Je veux que les Inuit soient libres de nouveau

Last weekend I went to a poetry reading called Les Bruits du Monde connected with the Salon du Livre book fair here. It featured 20 different poets in less than two hours, and nearly all of them were memorable. Several of the readers were Haitian, including Dany Laferrière who is one of Canada's best known contemporary authors, and I think four were Native authors, or Autochthones as they like to say here in Quebec. Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, a Wendat writer and part of the important Sioui family, was one and Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, a Cree métisse painter and writer, was another.

Native authors who publish in French and in an autochthonous language are interesting, and I'm sure are very little known to the US scholarly community in Native American Literature. I'd like to pursue this a little and try to read some of their works, and perhaps try to publish something on it if I find a writer I enjoy reading.

As a first step I began reading the autobiography of Taamusi Qumaq, Je veux que les Inuit soient libres de nouveau. Taamusi lived from 1914 to 1993, and also wrote an ethnographic and historical encyclopedia, in the Inuit language. His work alongside Louis-Jacques Dorais, translator of the autobiography, was instrumental for the creation of a dictionary of the language as well. But Taamusi spoke and wrote only Inuktitut, so this is an "as-told-to" autobiography. And like the works of that type in the 19th and early 20th century, such as Black Hawk's autobiography, it describes the enormous changes that colonization and modernity brought to his people, all within one lifetime. Until the early 1950s, Qumaq writes, there were no airplane flights to the villages of northern Quebec, only a resupply ship that arrived once every summer. The people lived in igloos all winter and in tents in the summer. Qumaq travelled by dogsled to fetch the mail for his community. They trapped fox and sold the pelts to traders from Revillon Freres or the Hudson Bay Company, and with the proceeds purchased only tea, ammunition, tobacco and flour.

Not until the 1960s did Qumaq and the community of Puvirnituq where he lived begin to sense the political forces of Canada. He writes of the "les deux paliers de gouvernement, fédéral et provinciale" and explains that he favored the Quebec authorities. In 1964 Qumaq, in his capacity of chair of the town council, met René Lévesque at a conference of Inuit leaders. At that time Lévesque was ministre des richesses naturelles, and in the midst of his effort to nationalize Hydro-Québec. He also worked to change the language of instruction in schools for Inuit children in Québec from English to French. The ministre said at the meeting that "Les Inuit ne devraient pas perdre leur culture et leur langage. Ils devraient pouvoir travailler dans leur propre langue...Les Blancs qui travaillent dans les collectivités inuit devraient parler l'inuktitut" (94). Those lines could just as easily have been spoken about Quebec and the French language. Qumaq was persuaded, and later even joined the Parti Québecois! This even though the schools recently established in his village demanded that the children to speak only English.

What interests me is the potential validity of an analogy between Quebecois nationalism and sovereignty movements and indigenous ones. Each can claim to be a colonized people whose language and traditions are under threat of assimilation by Anglo-American imperialists. I've begun to study how Quebecois scholars of the colonial period claim an affinity for Indians and even a kind of regional autochthony, or "originarity" to coin a term. Yet within Quebec the first nations peoples are not necessarily any better off than elsewhere in Canada, and some of them are quite annoyed by the way Francohphone Quebec claims to be a "distinct society" with special rights and privileges such as ought to be granted to the true natives of the country.