Once a month from the pens of Quebec writers, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
What if literature could give us access to a different way of seeing the territory we inhabit? Political and administrative borders continue to come into the news. During the Pope’s visit in July 2022, the notion of terra nulliusor the doctrine of discovery, which allowed the colonial powers to appropriate America, on the grounds that the continent would have been a “land belonging to no one”.
Last April 10, Kevin Lambert, on the television show The big bookstore, described Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean as a region carved out of the eternal land of the Innu people (formerly called Montagnais), the country of Nitassinan. These two examples show that borders are constructions which transform according to cultural and historical contexts and which reveal as much as they sometimes hide the territories they border.
Tales and legends by Joseph-Charles Taché are unique in that they play leapfrog with borders by representing the countries of the St. Lawrence estuary according to the river, its tributaries and the ancestral territories of the First Nations.
Joseph-Charles Taché the “Iroquois”
Born in Kamouraska in 1820 and died in Ottawa in 1894, Joseph-Charles Taché touched everything. He was a doctor, politician, writer, journalist, editor-in-chief, senior civil servant. He was considered to be the most universally learned Canadian of his time and, in fact, he was interested in all subjects and wrote on everything.
But far from being a pedant holed up in his library, he was a man of action close to the traveler he depicts in his tales and legends: “with an adventurous temperament, suitable for everything, capable of being, sometimes , successively or all at once, discoverer-interpreter, lumberjack, settler, hunter, fisherman, sailor”, even “warrior”, at least in political and intellectual debate, where he excelled.
Most of his literary work is inspired by his stay in Rimouski between 1843 and 1857, when, according to Father Casgrain, he visited “both banks of the river, lived the life of the woods, stayed in the construction sites, observed the customs of our travelers, sat in the wigwam of the Micmacs and Montagnais, studied everything, took note of everything.” This taste for the river, the forest and indigenous cultures earned him the nickname “Iroquois” from his colleagues in the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, where he sat as a deputy.
In the magazine Canadian EveningsTaché published two collections in quick succession: Three legends of my pays in 1861 and Foresters and travelers in 1863, taking advantage of the heritage of marvelous tales in the style of Charles Perrault, of the golden legend lives of saints and a romantic taste for folklore and fantasy. His tales and legends virtuosoly multiply the places represented, playing on a form of ubiquity which allows the storyteller to be simultaneously here and there, in the past and in the present, transcending temporal and geographical boundaries.
Certainly, the collections have an edifying aim, linked to the Catholic convictions of their author. Three legends from my country sets out to show the alleged progress in the evangelization of indigenous peoples as highlighted by the subtitles of the three stories: “The Gospel Ignored”, “The Gospel Preached” and “The Gospel Accepted”. In the same way, Foresters and travelers relates the tribulations of Father Michel, who vows to go on a pilgrimage to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré if John, the king’s postal employee whom he unintentionally injures, is saved. Although the latter ends up succumbing to his injuries, he nevertheless saves his soul by converting to Catholicism before dying.
The ubiquity of the Three Legends of my country
But what matters most is not so much what the tales and legends say as what they show, as if there were a tension between the ideology of the author and the experience of the territory he draws from its association with indigenous communities. The 1861 collection, Three legends from my countrydepicts three periods in the history of the First Nations: before the arrival of Europeans (“L’île au Massacre”), during the French Regime (“Le Sagamo de Kapskouk”) and in the 19the century (“The Giant of Méchins”).
If such a chronological division is thought of in terms of colonization, on the other hand, the places represented obey a completely different logic. Indeed, their diversity and the geographical extent that they embrace is striking, the action moving from Île au Massacre, off the coast of Bic, to Kapskouk, that is to say Grand-Sault, in Nouveau -Brunswick, to Les Méchins, east of Matane.
We would look in vain for a common thread in the proximity of the places, very far from each other, or in the territorial division of the time, especially since New Brunswick was not then part of United Canada. The coherence of these places is in fact due to the vast traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik (formerly called Maliseet), on the borders of that of the Micmacs, between the Saint-Laurent River and the Saint-Jean River. This vision, more indigenous than Euro-Quebec, is indebted in part to the writer’s informants, including Louis Thomas, Wolastoqey chief born around 1766 and died around 1869, from whom Taché gets the legend of the Sagamo of Kapskouk.
The liquid borders of Foresters and travelers
The 1863 collection, Foresters and travelers, goes even further in the incessant back and forth from north to south, from east to west, which Father Michel multiplies. A logging camp cook in the winter and a boatman in the summer, he is forced to go into exile in the upper lands to escape the authorities after injuring a man on the North Shore, so that his adventures take them to Winnipeg, and even to the Rocky Mountains and the Great Slave Lake, in a sort of continental epic.
He remembers his travels in a forestry yard in the Rimouski hinterland, regaling his listeners with his tales, once back in his native region of the “bottom of the river”. Father Michel’s experience of the territory is, as for Taché, linked to his indigenous allies, living with the Micmacs and traveling with them “all the woods and all the rivers, from Baie-des-Chaleurs to to the Rimouski River. He knows the route of the Wolastoqiyik, who go from the Saint John River to the Mitis to hunt pourcie — the harbor porpoise — in the Saint Lawrence River.
When he became a boatman with his partner Lévêque de L’Isle-Verte, he spent his life on the river transporting passengers and goods and hunting porpoise, “from the south coast to the north coast, from Quebec to Gaspé” , while trading illegally with the Innu and taking refuge on Anticosti Island to escape the coast guard. This “bottom of the river”, dear to Father Michel as to Taché, is neither an electoral district nor an officially recognized region, as Bas-Saint-Laurent can be today. The expression is to be understood in its proper sense and designates the entire vast area downstream of Quebec, to the north and south of the estuary up to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
It is a territory with vague boundaries, a set of countries made up less of dry land than of coastline and water, between river and tributaries, at a time when, to go from Trois-Pistoles to Rimouski, “we went by water or on foot following the strike.” As if there was behind the official geography a sensitive topography of places inhabited and traveled in all directions, in the manner of “nations”, an expression which Taché reminds us that in Canada designates the “aborigines”, those who inhabit the territory since the origins.
The other
To read or reread Taché’s tales and legends is therefore to experience cultural and historical otherness. It is a change of scenery from a territory perceived exclusively from the road and the car and according to a recent administrative division arbitrarily partitioning countries which previously lived in symbiosis around a large river, called Magtogoek in Algonquin: the path which walk.
In his own way and unexpectedly, Taché echoes the concerns of our time. It refutes the notion of terra nulliusby being one of the only writers of his time to imagine Le Bic and Massacre Island before the arrival of Europeans on a territory which, far from belonging to anyone, was bitterly contested by the Wolastoqiyik, the Micmacs and the Haudenosaunee (formerly called Iroquois).
Furthermore, even if Taché never uses the term “Nitassinan”, he tends, like the Innu regarding the border between Quebec and Labrador, to consider the indigenous territories as escaping the delimitations imposed after the fact. This explains why it represents Massacre Island, Kapskouk and the Méchins, then falling under distinct administrative and political entities, as forming a continuum with no break in continuity: the ancestral territory of the Wolastoqiyik.
One wonders if, when Father Michel talks about his temptation to “live the life of the woods and the coast, by associating with the aboriginal tribes”, it is not himself that Taché is talking about.