Between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Émilie became one of the names most given to little girls in Quebec. The monster success of Daughters of Calebfirst by the novels of Arlette Cousture, then by the television adaptation of Jean Beaudin, is certainly no stranger to this fashion.
I was still in elementary school when I stole The Cock Crow and The cry of the white goose from my mother’s library. I then turned to the TV series, which had also been preserved on homemade VHS for posterity. I was intrigued by Émilie Bordeleau, this strong heroine who, like me, only wanted to read and learn, and who, for her time, had a forehead all around her head. By Caleb’s daughtersI learned early that an Emilie, by definition, is a woman who stands up straight and is not afraid to disturb.
I have seen, over the past few days, many commentators denouncing Netflix, which has decided to put the series online while removing the second episode, where Roy Dupuis (Ovila Pronovost) is made up in blackface. It will be understood that as Emilie, in particular, I felt personally concerned.
If I understood the prevailing opinion correctly, Netflix would be wrong to judge a work from the 1990s, which describes the turn of the 20th century, with the values of today. the blackfacein this context, would be banal, even foreign to Quebec culture.
On that, we have it all wrong. The minstrel shows were a popular North American phenomenon in the time of Émilie Bordeleau. Troupes also staged this type of show in Quebec, and Quebeckers — including Calixa Lavallée, the author of O Canada — participated in American tours. If the character of Ovila is “stirred” by his peers for his makeup, it is also because of the ordinary racism of the time.
Female teachers of this generation worked with school curricula remarkably similar to those circulating in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas at the same time. Quebec schools taught, in history and geography, the fashionable theories on the inequality of human races—as everywhere else in the West. And we taught grammar, spelling and even arithmetic with often racist examples straight from the colonial imagination. You do not believe me ? You must read The school of racismby historian Catherine Larochelle, who has studied the Quebec textbooks that circulated between 1830 and 1915.
Should we therefore applaud Netflix, which, for its part, removes all content that contains blackface ? Allow me to defend a third way instead: that of Disney+.
The Walt Disney Studios, founded in 1923, are inseparable from the history of on-screen racism. His first cartoons are also strongly inspired by the aesthetics and “humorous” violence typical of minstrel shows. Removing racism from Disney is a bit like hoping that a house will still stand if you take away its foundations. By setting up the Disney + platform, the American giant has therefore rather bet on putting everything online, while clearly naming, in warnings, the presence of racism in certain content. This seems to be the way Radio-Canada took inspiration in publishing all of the Daughters of Caleb — except that in comparison, the text of Tou.tv is weak, and lacks outspokenness.
If I had to teach today, The Caleb Girls in a literature course, my first instinct would be to present the novels and the series alongside a more contemporary bestseller, the kukum by Michael Jean. On the one hand, we have a novel that focuses on the French-Canadian reality of the Mauricie, where we explore little of what the character of Ovila does when he “takes the wood” to the lumber camps. Aboriginal people are barely represented in the novels or in the series, except as accessories to the alcoholism, parental disempowerment and perdition that awaits the protagonist.
The other, kukum exposes the terrible consequences of the forest industry on the Innu communities. One can easily imagine how the logging camps and the log drive on the Saint-Maurice affected the Atikamekw in a similar way. Thirty years later, Michel Jean’s book somehow fills in, or at least questions the important blind spots in Arlette Cousture’s work. To present Caleb’s daughters and kukum together — with one or two chapters by Catherine Larochelle as a bonus, for context — would make it possible to explore in a much more complete way what Quebec was like at the beginning of the 20th century. The exercise would also stimulate a discussion on the evolution of popular culture in Quebec, from the 1980s until today.
The problem is that most of us have learned and internalized a narrative of Quebec history that has roughly the same blind spots as Cousture’s work and Beaudin’s series. There follows an outcry when the time comes to talk about the place of racism in our society. Basically, both Netflix and a Quebec commentator who is surprised that a blackface be received as a heavy symbol lack courage. The two, each in their own way, pretend to live in a magical world where colonialism and racism do not exist.
To look into the myths conveyed by popular culture and to study them, one must have enough column to examine the works and their context, without erasing them, nor trying to trivialize the violence they may contain. We have to question received ideas about our history with the same integrity and obstinacy as Émilie Bordeleau, who, from her rank of Saint-Stanislas, was already confronting her father by questioning the place of women in the domestic order.