Thunder Ant and Thunder Woman
Mi’kmaq advocate and culture bearer Lottie Johnson to receive honorary doctor of letters from CBU
Lottie Johnson was Thunder Ant before she became Thunder Woman.
About 40 years ago, the Mi’kmaq advocate and culture bearer from Eskasoni asked an elder who was pipe carrier to find her spirit name. But when he returned with word from Elsipogtog First Nation, formerly called the Big Cove Band, in New Brunswick, Johnson wasn’t exactly thrilled by her new moniker.
“He says ‘Well, the elder up there in New Brunswick says you’ve got a name, and he told me Kaqtukewe’j.’ I said ‘Kaqtukewe’j?’ He says, ‘Yeah, that’s a good name,’ and I said ‘OK.’ But if you speak Mi’kmaq, kaqtukewe’j is that little thunder ant. I said ‘Oh my god.’ I didn’t want to be an ant. I wanted this beautiful name — I don’t know what, maybe Soaring Eagle,” said Johnson, 73, who will receive an honorary doctor of letters from Cape Breton University on Saturday.
“It’s funny how a little ant or a little animal will teach you humility. That’s what I thought of — I wanted this beautiful name, yet I became this little ant, and from this little ant I had to grow and understand what it was.”
The metamorphosis from ant to woman didn’t take long.
A few months later, Johnson met that elder from New Brunswick, Eugene Augustine, and asked him why she was named after a large winged insect that’s often seen before storms. He explained that when he offered tobacco during two sweat lodge ceremonies, he saw lightning each time when he looked for her name.
“So, he says ‘That was your name — Thunder Woman.’”
It was a fitting name for someone who weathered her share of stormy times during her life.
Growing up one of 13 children, Johnson was sent to Shubenacadie Indian Residential School at age 10, and, with the exception of two years she spent helping take care of her dying grandmother, remained there until she was 16.
The experience took a toll on her relationship with her mother, the late Margaret Johnson, who was better known as Dr. Granny. A famous basket maker, historian and storyteller, Dr. Granny, who received an honorary doctorate from St. Francis Xavier University in 1994, was in the vanguard in the fight to keep the Mi’kmaq culture alive by passing on the language and traditional dances, songs and games to the next generation. And when her children returned from residential school speaking English, she banned the language from her home.
“My mother told us, ‘you speak Mi’kmaq. You’re Mi’kmaq, you’re not anything other so you speak Mi’kmaq.’ And after that she stopped speaking English to us,” Johnson said. “At the time I thought that she didn’t understand me, I thought she was just being mean: ‘Here you go again. Don’t speak English.’”
“She always carried the culture, and a thing for her was the language. She always told me, ‘You speak your language, you learn who you are.’ And she said once your language is gone, and you have no spirituality, and no culture, no nothing, that’s when you cease to become a native and that’s when we’re going to lose everything that we are.”
While Johnson learned to speak the Mi’kmaq language and grew up picking berries, making traditional medicines and learning to fish, she struggled to stay in later years.
When she was 19, she moved to Boston, where she met and married her first husband and had two daughters. The relationship turned sour, however, and she soon began drinking heavily.
Sober since 1979, she credits her culture with helping her get back on track. Soon after moving back to Eskasoni in 1980, she began following in her mother’s footsteps. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in community studies from thenUniversity College of Cape Breton in 1991, and began a long career with Native Alcohol and Drug Addictions Counselling Association.
“It was through traditional healing and different traditional teaching, cultural beliefs, that I found I was able to heal,” she said.
She also played an important role in developing the lawsuit against Canada and the Catholic Church as a board member for the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School Association. Their case became part of a national class-action lawsuit that settled for a Canadian record $5 billion.
Johnson was later appointed the Atlantic regional representative on the Indian Residential School Survivor’s Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and witnessed the historic release of the final report and recommendations at Rideau
Hall.
Retired since she was
70, she’s still active, helping addicts make dreamcatchers and talking sticks, leading prayer circles, and making presentations at schools across Cape Breton. She said her mother’s influence is now reaching another generation.
“My granddaughter, she’s two — she’ll be three soon — and I try with the smudging and little things with her. I’ll notice when I do it, she’ll stand really still. I have my mother’s feather, so then she takes the feather and she’s touching me on the head with it, so she’s picking up on it as well. And people are more open, I think, to native spirituality and stuff now. People are freer to do this.
“If I had a different parent, things wouldn’t have been this way, I might have been different.”
In addition to Johnson, CBU will confer honorary degrees on two other Cape Bretoners. Businessman Jim Kehoe will receive a doctor of letters, and Chief Justice of Nova Scotia Michael MacDonald will be awarded a doctor of laws.