Oldal 199 [199]
MAITRES CHEZ QUI?...
a territory still prey to the constraints of colonial domination.”' The term
“colonial domination” was outlined in the article “For an Independent Québec”
written by Lévesque for the Foreign Affairs journal in 1975: “[to understand
Québec one needs to understand] the British conquest of an obscure French
colony some 15 years before American independence, and then run right
through the stubborn survival of those 70,000 settlers and their descendants
during the following two centuries.”” Especially interesting in the above
quote is Lévesque’s admission that French-Canadians were “settlers” in a
“colony.” Such an admission certainly adds nuance to the notion that Québec’s
French-speakers were themselves victims of a colonial conquest. This nuance
— as it relates to those the French colonized — does not appear to have been
actively addressed by Lévesque or his party, however. In fact, the next section
will demonstrate that populations which were unquestionably colonized by
Quebec’s French settlers were often ignored by the PQ and its leader.
LÉVESQUE AND THE PQ IGNORE QUEBEC’S INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS
Allegations of English-on-French colonial rule demonstrates a certain level
of mendacity emanating from the PQ between the 1960s—1970s. Awareness
should have been accorded tothe province’s Indigenous inhabitants, themselves
the victims of colonization enacted by French and British descendants prior
and following the Confederation.” Rather than acknowledging this reality,
however, Lévesque and the PQ often obfuscated concepts of indigeneity so
as to present French-Québécois as the province’s earliest inhabitants. Option
Québec, a political manifesto published by the PQ in 1968, affirmed that
Québécois were “the heirs of this fantastic adventure known as America,
which was first almost entirely French.”** Another op-ed written by Lévesque
61 Original text: “Le nationalisme québécois, celui qui sert d’inspiration au programme du
Parti Québécois, posséde une fonctionnalité profonde qui est de restituer aux Québécois
le sens d’une patrie, de leur ouvrir toutes les occasions possibles de s’affirmer sur le plan
national et international, de faire une nation moderne d’un territoire encore en proie aux
contraintes d’une domination coloniale.” in: René Lévesque — Jacques Parizeau, La Solution:
Le Programme du Parti Québécois présenté par René Lévesque, Montréal, Les Éditions du
Jour, 1970, 5, http://classiques.uqac.ca/collection_documents/parti_quebecois/la_solution/
la_solution.pdf (accessed 14 April 2020).
62 René Lévesque, For an Independent Quebec, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 4 (July 1976), 734.
% See: Timeline: Colonization, The Canadian Encyclopedia (2016), https://www.thecanadian
encyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/colonization-and-immigration (accessed 26 July 2020); Jennifer
Henderson — Pauline Wakeham, Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal
People and the Culture of Redress in Canada, ESC, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 2009), 8-15.
Original text: “Nous sommes aussi les héritiers de cette fantastique aventure que fut
l'Amérique d’abord presque entièrement française et, plus encore, de l’obstination collective
64
qui a permis d’en conserver vivante cette partie qu'on appelle le Québec.” Extracted from:
Toupin, La politique identitaire, 104.
+ 197 +