image of Pocahontas from the breasts up as their symbol of governmental property, when they’re the ones that stole, trafficked, and then murdered her to begin with.
    Voting day in 2021 meant I was surrounded by literal countless versions of this horrifying image.

    While there were numerous instances were my looks and my mannerisms almost got me kidnapped, grooming (coercion by social training and “this is your fault” narratives) from white folks of all genders was still a sometimes daily aspect of my life. In the end, I willingly chose to protect myself by listening to the stories given to me by 0thers, and eventually became a sex worker while working my other jobs, as a means to choose how I responded to what was constantly non-consensually breathing down my neck. This decision helped me greatly when I tried the eurocentric response to non-eurocentric gender of “transitioning” in making it easier to view my healthy Indigenous consent as the centric aspect of my work.
    That choice actually minimized the sexual harassment and assaults in my life drastically, and I still thank the Sex Work community, especially the 2S, NB, and Trans* BIPOC sex work community, for teaching me how to better protect myself.

  • Removal from Home: By the time I reached high school, my body was ready to be done with the horrors being done to and around me. I stopped being able to breathe or function properly, and was removed from my home as no doctor could find “a reason” for what they termed as my health crisis. Their cure showed their ineptitude: Blame my parents.
    My parents, knowing what happens to teenage mixed-race children in this country, and constantly fighting their own poverty, attempted to create options of places where I could stay while we figured out what to do for my health. None of these options panned out, but they gave me the ability to be out of school and in some cases be in solitary confinement, which I morbidly found was actually better for my health than school or socializing. This began a personal commitment to what would become a 20+ year study on my behavioral contrasts due to colonial violence. That study became Le Rouge Sublet.

  • Mental Illness: After a[nother] suicide attempt and numerous other terrifying incidents while briefly removed from home and school, I made an active decision as a child to let extreme levels of dissociation become my normalized state until I could find actual safety.
    Later in life I would confirm through conversations with adults that many, if not most children surviving colonial oppression (or all colors) in the Western Hemisphere make this active choice: to dissociate to attempt to escape the trauma and violence of racism and bigotry, or dissociate to uphold it while gaining privilege. Today, a large portion of this is labeled various non-symptom treating (avoidance of racism or bigotry being a [prevailing] cause of symptoms) personality disorders, such as “Imposter Syndrome”.

Sadly, my health being in this state was not due to a lack of white counseling or doctors.
I am still, to this day, attempting to find behavioral workers that I can afford that are actually Indigenous, BIPOC, Trans, Queer, and Diffabled affirming in their work and create growth instead of harm.

Everything Changes

My never-ending health crisis did not ease until my mid 30’s, the easing of which was possible because I finally felt someone I knew was safe to be honest with, though it took more than a decade to actually do so.

My partner BB (Encrypted Ritual) and I still bring up how the first time I met them [as they helped me move through unceded Lenape Territory, Harlem to Bed-Stuy] I kept singing in their car. Singing was something I physically and emotionally thought I was no longer capable of, due to the damage in my face and my general mistrust of doing anything enjoyable around a white person.

Thankfully they’re not only the kindest person I’ve ever met, but it turned out they’ve been defending Indigenous folk and BIPOC long before they met me.

They’re also tenacious, so while my shut down, dissociation, and distancing continued for years, BB themselves kept pushing me to connect with and honor my ancestry openly. Until then, I had always been extremely quiet, private, and paranoid about sharing this with them due to the constant colonial violence I still fight to this day. Speaking to my Mi’kmaq family about it, who I have seen some 3-5 times since leaving at 18, was still something you did not do online or over the phone, only in person, until extremely recently.

Their drive to give me Two Spirit, Indigenous, and BIPOC resources (sometimes so many I still get wonderfully overwhelmed) and then sit with me through them has been such a drastic contrast to the token Mystic Indian trope white folks have always attempted to hold me as. BB learns my language and speaks Mi’kmaw to me through out the day. They check spaces and media for triggers and warn me. They correct people who treat me with racism, and they give space or hold me when I make the painful and often constant decisions of no longer socializing with most of the white folks I meet in my life.


To be honest, they usually call it quits with folks well before I do - can’t blame this L’nu for continuing to try though ;)

While we will continue this article further in the future, I leave y’all with a question:

Do you think my racism and bigotry induced health issues have ended?
Hint: As racism and bigotry have not ended, the answer can not be Yes.