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Chapter 17 | Joseph Yvon-Theriault (continued) Let us put a stop here to this short “Canadian” survey with words used by the Anglo Québécois to name themselves. At the beginning, they were English. Later on, they were English Canadians. Today, they hesitate between being simply Canadians, like the rest of Canadians speaking English, or Anglo Québécois. Québec nationalism would prefer to call them only Québécois, preserving their ethnic background only in their private lives or cultural community. 1. when words hesitate, so does identity What about the Francophones who are a minority in Canada? I would like to show how the words used to name them are a symptom of the precariousness of their situation and how it makes their identity reference lack precision. I do not want to give a meaning that is exclusively negative to precariousness and indecision. It is true that this is a situation, whatever the main leaders of those communities might say in echo to federal politicians, in which the handing down of culture, in terms of cultural reproduction from one generation to the next, is not at all secured. I also use here the terms precariousness and indecision as a challenge to be taken on, a “slightness” to be changed into creativity (Paré, 1992). For rendering commonplace the power of such expressions, one can say that precariousness and indecision of identity references are, in a world of globalization, where cultural diversity is challenged, more often the standard situation rather than the exception. When travelling across the identity vocabulary of French speaking Canada outside Québec (travelling across historical time but also across today’s identity space), I would like mostly to reveal two dimensions of their cultural position. A first one, more conceptual, is unfurled along the nationalitary axis: between ethnicity and nation; or to put it differently, between dimensions of their cultural reality which integrate them as fragments of a national culture different from their own culture — i.e., which makes them ethnic — and other dimensions of their cultural reality which integrate them in a more global way, to a national reality. That axis raises the following question: are those communities ethnic communities or are they part of a national community? A second dimension, which is more contextual, overlaps, not necessarily completely, and unfurls on the French Canadian axis, between Québec and the Rest of Canada, between its place as one of the fragments of the Canadian mosaic or as a minority extension of Québec’s francophone culture. From this second axis a question arises: are those communities part of the “Canadian” semantic field, to which they are linked through their geopolitical placement, or of the Québec francophone field to which they are linked because they share the same national culture? I am going to start this exploration with the expression French Canadian, because it precedes the others and still haunts francophones who live as minorities, although we tried to change that in the 1960s. Suggesting that francophones living as minorities have been French Canadians asserts two things when considered on two axes we have just defined. First assertion. As French Canadians, the Francophone communities outside Québec historically have never been called ethnic communities, but were part of a national community, French Canada. This reference to nation is not a mere game, or an historically false pretense carried out by French Canadian leaders as an interpretation of the political pact of 1867. Let us recall it. Beyond the representation, always subjective, French Canada has really been an objective sociological reality, a peculiar modality of social integration that warrants being called a nation. As Fernand Dumont (1993) put it, French Canada has never been, strictly speaking, an ethnic group (as it is too often called in our day to assert more strongly its fading away) but a culture-nation, a grouping of human beings behaving at a second level of culture, with reference to history, literature and institutions, often within a State, and also sometimes within a Church. So, when francophones living as minorities identified themselves as French Canadians, they were effectively sharing a kind of national integration. Second assertion. The French Canadian nation mentioned above extended itself far beyond the frontiers of the Province of Québec; it included all the French Canadians of Canada (including the Acadians and the French Canadians of the United States). In presenting themselves as French Canadians, francophones living as minorities did not see themselves as minorities and in consequence, did not live on a daily basis as minorities and even less as ethnic groups. To live as French Canadians meant living in the universe and in the institutional practices of the French Canadian nation — its parishes, its clergy, its institutions — from Baie Sainte-Marie in Nova Scotia to Maillardville in British Columbia. To call oneself French Canadian meant asserting one’s belonging to a common culture — from coast to coast — but also seeing its integration into Canadian society, not through the lens of a minority culture, but through that of a binational society. |
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