I knew Jean Morisset thanks to the worlds of poetry and wood combined. I don’t know if we talked about “literary theory” at a single moment during the dozens and dozens of times we crossed paths, almost always in a field, in a wooded area, on the water, at the top of a mountain. mountain, in a cabin. Died last week, at the age of 84, Jean was indeed an academic, but very much like one of our common masters of thought, Louis-Edmond Hamelin, that is to say a geographer capable of perfectly amalgamating intellectual work and life as a runner of the great outdoors.
I always thought that Louis-Edmond was of the stature of Brother Marie-Victorin, to which my friend Jean Morisset would have agreed. Because we weren’t made to argue, Jean and I. Destiny invented us so that we are almost all the time in a state of “poeticization” and invention of the best of our past as well as our collective future, in lighthouses located on islands not far from his house in Saint-Michel -de-Bellechasse, as in rooms where poets students teachers campers bohemians nomads trail runners gathered.
Living happily in the company of Jean Morisset to discover a hidden trail in a mountain not far from Montreal was like living next to an indigenous elder. Mixed race, I have felt all my life. Jean Morisset too, I think so. It was also he who made me better aware of the importance of crossbreeding, a word used by Louis-Edmond Hamelin.
It is largely thanks to Jean and Serge Bouchard that I was able to get in touch with our French-Canadian Métis history in love with the land that spans the whole of North America and for hundreds of years, from east to west, all the way to the Pacific. Sacagawea, Marie Iowa Dorion’s Shoshone friend, spoke French to her when they met somewhere in the Rockies. Jean Morisset was proud of this fact, as he was more than proud of each of the human roots of his country, a country that starts in Labrador, goes up to Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, then goes back down to Seattle before heading to Louisiana and up the Mississippi River to Kébec.
Jean Morisset was there when my friends Rita Mestokosho, from Mingan, and the writer Louis Hamelin attempted to reproduce what Laure Morali had succeeded so beautifully with her essay Aimititau! Let’s talk together ! by bringing together indigenous and non-indigenous writers, all people deeply in love with Ameriquoia, I dare say.
One fine day, about twenty of us camped on an island in the Romaine River, in the Middle North Shore, Innu and merry men gathered for days to chat, laugh, write, read texts to each other, sing and fish, in French and Innu. If a book was not born from this meeting, a sacred joy was created which still lasts as soon as we stop in the meteshan created by Rita in Ekuanitshit.
I will hear all my life and even after my death the laughter of Jean Morisset bathing in his underwear in the current of the Romaine, during our ascent of a part of the river in a canoe lent by an Innu. Jean Morisset, exceptional cold runner, representative par excellence of the Métis life in this Amériquoisia in which I like to believe.
John will not die.