“History is the most dangerous product that the chemistry of the intellect has produced. Its properties are well known. It makes people dream, it intoxicates people, gives them false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, maintains their old wounds, torments them in their rest, leads them to delirium of grandeur or that of persecution and makes nations bitter, proud, unbearable and vain. » This conception of Western history as described by Valéry suits the orientations of the Quebec government in its search for a political core of history through the creation of a National Museum of Quebec History (MNHQ) .
These are the tendentious predispositions that were submitted to us by the political leaders of the project. This history will write the happiness and misfortunes, the successes and failures of the nation of Quebec without seeking to nuance the characteristics and differences of societies. In fact, faced with this lack of scientific reasoning, Quebec will be immersed in a series of scattered stories instead of relying on a historical approach which would have been able to highlight its ethical ascendancy on minds, the recognition of peoples and a healthy truth on consciences. .
There are not two types of humans, those with writing and others without writing. A person responsible for the file mentioned people without writing, for whom a history commensurate with them would, according to him, be impossible: no writing, no past, no civilization, no current realities. I recognized the colonial thinking and inequality that prevailed during the creation of Canada. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is today copying ultra-conservative postures to shower us with a narrow nationalism that is incommensurate with our modern societies and our values of change.
The writing has caused carnage
Societies without writing are also rich and well-off in their journey with their past, thanks to their orality and their oral tradition. At this level, there is no falsification or doubt in the transmission of facts by word of mouth: the facts remain, as during their transmission, authentic despite the various speakers and the passage of time. Writing is playfulness manipulated for the purposes of individual and collective interests. Writing has wreaked havoc on the identity of the existence of the First Peoples by sabotaging their identities, their lands, their spiritualities and by transgressing their way of life.
A single stroke of a pencil changed the circumstances of living together, the definition of equality and ancestral sovereignty, forever tainted.
The CAQ is undertaking a project on national history which corresponds to the scrapping of sections and jewels of this history to demote them to the sum of non-existent or incomplete fictions so as not to confuse the new option of national history. We reduce the size of the flow of history to keep only what is profitable for a “national patriotism” which could please a gallery of voyeurs without political options.
Champlain at the tip of Saint-Mathieu does not constitute the beginning of the epic, rather it salutes the legitimate continuity of history and the presence of the First Peoples despite certain ruptures. This is where the first treaty of international law was embodied, which established the very essence of the relationship between France and the First Peoples of Mamit. These reports had positive and harmonious consequences for the tranquility of this New France.
How can we evacuate this passage of honor of relations between peoples in the new policy of the MNHQ if not by a “dehistoricization” allowing the forgetting and the publication of accounts of circumstances which will serve to promote the government plans released from the analysis of fundamental collective issues and challenges?
The Quebec history museum project must be collective and inclusive, and not create piecemeal branches of epics rewarding a certain elite.