Quote:
|
Actually, calling Quebec a "colony" in 1774 seems a little odd since there was no effort at bringing colonists to Quebec at that point, or very little. I would call it a "possession" in preference to a "colony". It had previously been a French colony, in addition to being a French possession.
|
Quote:
According to Wikipedia "In all, of the 14,100 Acadians in the region, approximately 11,500 Acadians were deported.[5][d] A census of 1764 indicates that 2,600 Acadians remained in the colony, presumably having eluded capture.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians Also interesting that "revanche des berceaux" worked in other parts of Canada. Within a Canadian context, at least, it seemed like even long before official bilingualism, it seems like Francophones seemed to know and recognize they had a "fighting chance" much more (e.g. Acadians, Franco-Ontarians), even if they were outside Quebec, than if they lived south of the border (Louisiana, Missouri, the US Midwest etc.). Was there something about being part of the same country as Quebec (long before official recognition of a distinct identity would arise in the 60s) that made a Franco-Ontarian more resolute about not giving up to English than an exiled Cajun surrounded by American southerners? I suppose I've never heard about "revanche des berceaux" in Louisiana, even among the Cajun descendants. I don't know enough about it, but being exiled, did they have big families French-Canadian style (did the French Canadian diaspora stateside ever achieve high birthrates and keep the tradition of big families alive or assimilate quicker stateside? Or even similar to stereotypes about Catholics elsewhere back in the day, like Irish, Italians etc.). I've never heard about Cajuns vs. Anglo-American southerners compared like Anglo-Ontarians and Francophone Ontarians, for instance. Did Cajuns think of themselves as French among Anglos when it came to the other US Southerners like the way German-speaking Amish called other midwesterners "English" or even older Hispanic communities (like the New Mexican Spanish speakers or Tejanos and Californios) saw themselves as surrounded by Anglos (Americans)? Rural linguistic minorities like Mennonites, Amish, etc. managed to hold on in the US and Canada through big families and cultural isolation, so I wonder why Cajuns didn't, or did they? |
Quote:
At least on the inside, the small neighbourhood bar I regularly go to in Vieux-Hull wouldn't be out of place somewhere in inner city Montreal. If you drill down into Canada's demographics a bit more, you also have the Anglo-Quebecer experience going on in places like Aylmer and Chelsea, and also the francophone-hors-Québec experience going on in Vanier, Orleans, Rockland, etc. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
One interesting piece of history though, is the Anglo-Canadian/British appropriation of the word "Canada". Originally (pre-1791), the word "Canada" referred to what is now Quebec.. it specifically referred to the French. "Canadien" meant French settlers. Nova Scotia (which at the time included NB & PEI) and Newfoundland were separate from the French possession called "Canada". But after 1791, the historical Canada region was divided into Upper Canada and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec, respectively), with the intention of Upper Canada becoming a British/Anglo colony, which it did. Later the term "Canada" was adopted to refer to the entirety of British North America. So the name went from being a descriptor of French Canada only, to its current meaning. |
Quote:
There was a lot of economic migration of Quebecois to the New England states as well in this era. In retrospect, it's a shame we couldn't have directed them to help settle the Prairies instead. French Canada could have spanned the whole country instead of really just being Quebec. In this scenario, we might actually be a binational country instead of an Anglo-Canadian country with Quebec as a minority nation. |
Quote:
In those days, the moniker "Canadien/Canadian" did not apply to them. Canadiens were people like Maurice Richard, Louis St-Laurent, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, etc. Acadiens were not Canadiens. For a lot of people, Mackenzie King would not really have been considered a Canadien/Canadian in those days either... he was an "Anglais". Obviously those identifiers were rapidly fading out in those days, and maybe already out of use in certain circles. But they were still shared by a large share of the population into the 1960s - and not just by francophones. |
Quote:
There are letters from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ottawa basically saying that Canada and the U.S. had a common "French problem", and that it was probably for the better if the migration is directed towards the established industrial cities of the NE US, as they'll be more easily assimilated down there. The Government of Canada made it deliberately logistically and cost-prohibitive for Canadian francophones to move to the West, and also greased the wheels for people from overseas who were deemed more easily anglo-assimilatable (among other factors Ottawa felt made them more suitable). |
Quote:
The time when most Cajuns in Louisiana were still native French speakers is only 3 or 4 generations distant from today. The first generation where French was lost by most everyone down there was that of my parents, so people born in the 30s and 40s. When I was in high school I read contemporary books written in French in the latter half of the 20th century by people from Louisiana. |
Quote:
That said, all of northern NB including the north-east always have seemed to be integrated into the Quebec "circuit" in terms of businesses, performers and educational, health care and religious personnel when the Catholic church played a big role in running things. So I wonder if that didn't play a role in implementing the societal phenomenon of the revanche des berceaux there, and why it does not appear to have been as predominant in other Acadian areas of NB like the SE and other Maritime provinces. As I have mentioned before one of my parents is from northern NB and the other is Acadian from elsewhere in the Maritimes, and the latter once made an astute observation in terms of northern NB being "on the Quebec circuit": it's how people swear. In northern NB people swear like Québécois: câlisse, hostie, tabarnac, sacrement, etc. But once you pass a specific point, roughly the bridge over the Miramichi River (dividing northern and southern NB), most Acadians no longer swear like that. |
Quote:
I suspect the revanche des berceaux phenomenon probably played a part, but there are no doubt other factors as well... I sometimes wonder about this. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
We have a 3% undercount today in the census. Imagine what it was in 1764. Another factor that is often missed is that Nova Scotia had a significant number of Protestant Francophones from places like Switzerland and Jersey. They were not considered to be the same group as the Acadians, and were not deported. Today they mostly have slightly weird Anglicized names. I am not sure when they switched over to using English. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
I've read a lot about this and around 10,000 deportees seems fairly consistent. Of those about half died on the water. Of the remaining numbers some ended up in Louisiana (semi-famously), the east coast of the U.S. and even France. Also some went to the Caribbean. A decent chunk of them simply sailed to other parts of Atlantic Canada or even Quebec which were either uninhabited (though still under British control) or still controlled by France. I am mainly descended from Acadians who were deported but ended up resettling in parts of the Maritimes that the British had not earmarked for settling their own people in - often rocky coastal areas not suitable for farming. The reason the Acadians were deported is because they had settled on the best agricultural land in Atlantic Canada with a favourable climate to boot (today's Annapolis Valley). The British wanted that land for their own people. The deportation was what compelled the Acadians to transition from a primarily agricultural existence to a now-legendary reliance on the sea and fishing. |
Quote:
Though I find the Eastern Ontario culture to be quite similar to the Brayon culture, even with similar idioms that Québecers don't use themselves. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
There was actually something going on at the time, Starting in the latter part of the 19th century and running well into the first half of the 20th. In particular if you look at the legacy of Curé Antoine Labelle and politician and journalist (founder of Le Devoir) Henri Bourassa, there was clearly a movement to settle a large swathe of central-northern Canada with francophones. Part of this was to build a demographic "bridge" of francophone settlement to help out the beleaguered Franco-Manitobans who were being fucked over by that province at the time, so they wouldn't be all alone out there. The idea was that along a line going northwest from Montreal you'd have a band of towns and villages populated by francophone. All the way through NW Quebec, across northern Ontario and into Manitoba. A parallel settlement corridor to the anglo one that had taken shape to the south. This would also help stymie the outflow of francophones to the US, and keep more of them within Canada's borders. Today Curé Antoine Labelle is mostly known as the man who led the opening up of the Laurentians for settlement, but his vision and impact went far beyond that. The settlement of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region happened in large part due to that impetus, and if you look at a map of where Canadian francophones live today you can see how francophone populations were implanted well into Ontario along a northern axis in the Kapuskasing-Hearst-Timmins region, and also along a more southerly one in the Sudbury/Nipissing area. It does seem like the effort eventually petered out at Sudbury and Hearst going west. |
Quote:
I've done the drive from Hearst to Thunder Bay. There's not too many places in this country that are as remote as that drive is, especially the strip from Hearst to Longlac. |
All times are GMT. The time now is 9:23 AM. |
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.