The Aboriginal foundation of this country and the native ferment within it are driving it above and before all into the concert of the other American countries, and this is why the results of this Commission's proceedings will, in my view, take on an obvious international aspect. What Canada does or does not do, what Canada will or will not accomplish in the next few years will, starting with the proceedings and recommendations of this Commission, serve as a model - whether to be imitated or not - for all the other countries on this continent. 

Besides, nobody is really deceived. Anyone who enters the premises of a Canadian embassy abroad - and I have often done so, in full awareness - will see before him or her, in the waiting rooms or the embassy offices, an identity, a symbolic three-layered representation which invariably takes the following form: 

1) an Eskimo [TR-sic] carving, an Indian doll or moccasin;  

2) a sculpture which nearly always represents a Canadian habitant farmer of the Ile d'Orleans or Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, and  

3) a mosaic or a painting of the raw, pure landscape of the Rockies or the Canadian North, usually without the slightest indication of a human being. 

In short, a country with three components, Anglo geography, native art and a Franco human figure. To these dimensions there may sometimes be added the C.N. Tower in Toronto or Place Ville-Marie in Montreal, These are seen, apparently, not so much as architectural elements as an appeal to the geometrical multiculturalism of a country which is always yet to come, and this may well lead one to ask whether the people who define its image really do believe that it will ever arrive. They do, they do, but... 

Eight years from now we will have passed the turn of the 21st century. And the question as to whether Canada has been, in the century now ending, the great power envisioned by Wilfrid Laurier will no longer be a question of its mere existence. It will be a question essentially linked to its native dimension, and that is what the coming years will, or will not, reveal. 

Now that I have made these brief preliminary remarks I am well aware that, if I have been invited to address you, it is because of my academic record and my research, but all that seems to me  
somewhat secondary in the present context. I therefore would not wish to lose this opportunity to go further. Very much further.  

Like any other academic I am a "flesh and blood" creature with a pre-academic past, an individual who is the product of a country and a heritage, and one who must, inevitably, bear witness to an experience inherited from geography and issuing from history. Permit me therefore to evoke these personal dimensions. While I was writing this text, I passed by my family's home at Belle-Chasse, down river from Quebec City, opposite Minigo, the Isle [TR-sic] des Hurons in the 18th century and the Isle d'Orleans as the French called it, and I found there an old pair of moccasins - the souliers d'beu that belonged to my father, if I may use an expression from that time, which people in Quebec are nowadays rather ashamed of. I do not know who made these moccasins or when they were made, but there they are, eloquent imprescriptible evidence of something unsaid in our time... 

My contribution will therefore be simply that of a Canadian born in this country, a Canadian born from this country, more than 150 years before the appearance of the United States of America and  
almost 250 years before the appearance of the confederated entity whose century and a quarter of existence we are preparing to celebrate, next July. There is a discrepancy here which can provoke a smile, it does not drive one to revolt and denunciation; it has something so false and fictitious about it - a Canada which is more than four centuries old, reduced to a century and a bit - that it is better to laugh about it. And yet... 

Let me make myself clear at the outset. My voice is not just mine, but the product of a country which is the result of a great geographical and anthropological hybridization in the 16th and 17th centuries, so much so that all the supposedly European origins vanished in the mist over the centuries, and then were recently re-invented through the medium of a proposed Quebecois identity which I do not favour. What I want to say you is this...I'm not French and I don't speak French as a first languaqe. I'm a "Canadian" and I was brouqht up to speak a languaqe that used to be called canadien or canayen, a languaqe that still exists in and throuqh many native lanquaqes [2] across North America. Of course I also speak French now, my accent has been radically changed, but my roots are exclusively Canadian. 

Roots like this result from a mixing of the influences of the earth and the Aboriginal people that the contemporary political goals of Canada and Quebec have sought not only to forget but to obliterate. I therefore take my stand neither with one side nor with the other, but with something else that is yet to come - a country buried athwart Canada-Quebec, which both sides have sought to have done with once and for all and to eliminate. A country which can only see the light of day again through the native dimension. 

Of course, I will be quickly told that four centuries of Canadianness count for little against thousands of years of native settlement. May I therefore at once add the following remarks. As a member of what I will term the old tribe of the Old-time Canadians whose existence Quebec has doggedly tried to overlook so that it can open for itself the gates of what is called modernity,  

I am - I am weighing my words - part of a cultural and political universe which owes its survival to the native presence. I have, while traversing this country and its regions, encountering one,  two and sometimes three languages, from Manitoba, Acadie, Newfoundland, the Northwest Territories, Baffin, Keewatin and so forth, come to realize just how far the people I belong to were, and until very recently always have been, much less "quebecois" or "francais" (French, as they say in English) than native.