Traditional Medicine

The Easter water, the water that is gathered before the sunrise on Easter Sunday morning and not only here in Acadia, but in Québec and some regions some rural regions some people still gather it, and in Acadia it’s especially in northern New Brunswick where it’s a common tradition to gather water before the, it has to be water that is from a stream that’s running, not from stagnant water. And the belief is that this water will stay pure forever and you’ll keep it preciously, and people always said that it was just like holy water, because it was blessed directly from, from heaven on Easter Sunday morning. So that water is used, people will sometimes drink a little bit if they’re not feeling well or they’ll rub a little bit on themselves if they have, if they’re sore somewhere and believe that it’s going to cure them or some people will just keep it as a souvenir because it’s Easter water that’s pure and will never be…

After 5 or 10 years it’s still very pure?
Yes, I even have a bottle that I collected in the 1970s over 30 years ago that’s still quite transparent and looks pure.

What’s the importance of medicinal herbs are they still in use and in the past they were very important I think.
In the past it was everywhere all over Acadia, people would use medicinal herbs and today it’s mostly older people who have inherited this knowledge from one generation to another, people who are not used to relying on modern medicine but always use their own, their own ways of healing who have all this knowledge of using traditional herbs. And there’s also younger people who have a particular interest for the subject who have done research on their own and who have questioned older people to try to find out about these herbs. Some of them that are well we have in the field of folk medicine it’s really, there’s a link there between traditional French culture and traditional native culture because some of the plants were brought over from Europe; a lot of the plants that just grow like weeds, like plantain and tansy things like that, you’ll see on the roadside, those were brought over from Europe, because people used them in their traditional medicine. But there’s other plants that are native to North America, like Labrador tea that come from the Natives and it was the Natives who told, taught people that during the winter you take a tea made with Labrador tea and you’ll stay healthy that way.

In the Acadian society there were many healers, are they still active today?
Yeah that’s something that hasn’t disappeared either, even though it’s gone kind of underground, you don’t hear about traditional healers today, but there are still people who are, for example people who can stop blood if someone is injured and bleeding, these blood stoppers they have a secret ritual that they accomplish to stop the bleeding and they say that you can only transmit your secret from, to a person of the opposite sex and you can’t transmit it openly to a whole group of people you can only do it very rarely otherwise you lose the power. It’s considered like a supernatural power and it seems like something like old magical beliefs from the past, but this is still quite, very much alive today. And one category of healer that you don’t find so much today are the seventh son or seventh daughter, the people who are supposed to have a gift directly from God. If you were the seventh son of seven in a row or seven daughters in a row then the seventh is supposed to be able to just by putting his hands on someone who is sick able, be able to heal them and obviously with the smaller families today it’s not so common.

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Traditional Medicine