In New Quebec, by Sarah Fortin, in theaters next week, the script plays familiar tunes. A classic plot in Quebec cinema, this trip to a remote region in the footsteps of the deceased father, with or without the urn. A daughter or a son meets people who question their life choices. But this time, a new element appears: the Innu community. Because the heroine’s father had forged ties in Schefferville on the reserve side. So languages and origins waltz together.
Without the death of Joyce Echaquan, without the revelations about the infamous residential schools, without the immense wave of recognition of the First Nations so long invisible, the usual quest for identity would constantly decline between native French speakers on the screen. We need to find the footprints of our ancestors to better understand each other. However, the roots were once intertwined in New France. These ancestors sometimes walked in single file.
Such interbreeding constitutes a precious heritage, a real key to belonging to the territory. Quebecers are rediscovering its value little by little. With careful steps, but by reading more and more Aboriginal novels, discovering them at the cinema. And an ear on the lookout for the rest.
I’m listening to Claude Mckenzie’s new album released on Musique nomade, Muk(u)uin (“Just her”), all in Innu, except for a few spoken French words. It had been ten years since he had recorded, after many setbacks, three chasms and a thousand scratches. I like his forest blues, his melancholy sounds, his chords linked to distant traditions mixed with various influences, rock, pop, folk too. It’s the type of music, under guitar and harmonica, that makes you want to roll north to listen to it, where the hardwoods shorten before giving way to conifers, soon shriveled in turn. Then appear, on foot or in trucks, descendants of other peoples who have known the area for a long time. Thus the Innu songs aboard a car echo the landscapes and the language of many inhabitants of the area.
It must be said that, up there, the neighboring communities do not often get along with each other. The conflicts between Whites and Aboriginals are atavistic, nourished by old resentments and deep wounds. Hard to imagine in the heart of our big cities, this weight of bruised silences in boreal regions. To hear them, you have to explore paths and rivers, go up springs. We come across looks that kill, some who cry, others who defy. But recent artistic or touristic connections make it possible to dream of future reconciliations.
With Florent Vollant, Claude Mckenzie was the big star of the Kashtin group, so popular a few decades ago. Then each made a solo career. It’s been a while since their rhythms rock us or shake us. Enough to have tamed the music of their language. At best to know a few words.
Florent Vollant and his son, Mathieu Mckenzie, Innu producers from the Makusham studio in Maliotenam, near Sept-Îles, are asking the CRTC for meager quotas of Indigenous songs on the country’s public and private radio stations. If only in the middle of the night, when there are not many people to listen to them, just for the advancement of the cause. Florent Vollant reminded the Homework this week that his works had been boycotted on the air after the Oka crisis. Art, which one would dream of as a free bird, gets its wings clipped in times of conflict. But let it fly away.
I understand Samian rapping and singing in Anishinaabe, even though he was first raised in French. The language of his grandmother, who helped him to appropriate it, is lost. A language on the run is a buried memory. His claim, a resistance. We know these fights. I would have liked the Festival international de la chanson de Granby to let him sing his verses in his language, for the poetry of the thing, out of moral elegance, rather than banishing him because he is not a French speaker. Solidarities get lost through overly rigorous approaches. Helping cultures in distress does not mean denying oneself, but forming a common front against English in planetary domination.
Linguistic battles have not finished raging on our shores. Lot of Quebec, where the national language is losing ground. Which does not prevent anyone from singing in Franglais, of course. So many foreign sounds mingle with the French which is going down the drain, and which we insist on slaughtering while pretending to assist it. All in all, I would like to hear it more often associated with the words of woods and rivers, mishta-shipu, mishtuk Where ashinisound echoes of these horizons that bathe us.