It’s Niagara Falls’ fault. Geology having posed this gigantic obstacle in their path, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle and his men had to turn back. They thought of canoeing towards China, its silks and its spices, but returned empty-handed to the lands of their Lordship of Côte Saint-Sulpice. In derision, the inhabitants nicknamed them “the Chinese” and their lands, “Lachine”.
It would be easy to find a Chinese-Canadian activist to complain about this sarcastic use of the name of his country of origin. To denounce not only this appropriation of the Middle Kingdom by French colonists, but also the blatant lack of respect towards a nation that has nothing to do with it.
We would have to tell him that we fully understand his point of view, that we respect his sensitivity, but that the name of the city of Lachine is part of our historical heritage on several levels: the desire for discovery that inhabited our ancestors, first of all ; their legendary sense of humor, then. Having to explain the anecdote to each generation of Montrealers testifies to the presence of the past in our urban fabric. To change the name of Lachine — or, for that matter, of the shepherd’s pie — would be to take away from the flavor of the heritage that we pass on to ourselves.
It’s obviously worse for the Indians. The word embodies the misunderstanding of Christopher Columbus, Cartier, Champlain and others, believing they have discovered the country of the maharajas on our shores. It is fitting that after we awkwardly tried to reconcile the error with geography, by renaming them Native Americans, the first inhabitants claimed an intrinsic identity by preferring First Nations or Natives. It commands respect.
But the persistence of misunderstanding in the vocabulary, as in “corn of India” and “Indian summer”, belongs to our culture more than to theirs, since it stems from the inability of our navigators to know where they were.
Each autumn that passes sees the beautiful expression fade a little more, in our gazettes and on our airwaves, in favor of the insipid “warm spell”. However, there is no indigenous organization that has called for this erasure. It is a pure preventive self-censorship that nothing justifies. Even if we were asked to do so, I would plead for its maintenance. The expression refers to an era when our ancestors were very attentive to the knowledge that Aboriginal people had of the place, of the fauna and flora, of the cycle of the seasons. We were, on this new land for us, old for them, their students. That each autumn and for eternity, when our children ask us the meaning of the expression, we tell them that, is a renewed testimony of esteem and humility. And then, try to imagine Joe Dassin singing this: “We’ll go where you want, when you want / And we’ll still love each other, when love is dead / All life will be the same as this morning / In the colors thaw. »
See, the case is heard!
I take this opportunity to be saddened by the name change of the McGill football team. They were called Redmen, because the institution’s founder, James McGill, was Scottish and had red hair. But usage has found it symbolically much stronger to associate the name with the Aboriginal peoples. The team wanted to draw inspiration from the formidable warriors that were the First Nations, in particular the Iroquois. Their courage, their tactical intelligence (they invented guerrilla warfare), their esprit de corps: that’s what the term “Redmen” meant.
In 2017, one of our best filmmakers, François Girard, made it the apotheosis of his historic film on Montreal, Hochelaga, land of souls. In the final scene, all of Montreal’s diversity is represented in the Redmen team — and in the stands — , embodying the homage paid by all the inhabitants of the place to the indigenous heritage. The following year, the woke wave would render the name, the tribute and the film obsolete by renaming the team Redbirds. How many battles have they won, the red birds, tell me?
The toponymy commission decided, in 2015, to erase from the territory the 11 places where the word in n was used, sometimes to mark the presence of the first blacks established here or to recall events involving them. We are still waiting for what these names will be replaced by, but it would be tragic if, out of overzealousness, we wiped out evidence of their existence from the territory. It is obviously agreed to no longer use this term to designate our black fellow citizens. But their trace in history belongs to another register, unless the use of the term was deliberately degrading.
I will conclude by talking about the “little Jew” that I was in my father’s eyes. He gave me that nickname every time he realized that I had just done something clever, amazing, clever. I had, in the Thetford Mines of the 1960s, only one other landmark about the Jews. The Romans had crucified Jesus by planting on his cross the inscription “INRI”, “Jesus the Nazarene king of the Jews”. (Despite a Catholic upbringing, I had never heard that the Jews were guilty of the execution of Jesus.) So my calculation was simple. Jesus was a Jew, and if we were smart, we were too. When, as a teenager, I was confronted with an anti-Semitic remark, I said to myself: to think ill of the Jews, are they sick?
My argument is the following. Doesn’t the excess of political correctness, the ethnic cleansing that we impose on our language and our places uproot from our memory garden not only the weeds, but also the flowers of our common past?
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