The medieval accounts of the Scandinavians indicate it in hollow: Viking ships had, long before the ships of Christopher Columbus, reached America. In Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows, as in other places presumably, Icelandic navigators set foot ashore and settled for a time. A study, carried out in the light of new methods of dating wood, has just been published in the journal Nature. She claims that the L’Anse aux Meadows site was inhabited, at least from 1021, by Europeans. So 1000 years ago.
In Gatineau, at the former Musée de la civilization, renamed the Canadian Museum of History by the curators, visitors can appreciate a very small wooden figurine at the entrance to the permanent exhibition. It was found in 1978, during excavations on Baffin Land. The object, saturated with seal oil, was sculpted around the year 1300. What is special about it? It represents a human dressed in clothes from the European Middle Ages. On the chest of the figurine, a cross has been drawn. At the time of this archaeological discovery, the presence of a metal blade from the same period was noted, which suggests exchanges between two civilizations. Is this the case? Who knows.
In 1534, on his first trip to the New World, Jacques Cartier met Indigenous people in the vicinity of the Natashquan River. These, he notes, practiced cod fishing. They did so for the benefit of a European captain, a certain Thiennot. In People of the river, people of the island, a book just published by Roland Viau, the ethnohistorian explains that Native people from around Quebec at that time traveled up to 1200 km to fish between Tadoussac and Blanc-Sablon.
Also in 1534, in the long bay of Mistanoque, on the North Shore again, Captain Cartier, coming from Saint-Malo, came across a large ship from La Rochelle which was already there, long before him, to fish. In other words, these waters are already known, marked out, animated. As proof, the two captains probably both knew another harbor, said de Brest.
We can obviously go back much further on these paths. Through Beringia, there are undoubtedly more than 25,000 years, populations from Asia first populated America to spread there at full speed. Can we even imagine this slow migration which leads us, on the poorly marked roads that humanity takes, to the depths of its origins? Migration, to be sure, has never stopped. On this axis, the world has never stopped turning and rebuilding itself on the scale of time.
Huguenots and Catholics, French, English, Spanish, Dutch speakers, gibberish of multiple patois joined the New World, in the name of the Old. In the XIXe century, thousands of Irish, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Italians, Belgians, Chinese, Jews and many more arrive in their turn.
In 1913, Canada welcomed 400,000 immigrants for a total population of about 8 million. It’s a lot. Much more in any case than in 2019, a record year of immigration, it is said, in this same country which now has 37 million inhabitants. Immigration is not new. According to the latest statistical data compiled by the federal government, one in five Canadian citizens was born abroad.
America, like the other continents, but later, is the relative product of crossbreeding, according to movements that nothing and no one, over the course of history, has ever succeeded in hindering, or even on the occasion of moments of political tension, as in the nauseating 1930s, thanks to the meteoric rise of hate speech which no one is supposed to ignore what they have led humanity to.
However, anti-immigration rhetoric is flourishing these days as never before, sometimes using a vocabulary barely renewed compared to that of the ardent professors of hatred of yesteryear. To hear them, the maintenance of an identity would be conditional on a permanent confrontation against a willingly fabulous enemy: the Stranger, the Other. The population sees itself divided according to the contours of quasi-tribal and antagonistic identities. So much so that immigration, in such fables, is presented as the great threat of our time, far ahead of any other political, social, cultural, economic, environmental consideration. What a diversion!
The uninhibited words, here as elsewhere, of these professors of misfortunes willingly balance all accusations on others. Its carriers, however, appear as fervent activists for freedom of expression, but provided that it primarily serves their ideas of the world, even if it means abandoning any belief system based on reality and reason.
Identity activists have the wind in their sails. They do not see that it is only wind. Listening to these chewers of old tense ideas, one might think that societies no longer have any project to carry, except that of curling up forever in the illusion of their permanence, in the name of a past frozen in the swaddling clothes of ‘a chilly national novel. Anything that thwarts their inclinations is accused of fermenting decadence, of attacking the nobility of an identity cooked over low heat, sprinkled at leisure with prefabricated pride. Such a speech does not invent anything. It is an old recipe, revisited up to date. And it is possible to doubt that its result is less nauseating than in the past.