Secession in Canada and U.S. History

More than a year ago when I was putting together ideas for my Fulbright fellowship application I read an article by Thomas Loebel published in the New Centennial Review 1:2 Fall 2001. The journal is edited by my old classmates David Johnson and Scott Michaelson. The title: "Jefferson Davis on the Plains of Abraham." The idea was simple and provocative. The U.S. South organized itself as the confederate states and asserted its right to self-determination. Quebec has done the same. Both the old South and Quebec developed and cultivated a strong sense of cultural identity in contradistinction to the larger nations that contained them. Loebel also told me something I had not known: that after the civil war Jefferson Davis went to live in Eastern Townships of Quebec, and that during the war his elder children had lived in Montréal. The land that offered freedom fugitive slaves before the war also offered exile to confederate leaders afterwards.

Loebel is aware of how controversial his article might be, and takes pains to point out that whereas in the U.S. the doctrine of confederacy became linked to racism, in Canada the situation is different. In fact, it seems to me that the Canadian confederation, founded in 1867, offered to the provinces the autonomy and self-determination that the southern states had demanded.

To me the most salient comparison between Quebec and the American south is the sense of tragic loss and ressentiment that binds the culture. The moment of loss for Quebecois is "la conquête anglaise" in 1759. When in Ottawa for the Fulbright scholarship orientation, I met Carla Mendiola and we spoke about how in her hometown of San Antonio the phrase "remember the Alamo" invokes the nationalist spirit of Texas. Why do affluent and privileged people prefer to invoke losses rather than victories when they celebrate their in-group? I proposed to Carla that it would be too damaging to the hispanic population of Texas to celebrate a battle in which the U.S. slaughtered Mexican soldiers in 1848. However, Carla pointed out that many of the defenders of the Alamo, and of the goal of Texas nationalism, were hispanophones.

The patriot rebellions of 1837 prompted the British to send Lord Durham to Canada to figure out how to get the colony back in line. He proposed uniting the two parts Upper and Lower Canada (roughly corresponding to Ontario and Quebec) so that the Francophone population that was the majority in Lower Canada would be a minority in the united colony.

Folklore and Ethnologie

At Oregon I've begun teaching folklore courses and am now part of the participating faculty in folklore. For my Fulbright at Université Laval I will be associated with the history department, which has programs in archivisme, archéologie, muséologie, and ethnologie. The translation of disciplinary names between languages may seem straightforward, since each of those French words has an obvious cognate in English. But it's really more complex that it appears. As Laurier Turgeon told me, the word "folklore" although used in French, does not carry the connotations that he and other researchers want to have. It suggests something outmoded, crusty and traditionalist. This was confirmed by a folklore colleague at Oregon, who said that in international meetings organized by UNESCO, the northern Europeans, from England or Scandinavian countries, embrace the term "folklore" and want to pursue it, while the southern Europeans do not like the term. Dan said that it carries associations with fascist nationalist projects to cultivate a racist notion of the folk. France I guess belongs with southern Europe in this case.

Laurier Turgeon holds a Canada Research Chair in History and Ethnology and formerly headed the CELAT or "Centre interuniversitaire des études sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions" which sums up the object of folklore/ethnology research without using either word. Oddly, the word "ethnology" is rarely used in English, or at least, I've never used it myself, even though I've often read and written about ethnography, and ethnology would logically be the science of which ethnography is just one part. So Laurier is a professor of ethnology.

Laurier and Dan both referred to the boost given their field by the UNESCO project on intangible cultural heritage. There's another term for folklore--"intangible cultural heritage"-- all the elements of traditional cultures that do not take the form of artifacts, artworks, or buildings, but instead are stories, performances, and other spoken words and gestures. Why do governments pay to preserve buildings and artifacts in museums while they do little to preserve the intangible cultural heritage? No doubt the endeavor has something of a "salvage ethnology" goal behind it, rather like the "salvage ethnography" that the soi-disant up-to-date anthropologists declare they don't do anymore, and the "salvage linguistics" that some of my colleagues in Oregon are very much committed to as they try to document and/or revive Native American languages that are spoken by only a small population of tribal peoples. So Laurier's projects include the "encyclopédie du patrimoine immatérielle du Québec." This is an effort to document religious traditions (not only Catholic but Jewish and Native too) in a largely secular Québec.