|
|
||
|
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A MAP OF CANADA 1739-1742 by Joeph Lafrance
will be inserted here when a digital
A native substratum which has found itself gradually forced to become assimilated to English, not only as a language but as a system of legal and territorial thought, just like the Canadians. As a Dakota "colleague" bluntly put it one day: "I may very well speak English, but it is not English that speaks through me" - it is a new country we are all seeking for, well beyond the present debates, is it not? James Joyce, basing himself on a vanishing Celtic heritage, drove the transformation of English so far; what is the position of pre-American native thought in the Canadian framework? I wanted to add these explanations, which are both personal and plural, because I wish to distance myself from the Quebec-Canada game of politics and identity which has been played out during the last few decades on the backs of the natives and of the Canadians, and to attempt to find a new modus operandi. There is a dilemma which it would be tempting to leave unmentioned. The entire political organization of the natives (and of the Francophones as well) has necessarily been copied from the federated structure which has categorized it, when the actual goal is to be freed from it. It is indeed not easy to use the administrative structure which has conditioned us politically in an attempt to imagine the new political structure which might recreate that native identity which has been undergoing a process of continuous acculturation since the coming of the Europeans. Like all the other countries of the Americas Canada does not acknowledge a real Metis identity, but seeks to integrate into European structures, termed "republics" or "constitutional monarchies", a native dimension which has to accept political and juridical acculturation in order to be acknowledged. Before proposing anything different, I have the feeling that, unlike the other Commissions that have been set up in the past, the Natives have ceased long ago to be a subject of investigation, despite the forms of words which it always seems obligatory to refer to. There was the Hawthorne-Tremblay Commission, in which the "White" administrative and anthropological apparatus discovered that the Native wanted change and which therefore received the native submission as a procedure outside its own form of operation. More recently there was the Penner Report in which, more or less, the same administrative apparatus stated: "They want governmental autonomy or self-government". But the native "they" remained outside the Commission and acted as an external witness to its own process of evolution. But today the membership of this Commission is, in the majority, native. The question which then arises is the following, and it indicates, potentially, a fundamental change of course. Is this a Royal Commission on Native Peoples or is it a Native Commission - Royal, to be sure, the royalty of the earth and of being - on the future of Canada, or is it both at the same time? What is its real role, and what will it be? For the time being anything is possible and these thoughts enter freely into the infinite realm of possibilities, which is quite exceptional. If it obtains the means and the staying power this Commission could be one of the most important, if not the most important, in the history of this country, more important than the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission of the sixties (Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism which, as we recall, had created bilingual districts right up to that of Fort Smith, in the Northwest Territories, because of the Metis presence). There was, in fact, a succession of events, the possibility and the scope of which had hardly been guessed at a quarter of a century earlier. First, as it is always pointed out, without fail, there was the arrival of the Parti Quebecois in power in 1976. But with the passage of time it is possible to highlight another fact of comparable importance: the proceedings, during the same period, of the Berger Commission which from 1974 to 1977 literally put the North and the native question on the table of pan-Canadian identity and constitutional renewal. To illustrate the parallelism of these movements I will quote just one example, which is however extremely revealing; it concerns a Dene promotional pamphlet from the end of the seventies, the title of which read: "the Dene are not talking separatism". But why issue such a statement of defence, and to whom was it addressed? Certainly not Quebec. One had the feeling that this message, which took Quebec's own words in order to separate, or rather, dissociate itself from them, announced both a fear and a hope. The fear of being identified with the threats that Quebec seemed to present and the hope of getting as much as Quebec. But all this, from a Quebecois standpoint, was going on in isolation, we must not be afraid to say so, Quebec being a continual subject of talk and deliberation without being able to offer in return its own analysis both of the native question and of the Anglo question, if I may say so. It is somewhat ironic to observe, some twenty-five years later, that today it is the people whom Quebec has called, contrary to their wishes, the Francophones outside Quebec, who are now invoking the example of the Mohawks and the "Oka crisis" as action which should be considered as a means of forcing the governments to pay attention to what they are saying. Further to these propositions, which would require, I admit, a much more extensive development, it may be asked how analysts and politicians have so often managed to dissociate the synchronic and complementary features of all these events. These are events which in the seventies already appeared to carry within them the only possible Canada: James Bay I, Mackenzie Pipeline, 1969 White Paper, new claims policy. Not forgetting, of course the referendum of 80, the process of constitutional repatriation, [3] the question of "what does Quebec want", which Quebec would subsequently serve back to its authors in the inverse form "what does Canada want" and lastly and above all, the series of constitutional conferences whose task was to "elucidate and define the nature and the scope of native rights". When all these facts are brought up in succession, not only does a persistent continuity become evident, but a remarkable convergence also emerges. That is, the "Quebec Question" and the "Native Question" will not be settled separately. Moreover, when one thinks seriously about these two dimensions - and this, you will have guessed, is the line of argument underlying my entire presentation - have the two dimensions really been separated in the course of history? How, indeed, could a people so interbred, culturally and otherwise, as the Canadian people now called Quebecois, and how could a people so interbred in the Quebecois fashion, or, if you prefer, so interbred in their Canadianness, as are the native peoples to the east of the Rockies and beyond, claim to have a history which cannot in any way be reduced to that of the other? [4] It simply does not make sense. The whole Riel affair is there as evidence. Incidentally, the facts referred to above display an obvious parallel
with the events at the end of the l9th century and once again testify to
an astonishinq converqence. The war which was forced on the Metis and the
Cree, the Numbered Treaties process, the condemnation and dispersal of
the Natives and their settlement on reserves, and the sudden descent, upon
the whole of the Prairies
I see no need to insist any further. The time has come to lift the
veil from a huge mystification.
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||