Oldal 205 [205]
MAITRES CHEZ QUI?...
could not allow non-French-Québécois to display acts of sovereignty on a
territory which — according to the messages conveyed by the PQ - did not
belong to them.
The above conclusion is rich in implications. Most prominently, it
indicates that while Québécois’ cultural identity crystalized during the
Quiet Revolution, any semblance of Indigenous sovereignty was inversely
quashed at the hands of the province’s policy makers. Of course, it would
be disingenuous to maintain that these circumstances were shaped solely by
the PQ and its leader. Previous governments also had a hand in divesting
territorial sovereignty from Québec’s Indigenous population during the
Quiet Revolution. School manuals sanctioned by the government of Québec
during the mid-1960s, for instance, propagated the view that Indigenous
populations were undeserving of the province’s territory due to the former’s
misuse of the latter." Evidently, the territorialité Québécoise resulting from
the Quiet Revolution was not solely shaped by Lévesque and the PQ. It should
be emphasized, however, that, even if dreadfully colonialist, the above¬
described school manuals at the very least recognized the existence of distinct
Indigenous communities within the province of Québec. Once formed, the
PQ appears to have largely forsaken such recognitions, instead focusing on
French-Québécois’ inextricable link to a territory supposedly unmarked by
pre-French indigeneity. As it happens, the discourses used to promote this
ideology were diametrically opposed to Indigenous self-determination.*’ As
stated by Daniel Salée in “Identities in Conflict,” self-determination requires
an “adequate territorial base” able to supplement institutional autonomy.”
The cultural geography which resulted from the Quiet Revolution could
not permit such a development for Indigenous communities in the 1980s.
To carve Québec’s territory would have been tantamount, in the words of
Salée, to “carving up the identity of Quebecers [themselves]” since it would
have served to deconstruct the “generous, proud, self-assured and virtuous
picture” Québec’s French-speakers had built for themselves over the years.”
This indicates that the cultural achievements of thel960s and 1970s, as
positive as they may have been for Québec’s French population, occurred to
96 Research conducted by Sylvie Vincent and Bernard Anctil found that the above-mentioned
manuals forwarded the view that “comme les Amérindiens faisaient de la terre du Québec
un usage qui s’accorde mal avec les nouveaux idéaux du développement économique, il fallait
leur prendre cette terre pour en faire quelque chose de valable et les reléguer à l’arrière-plan,
où ils deviennent les figurants de notre histoire” (Sylvie Vincent — Bernard Arcand, L'image
de l’Amerindien dans les manuels scolaires du Québec ou Comment le Québécois ne sont pas
des sauvages, Montréal, Hurtubise, 1979, 379).
Daniel Salée, Identities in Conflict: The Aboriginal Question and the politics of recognition
in Quebec, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1995), 277-314.
98 Ibid., 279.
99 Ibid., 282, 295.
97
+ 203 +