Permission to Land : A Memoir of Loss, Discovery, and Identity

When Judy LeBlanc’s mother died in 2015, she embarked on a personal journey of discovery and reconciliation with her known but unacknowledged Coast Salish ancestry on her mother’s side. She was to discover that both maternal great-grandparents had Scottish fathers and Coast Salish mothers. Her great-grandmother was from the W_SÁNEC people in what is now known as Saanich on Vancouver Island, and her great-grandfather was the son of a woman from either the Suquamish in Washington state or the Tsleil-Waututh in Burrard Inlet, North Vancouver. Finally, LeBlanc discovers that her great aunt attended Chemawa, an American Indian boarding school where, at the age of fourteen, she contracted tuberculosis and was sent home to die.

In this intimate and moving memoir-in-essays, LeBlanc reflects on the impact of erasure in her family, particularly on the women through four generations. Marked by grief for the loss of her mother and the discovery of buried family secrets, LeBlanc sets out on a journey, both literary and cultural, in the form of a voyage by canoe to the home of her ancestors. Permission to Land is a powerful and vulnerable exploration of the complexities of family, heritage and identity, courageously questioning whether it is possible to seek renewal after irrevocable loss.