Culture And Identity In French Canada

French-Canadian culture has evolved over a period of nearly four centuries, shaped by the encounter between the cultural heritage brought from France and the new milieu in which the European settlers found themselves. The influences that helped to form it included contact with the aboriginal peoples, the physical realities of the North American continent, and the changing political, social, and economic situation of French-speaking Canadians over the centuries. (See also CANADIAN CULTURE AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY.)

The culture varies between the different regions where there are francophone populations. The Acadians are a good example in this respect. Because of geographic isolation, together with the distinct cultural heritage brought by the group’s original settlers who came mostly from Poitou in France, and the particular conditions they encountered in what were to become the Maritime provinces, Acadian culture developed in a different way from that of the St Lawrence valley, Ontario, or the west. After the rise of Québécois identity, francophone groups in the other provinces and territories began to identify themselves in terms of their own regional history, so that today the cultural map includes the domains of the Franco-Ontarians, the Franco-Manitobans, the Franco-Yukonais, the Franco-Ténois, the Fransaskois, and the Franco-Columbians.

Contact with the native peoples inhabiting the areas in which the French settled had important results for French-Canadian culture. A great number of place names, including those of Canada and Quebec, have come from aboriginal languages. Words designating new realities have also been integrated into French, such as toboggan and attacas, the latter a term referring to the cranberry, which is also known by the Latinate canneberge. The interaction between the French settlers and the aboriginal peoples not only resulted in synthesis and acculturation on the part of the settlers, but also caused immense changes to the culture of the native peoples. Many aboriginal traditions, including stories and rituals, have died out without being recorded, and what has been written down has until recently been documented largely by Europeans and their descendants, who have often filtered the native culture through a European perspective, whether consciously or not.

The earliest of these records were made by the explorers (for example, in the letters of Jacques Cartier) and the Jesuit missionaries (in their Relations), who were writing for a European audience that had certain cultural expectations about the New World. The European view of the native peoples as noble savages was already determined when the first explorers arrived by the humanist dream of a utopia. The descriptions sent to Europe influenced the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne and the great figures of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, especially Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The latter was a major influence in the development of romanticism, a movement that drew heavily on representations of North American aboriginals.

By the nineteenth century the portrayal of the native peoples came to serve the ideological purposes of the nationalist school of writers in Quebec. In 1861 Henri-Raymond Casgrain published his Légendes canadiennes, which represented aboriginals in a systematically savage way, using this portrayal to highlight the virtue and humanity of the French settlers. His intention was informed by the Romantic concept of nation, and his legends were part of an effort to create a national mythology by identifying and canonizing the legendary founders of Canada. In a more scientific vein, Marius Barbeau in the twentieth century followed his mentor Franz Boas’s ethnological methods and recorded many aspects of native culture. He also used aboriginal legends and traditions as the basis for his novel Le rêve de Kamaelmouk (1948). A similar interweaving of a European literary form with aboriginal content characterizes Yves Thériault’s Agaguk (1958).

Over the past three decades, native people have begun to use written forms adapted from European origins, and since the 1970s they have published their own cultural works in French. According to Diane Boudreau, this development is the result of an increasing number of natives whose principal language is French, as well as a response to a federal white paper in 1969 that argued for the assimilation of the native peoples. As she points out, these writings generally have a twofold purpose. Texts may be directed to a native audience as a means of assuring cultural survival among those who have lost their traditional language through assimilation. Or they may be intended for a white audience in an attempt to make the larger public aware of the native movement of protest and resistance against the colonizing effects of Euro-Canadian culture.

Historical and ethnological works such as Histoire des Indiens du Haut et du Bas Canada (1973–74) by Bernard Assiniwi, Les Algonquins (1983) by Yvon Couture, and Albert Connolly’s Oti-il-no kaepe (1972) provide a record of life in the past and describe the culture shock that resulted from contact with Europeans. This category of writing includes autobiographical works such as Le “premier” des Hurons (1971) by Max Gros-Louis and Moi, “Mestenapeu” (1983) by Mathieu André, not a traditional Amerindian genre. These books seek to pass on the values and experience of the native cultures while at the same time condemning the action of white colonizers. Boudreau points out that they differ from Western autobiography in at least two ways: they tend to place a greater emphasis on the formation of a collective, as opposed to an individual, identity, and the episodic structure is sometimes influenced by aboriginal narrative patterns.

There is as yet little fiction or poetry written in French by native peoples. The first novel was Bernard Assiniwi’s Le bras coupé (1976), a story of cultural dispossession. Other works of fiction include short prose pieces published in the magazine Rencontre and translations and adaptations of traditional stories and legends. In 1985 Andatha, the first Amerindian book of poetry in French, was published by Eleonore Sioui. In addition to evoking the cultural heritage of her people, the author places her own experience of cultural colonization in an international context by comparing it to that of Haitians, Cambodians, and Tibetans. Her love poems represent a mixture of genres in that traditional oral Huron literature does not accord much importance to the celebration of love between individuals. Charles Coocoo, in the poems of Broderies sur mocassins (1988), evokes the spiritual traditions of his people, with an emphasis on harmony with the natural world. Several plays have also been written and some produced, all dealing with the theme of the confrontation between Amerindian culture and the colonial practices of whites. These theatrical works incorporate elements of traditional ritual, including dance, song, and mythical characters.

In the creation of French-Canadian culture, the process of synthesis and assimilation resulting from the encounter of different cultural traditions has not only taken place as a result of the contact between European and North American aboriginal traditions. More recently, the arrival of significant numbers of immigrants to Quebec has resulted in a new process of synthesis and acculturation. As Pierre L’Hérault has shown, the writings of these newcomers have used the idea of the heterogenous to examine the notion of identity. In the early 1980s authors from various immigrant groups, whether from francophone areas such as France (Régine Robin), Haiti (Dany Laferrière), and the Middle East (Naïm Kattan) or other places such as Italy (Marco Micone, Antonio D’Alfonso, and Fulvio Caccia), began publishing works that expressed a notion of identity based on their diverse backgrounds. They wrote, not from a certain past, but rather, as Marco Micone has said, by balancing three experiences: the country of origin, the migratory process, and the host culture. This contemporary notion of identity recalls the processes at work in the genesis of that earlier representative figure in French-Canadian culture, the nomadic coureur de bois. As shown by Maurice Lemire, his identity, like that of the modern immigrant, was generated in a mixture of cultural experiences, European and North American. In contrast, the Québécois sense of identity associated with the habitant and the culture of the land was based on the notion of homogeneity. So it would seem that some of the same factors at work in the first manifestations of Canadian identity in the period of New France still play a role today in Quebec.

Of greatest importance in the evolution of French-Canadian culture has been the sustained contact with the British, especially since the French colony was ceded to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, and the increasingly important cultural influence of the United States. Although this contact has not totally excluded the processes of synthesis and assimilation (including the use of English weights and measures, for example), British culture has generally served the role of foil and catalyst for the development of a distinctive French-Canadian culture, and the continuing reference with regard to cultural origins has continued to be France.

Beginning with the first cultural productions that provided the basis for the creation of a national identity and extending to the present-day critique of the notion of identity itself, French-Canadian society has created a varied and extensive body of cultural works. As Fernand Dumont has observed, they have played a central role in the founding of a society by establishing a reference through which that society at once defines and expresses its identity. It is this dual role of culture as a means of creating social identity and as a way of expressing and perpetuating that identity which will be stressed in this essay. Literature is an especially privileged player in this process, but the other arts, including painting, architecture, and film, also play a part.