Editorial Board / Comité de rédaction Advisory Board / Comité ...

Editorial Board / Comité de rédaction 

Editor-in-Chief Rédacteur en chef 

Robert S. Schwartzwald, University of Massachusetts Amherst, U.S.A. 

Associate Editors Rédacteurs adjoints 

Claude Couture, Faculté St-Jean, Université de l’Alberta, Canada 

Marta Dvorak, Sorbonne Nouvelle-Université de Paris 3, France 

Daiva Stasiulis, Carleton University, Canada 

Managing Editor Secrétaire de rédaction 

Guy Leclair, ICCS/CIEC, Ottawa, Canada 

Advisory Board / Comité consultatif 

Malcolm Alexander, Griffith University, Australia 

Rubén Alvaréz, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuela 

Shuli Barzilai, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israël 

Raymond B. Blake, University of Regina, Canada 

Nancy Burke, University of Warsaw, Poland 

Francisco Colom, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain 

Beatriz Diaz, Universidad de La Habana, Cuba 

Giovanni Dotoli, Université de Bari, Italie 

Eurídice Figueiredo, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brésil 

Madeleine Frédéric, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique 

Naoharu Fujita, Meiji University, Japan 

Gudrun Björk Gudsteinsdottir, University of Iceland, Iceland 

Leen d’Haenens, University of Nijmegen, Les Pays-Bas 

Vadim Koleneko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia 

Jacques Leclaire, Université de Rouen, France 

Laura López Morales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico 

Jane Moss, Romance Languages, Colby College, U.S. 

Elke Nowak, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany 

Helen O’Neill, University College Dublin, Ireland 

Christopher Rolfe, The University of Leicester, U.K. 

Myungsoon Shin, Yonsei University, Korea 

Jiaheng Song, Université de Shantong, Chine 

Coomi Vevaina, University of Bombay, India 

Robert K. Whelan, University of New Orleans, U.S.A.

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International Journal of Canadian Studies 

Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 

Languages 

Langues et langages 

30, 2004 

Table of Contents / Table des matières 

Robert Schwartzwald 

Farewell / Au revoir. ........................................5 

Marta Dvorak 

Introduction / Présentation ...................................9 

Catherine Khordoc 

Reconsidérer Babel: appropriation du mythe de Babel dans 

quelques textes québécois et franco-ontariens ...................19 

Jane Koustas 

Robert Lepage’s Language/Dragons’ Trilogy. ...................35 

Lynette Hunter 

Equality and Difference: Storytelling in Nunavut, 2000. ...........51 

Michelle Daveluy 

Language Policies and Responsibilities in the Canadian North ......83 

Jesse Archibald-Barber 

Cognitive Quickenings: Contemporary Readings of Orality and 

Literacy in English-Canadian Colonial Practices and Modern 

Critical Theories .........................................101 

Kathleen Buddle 

White Words, Read Worlds: Authoring Aboriginality through 

English Language Media. ..................................121 

Open-Topic Articles / Articles hors-thèmes 

Emily Gilbert 

What Is at Stake in the NAMU Debates? A Review of the 

Arguments For and Against North American Monetary Union .....161 

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 

30, 2004



Rachel Laforest 

Governance and the Voluntary Sector: Rethinking the 

Contours of Advocacy. ....................................185 

Review Essay / Essay critique 

Donna Patrick 

Understanding Canada through a Linguistic Lens: French, English, 

and Aboriginal Realities in an English-dominant World ..........207 

Authors / Auteurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 

Canadian Studies Journals Around the World 

Revues d’études canadiennes dans le monde . . . . . . . . . . . 217 

Calls for papers / Demandes de textes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 

4

Farewell 

Volume 30 marks the end of my 

decade-long association with the 

International Journal of Canadian 

Studies. Serving as Associate Editor 

and then as Editor-in-Chief has 

afforded me a ever-renewed 

opportunity to engage in sustained 

and stimulating discussion about 

Canada. I say discussion, for 

although it is always satisfying to 

receive each issue as it is published, 

it is the process leading to 

publication that has proven so 

gratifying over the years. When the 

Editor-in-Chief and three Associate 

Editors meet twice-yearly, we have 

each read all of the submissions and 

the assessments on the agenda. 

Then, over two days, we engage in 

intensive, truly interdisciplinary 

discussion. It is nothing less than an 

intimate yet freewheeling 

colloquium, a profoundly rewarding 

experience in which deep, enduring 

respect and affection are developed 

for one’s colleagues. I have always 

emerged from these meetings with 

dedicated Canadianists from around 

the world feeling supremely 

fortunate. 

Serving as Editor-in-Chief has also 

allowed me to witness the 

development of scholarship on 

Canada in a variety of national 

contexts by virtue of my 

participation in the conferences and 

colloquia of various ICCS member 

associations. It has been fascinating 

to observe how various topics and 

disciplines strike resonant chords in 

specific contexts; how comparative 

approaches to the study of Canada 

produce a variety of results that 

often respond to pressing national or 

Au revoir 

Le volume 30 marque la fin de mon 

association avec la Revue 

internationale d’études canadiennes, 

une association vieille de dix ans. À 

titre de rédacteur adjoint puis de 

rédacteur en chef, j’ai eu l’occasion 

sans cesse renouvelée de participer à 

une discussion soutenue et 

stimulante à propos du Canada. Je 

dis discussion, parce que c’est le 

processus menant à la publication 

qui s’est révélé si gratifiant au fil des 

ans, même s’il est toujours 

satisfaisant de recevoir chaque 

numéro tel quel. Lors de leurs 

rencontres, deux fois l’an, le 

rédacteur en chef et les trois 

rédacteurs adjoints ont tous lu 

chacun des textes proposés et des 

évaluations au programme. Ils 

s’engagent alors, pendant deux jours, 

dans une discussion intensive, 

vraiment interdisciplinaire. Ce n’est 

rien de moins qu’un colloque intime, 

où les participants s’expriment 

pourtant en toute liberté – une 

expérience profondément gratifiante 

au cours de laquelle ils développent 

un respect et une affection durables 

pour leurs collègues. Je me suis 

toujours trouvé extrêmement 

chanceux au sortir de ces rencontres 

avec des canadianistes dévoués 

venus des quatre coins du monde. 

La fonction de rédacteur en chef m’a 

aussi permis d’être témoin de 

l’expansion des études sur le Canada 

dans divers contextes nationaux, en 

raison de ma participation aux 

conférences et aux colloques des 

diverses associations membres du 

CIEC. J’ai trouvé fascinant de 

constater à quel point divers sujets et 

diverses disciplines touchent des 


30, 2004



regional concerns. I have also been 

privileged to attend several of the 

graduate student colloquia of the 

European Network for Canadian 

Studies. The rigour and scope of the 

student presentations leaves me 

feeling optimistic about a new 

generation of Canadianists. This 

optimism is generated as well by the 

submissions we receive for the 

Pierre Savard Prize and the ICCS 

Publishing Fund, both adjudicated 

by the Editorial Board. I am proud 

that we have facilitated the 

publication of work by so many 

international Canadianists. 

As I leave the Journal, I offer my 

heartfelt thanks to all the Associate 

Editors with whom I have worked. 

Thanks, too, to the staff of the ICCS 

Secretariat, especially Sylvie 

Provost, whose diligence has been so 

crucial over the years. I salute: 

Kenneth McRoberts, my 

predecessor, and thank him for 

having confidence in my ability to 

continue his excellent work; 

Catherine Bastedo-Boileau, outgoing 

Executive Director of the ICCS 

whose friendship and 

encouragement have meant so much 

to the Board members and to me; 

and the person who has helped me 

most of all in my years as 

Editor-in-Chief, Guy Leclair, the 

Journal’s Managing Editor. Guy has 

been a trusted advisor and a true 

friend all these years. His love of the 

Journal and respect for its mission 

make him a proponent of the study 

of Canada of singular intelligence, 

conviction, and commitment. 

I extend my best wishes to the 

current Editorial Board. It is indeed 

sad to leave you all. Claude Couture, 

the incoming Editor-in-Chief, is a 

6 

cordes sensibles dans des contextes 

donnés; à quel point les perspectives 

comparatives sur l’étude du Canada 

produisent une variété de résultats 

qui, souvent, répondent à des 

préoccupations nationales ou 

régionales pressantes. J’ai aussi eu le 

privilège d’assister à plusieurs 

colloques pour étudiants diplômés du 

Réseau européen d’études 

canadiennes. La rigueur et la portée 

des présentations faites par les 

étudiants me portent à l’optimisme 

quant à la nouvelle génération de 

canadianistes. Les ouvrages qui nous 

sont soumis pour les Prix 

Pierre-Savard et le Fonds d’aide à 

l’édition du CIEC, attribués les uns 

et les autres par le comité de 

rédaction, sont également source 

d’optimisme. Je suis fier que nous 

ayons facilité la publication de 

travaux de tant de canadianistes du 

monde entier. 

Au moment de quitter la Revue, 

j’offre mes sincères remerciements à 

tous les rédacteurs adjoints avec qui 

j’ai travaillé. Merci également au 

personnel du secrétariat du CIEC, en 

particulier à Sylvie Provost, dont la 

diligence a été si essentielle au fil 

des ans. Je tiens à saluer Kenneth 

McRoberts, mon prédécesseur, que 

je remercie d’avoir eu confiance en 

mon habileté à poursuivre son 

excellent travail; Catherine 

Bastedo-Boileau, directrice générale 

sortante du CIEC, dont l’amitié et 

l’encouragement ont eu tellement de 

signification pour les membres du 

comité de rédaction et pour moi; 

enfin, le secrétaire de rédaction de la 

Revue, Guy Leclair, qui m’a aidé le 

plus au cours des années où j’ai été 

rédacteur en chef. Guy s’est révélé 

un conseiller en qui on a confiance et 

un véritable ami pendant toutes ces 

années. Son affection pour la Revue

colleague and friend of great 

erudition and dedication, and so I 

leave serenely, certain that the 

Journal is in excellent hands. Bonne 

continuation! 


Editor-in-Chief 

Farewell 

Au revoir 

et le respect qu’il a pour la mission 

de cette dernière font de lui un 

adepte de l’étude du Canada d’une 

rare intelligence, d’une rare 

conviction et d’une rare ferveur. 

J’adresse mes meilleurs vœux à 

l’actuel comité de rédaction. Il est 

triste en effet de vous quitter tous. 

Claude Couture, le nouveau 

rédacteur en chef, est un collègue et 

ami d’une grande érudition et d’un 

grand dévouement; aussi est-ce avec 

sérénité que je m’en vais, assuré que 

la Revue est entre d’excellentes 

mains. All the best! 


Rédacteur en chef 

7

Introduction 

Language, or languages, in the 

Saussurean sense of signifying or 

semiological systems, assemble 

and divide. Amongst other sign 

systems ranging from military 

signals to symbolic rites and 

protocol, which accomplish their 

mandate of communication 

effectively, the abstract domain of 

language is the most complex, 

widespread, and arbitrary. As 

Emile Benveniste (Problèmes de 

linguistique générale) has pointed 

out, language alone involves two 

distinct faculties of the mind. There 

is the faculty to recognize and the 

faculty to understand (the semiotic 

mode and the semantic mode, or 

discourse, respectively). There is 

the ability to perceive the 

equivalence of what has been 

encountered before and what is 

encountered now, and there is the 

ability to perceive the significance 

of a new enunciation, in a new 

context. And because it contains 

both the significance of its signs 

and the significance of its own 

enunciation, making it possible to 

hold significant statements on 

significance, language 

encompasses and interprets all 

other systems. 

Language before the ahistorical, 

Biblical Babel was allegedly a 

perfectly transparent sign of things, 

which it resembled. After Babel, 

the legend tell us, this 

transparency, this resemblance to 

things, was destroyed. Philosophers 

such as Michel Foucault (Les Mots 

et les choses) have argued that the 

languages we speak today are 

rooted in this lost similitude, in the 

space left void. Language of course 

Présentation 

Le langage ou des langages, au sens 

saussurien des systèmes signifiants ou 

sémiologiques, servent à la fois à 

assembler et à diviser. Parmi d’autres 

systèmes sémiologiques allant des 

signaux militaires à des rites 

symboliques et des protocoles, qui 

remplissent efficacement leur mandat 

de communication, le domaine 

abstrait des langues en est le plus 

complexe, le plus répandu et le plus 

arbitraire. Comme l’a souligné Émile 

Benveniste (Problèmes de 

linguistique générale), le langage à lui 

seul a recours à deux facultés distincts 

de l’esprit. Il existe la faculté de 

reconnaître et la faculté de 

comprendre (le mode sémiotique et le 

mode sémantique, ou le mode 

discursif, respectivement). Le 

langage possède la capacité de 

percevoir l’équivalence entre ce qui a 

été rencontré auparavant, et ce que 

l’on rencontre maintenant, et il a la 

capacité d’entrevoir ce que signifie 

une nouvelle énonciation, et ce dans 

un contexte nouveau. Et parce qu’il 

renferme à la fois la signification de 

ses consignes et celle de sa propre 

énonciation, ce qui le rend capable de 

tenir d’énoncés importants quant à la 

signification, le langage est en mesure 

d’embrasser et d’interpréter tous les 

autres systèmes. 

La langue de l’époque précédant la 

Tour de Babel biblique fut 

prétendument un nsigne parfaitement 

transparent des choses, auxquelles 

elle ressemblait. À la suite de Babel, 

nous raconte la légende, cette 

transparence, voire cette ressemblance 

aux choses, fut détruite. Des 

philosophes tels que Michel Foucault 

(Les Mots et les choses) ont soutenu 

que les langues que nous parlons 


30, 2004



no longer directly resembles the 

things it names, nor does it signify 

“naturally.” It does so through 

combination regulated by a strict 

code, and the arbitrariness of the 

signifier is the very strength of 

alphabetic language. Still, as 

Foucault has argued, language is not 

separated from the world. It 

continues to be a part of the space in 

which truth manifests itself, in a 

relationship which is as much that of 

analogy as of signifying. Humanity’s 

original relationship to texts was 

perhaps identical to its relationship 

to things, as Foucault suggests, 

consisting in both cases in 

perceiving, decoding, and 

interpreting visible signs and their 

correspondences. But writers and 

thinkers today continue to reorder 

the world through logos, to interpret 

and superimpose the secondary 

discourse of commentary upon the 

visible marks of what Emerson (The 

Complete Essays and Other 

Writings) called “the cipher of the 

world.” Paradoxically, we conceive 

a universe fashioned by our 

language, for consciousness and its 

articulation are inextricably 

interconnected, in the manner of 

Saussure’s (Cours de linguistique 

générale) famous analogy 

comparing language to a sheet of 

paper, thought being one side and 

sound the other. 

The paradoxical dimension of 

language as a cultural object is 

manifold. Transhistorically and 

transnationally, languages have 

always been the cornerstones of 

cultures yet also their products. They 

investigate individual visions of the 

world, yet they hold collective 

visions. They bring together and 

they divide. A multicultural society 

10 

aujourd’hui ont leurs racines dans 

cette similitude perdue, voire dans 

l’espace laissé vide. Le langage, il va 

sans dire, ne ressemble plus aux 

choses qu’il étiquette, ni signifie-t-il 

« de par la nature ». Il accomplit son 

mandat par le truchement d’une 

combinaison qui est réglementée par 

un code strict, et la nature arbitraire 

de la personne qui signifie constitue la 

force même d’une langue alphabétique. 

Et pourtant, comme l’a 

soutenu Foucault, le langage n’est pas 

une chose qui est distincte du monde. 

Il continue de faire partie de l’espace 

à l’intérieur duquel la vérité se 

manifeste, et ce dans une relation qui 

doit autant à l’analogie qu’à la 

signification. D’emblée, la relation 

des êtres humains aux textes était 

peut-être identique à celle qu’ils 

entretenaient aux choses, comme le 

suggère Foucault, relation qui se 

composait dans les deux cas de la 

perception, du déchiffrage et de 

l’interprétation des signes visibles et 

des choses auxquelles ils se 

rapportaient. Mais certains écrivains 

et penseurs d’aujourd’hui continuent 

de réorganiser le monde au moyen du 

logos, d’interpréter et de surimposer 

le discours secondaire du 

commentaire à ce que Emerson (The 

Complete Essays and Other Writings) 

a appelé « le chiffre du monde ». 

Paradoxalement, nous concevons un 

univers qui est façonné par notre 

langue, car notre conscience de 

l’univers et notre façon de l’expliquer 

sont entrelacées inextricablement, 

d’après l’analogie de Saussure (Cours 

de linguistique générale) selon 

laquelle il assimilait le langage à une 

feuille de papier, où la pensée figure 

sur l’un des côtés, tandis que le son 

figure sur l’autre. 

La dimension paradoxale du langage 

en tant qu’objet culturel présente

which is officially bilingual but in 

point of fact multilingual, Canada 

has taken up the challenge of 

building on these paradoxes by 

basing its unity on diversity, by 

turning division into the adhesive 

that forms cultural unity. It has not 

been alone, but may be considered to 

be a model, at best, or, at the very 

least, a laboratory for the planet in 

matters of language policy and 

linguistic and cultural cohabitation. 

Since the second half of the 

twentieth century, there has been an 

exponential rise in the frequency, 

rapidity, and sheer quantity of global 

communications, accompanied by 

the adoption of official language 

policies on the part of bilingual or 

multilingual countries such as 

Canada, Belgium, or Nigeria, as well 

as a phenomenal growth in the 

translation industry (a $500 million 

industry in Canada, populated by a 

mere 30 million inhabitants but 

increasingly committed to 

bilingualism). Bilingualism and 

multilingualism are actually global 

phenomena, since over a hundred 

million people migrate every year, 

and over six thousand languages and 

dialects coexist on the planet in 

fewer than two hundred states. In a 

Europe which is struggling to 

integrate its most recent members 

and to construct (even more 

painfully, since the French refusal to 

ratify the European Constitution) a 

European identity of unity through 

diversity (but also, undeniably, 

through exclusion), the Canadian 

paradigm cannot fail to be 

significant. For Canada has one of 

the highest immigration rates per 

capita in the world, and its ethnic 

diversity is unparalleled in the West: 

almost one person in five nationwide, 

and almost one person out of 

two in the sole city of Toronto, is 

Introduction 

Présentation 

maintes facettes. À travers l’histoire 

et les nations, les langues ont toujours 

été la pierre angulaire des cultures 

mais également leurs produits. Les 

langues nous aident à explorer les 

visions individuelles du monde tout 

en gardant des visions collectives. 

Elles réunissent et elles divisent à la 

fois. En tant que société 

multiculturelle qui est officiellement 

bilingue mais qui est de fait 

multilingue, le Canada a relevé le 

bâtir sur ces paradoxes en fondant son 

unité sur la diversité et en 

transformant ses fissures sociales en 

un agent adhésif qui relie les diverses 

facettes de notre culture. Le Canada 

n’a pas été seul lorsqu’il a défriché de 

la terre neuve, mais il peut être 

regardé au mieux comme modèle, et à 

tout le moins comme un laboratoire 

pour la planète en ce qui concerne la 

politique linguistique et la 

cohabitation linguistique et culturelle. 

Depuis la deuxième moitié du 

vingtième siècle, on a assisté à une 

montée au niveau de la fréquence, de 

la rapidité et de la quantité même des 

communications globales, le tout 

étant assorti de l’adoption de 

politiques en matière de langue 

officielle dans des pays bilingues tels 

le Canada, la Belgique ou le Nigeria. 

Dans la même veine, on a assisté à 

une croissance inédite de l’industrie 

de la traduction (dont le chiffre 

d’affaires frôle les 500 millions de 

dollars par année, et ce dans un pays 

qui est habité par seulement quelque 

30 millions d’habitants qui sont de 

plus en plus engagés envers le 

bilinguisme). Le bilinguisme et le 

multiculturalisme sont en fait des 

phénomènes globaux, puisque plus de 

cent millions de personnes 

empruntent la route de la migration 

chaque année, et plus de six milles 

langues et dialectes coexistent partout 

à travers la planète et ce à travers 

11



foreign-born 1 . In Toronto alone 

(dubbed the most multicultural city 

on the planet by the United Nations 

in 1995 2 ), one million people speak 

one hundred languages and idioms, 

and the multicultural cities of 

Vancouver and Montreal are not far 

behind. International assessments 

(such as “The First International 

Nation” by The Economist’s Barbara 

Ward) of Canada as a potential 

model-builder with respect to the 

peaceful cohabitation of languages 

and cultures can be found as early as 

1968 (The Cambridge Companion to 

Canadian Literature). 

The essays in this issue on 

“Languages/Langues et langages” of 

the International Journal of 

Canadian Studies address recent 

developments which make Canada 

distinctive in the rethinking of 

culture along linguistic lines and 

origins. Identity is manufactured 

from contingent experiences; 

linguistic elements are 

context-dependent and inevitably 

hybridized, as theorists of diglossia 

and heteroglossia from Antoine 

Berman to William Mackey have 

demonstrated. The authors of these 

essays seek to identify the 

challenges which have been raised 

and met, calling to mind for instance 

a time-space which privileged 

“speaking white.” They investigate 

the centrifugal dynamics which war 

with an individual’s cultural identity, 

grounded in his or her belonging to a 

linguistic community whose main 

trait is to be discrete. The 

contributors engaged by these vital 

questions come from the arts and 

humanities as well as the social 

sciences. Focussing both on langue 

(language as organized system or 

code) and parole (the concrete 

12 

moins de deux cents États. Dans une 

Europe qui s’efforce à faire intégrer 

ses membres les plus récemment 

venus et à construire (avec d’autant 

plus de mal, depuis le refus de la 

France d’entériner la constitution 

européenne) une identité constituée 

d’unité par l’entremise de la diversité 

(mais, également, et indéniablement, 

par l’exclusion), le paradigme 

canadien peut ne pas être rien d’autre 

qu’important. Car le Canada est doté 

d’un des taux d’immigration les plus 

élevés par personne dans le monde 

entier, et sa diversité ethnique n’a de 

pareil dans l’occident : près d’une 

personne sur cinq à la grandeur du 

pays, et près d’une personne sur deux 

dans la ville de Toronto seulement, 

est née à l’étranger 1 . À Toronto seule 

(surnommée la ville la plus 

multiculturelle du monde par les 

Nations-Unies en 1995 2 ), un million 

de personnes parlent une centaine de 

langues et idiomes, et les villes 

multiculturelles de Vancouver et de 

Montréal ne traînent pas loin derrière. 

Des évaluations internationales (telles 

que « The First International 

Nation ») par Barbara Ward de 

l’Economist) qui ont été effectuées au 

sujet du Canada en tant que bâtisseur 

de modèles au regard de la 

cohabitation paisible de langues et de 

cultures, remontent aussi loin que 

1968 (The Cambridge Companion to 

Canadian Literature). 

Les articles publiés dans le présent 

numéro sur « Languages/Langues et 

langages » de la Revue internationale 

d’études canadiennes se penchent sur 

des développements récents qui ont 

fait du Canada un foyer à part au 

chapitre de la refonte de la notion de 

culture suivant les démarcations et les 

origines linguistiques. L’identité est 

fabriquée à partir d’expériences 

contingentes; les éléments

individual act of language), they 

have set out in diverse ways to 

identify the paths that Canadian 

society and cultural production are 

tracing for the 21st century. 

In the opening essay, Catherine 

Khordoc takes us back to that myth 

of cultural/linguistic origins, the 

master narrative of Babel, handed 

down through three millennia rife 

with migration and diasporic 

dispersion. She examines the 

reappropriation of the legend 

(concomitant with issues of 

collective identity and traditionally 

associated with disorder and loss) in 

contemporary Québec and 

Franco-Ontarian writing, notably 

including what has been termed 

migrant literature. Exploring texts 

with such a common intertext by 

francophone writers born in Québec 

or having migrated from France or 

Tunisia allows her to identify 

processes of linguistic and cultural 

hybridity, to investigate the 

transformations of collective, 

societal vision involved in the notion 

of transculturalism, and to 

foreground the dialogue of cultures 

subtending the diversity staged by 

such literatures. The notion of a 

common primal speech long debated 

in the spheres of philosophy and 

linguistics also provides the point of 

departure for Jane Koustas’s essay, 

but here the focus shifts to artistic 

production rooted in globalization 

and connected intelligence. Koustas 

looks at one of the locomotives of 

Québec experimental theatre, Robert 

Lepage, who has always foregrounded 

and promoted transculturalism 

through his bilingual and 

multilingual productions. Studying 

the production and reception of 

Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy/La 

Trilogie des dragons allows Koustas 

Introduction 

Présentation 

linguistiques dépendent du contexte et 

sont forcément hybridés, comme l’ont 

démontré des théoriciens de la 

diglossie et de la hétéroglossie, allant 

d’Antoine Berman à William 

Mackey. Les auteurs de ces articles 

cherchent à cerner les défis qui ont été 

soulevés et relevés, et en ce faisant 

nous rappellent un temps-espace 

d’autrefois qui privilégiait « speaking 

white ». Ils explorent les dynamiques 

centrifuges qui militent contre 

l’identité culturelle de l’individu, ce 

qui est enracinée dans l’appartenance 

à une communauté linguistique dont 

le caractère essentiel est la discrétion. 

Les auteurs qui se penchent sur ces 

questions vitales proviennent des arts, 

des sciences humaines et des sciences 

sociales. Tout en mettant l’accent à la 

fois sur la langue (la langue comprise 

en tant que système ou code 

organisé), et la parole (le geste 

langagier concret d’un particulier), ils 

se sont mis, de diverses façons, à 

repérer les pistes que la société 

canadienne et la production culturelle 

défrichent à l’aube du vingt-et-unième 

siècle. 

Dans le premier article, Catherine 

Khordoc nous ramène jusqu’au mythe 

de nos origines culturelles/linguistiques, 

soit le récit de la Tour de 

Babel, qui avait été passé d’une 

génération à l’autre à travers trois 

millénaires durant lesquels la 

migration et les dispersions 

diasporiques allaient bon train. Elle 

étudie l’appropriation à nouveau du 

mythe (parallèlement aux problèmes 

d’identité collective et associée 

traditionnellement au désordre et à la 

perte) par des écrivains québécois et 

franco-ontariens contemporains, ce 

qui, plus particulièrement, comprend 

ce qui a été appelé la littérature 

migrante. L’exploration de textes 

partageant un tel intertexte et rédigés 

13



to show how such work explodes 

traditional linguistic, cultural, and 

geographical boundaries, as well as 

notions on identity construction. 

Continuing this issue’s investigation 

of the relations between language, 

contingent experience, and identity 

construction, but shifting the focus 

to the oral storytelling practices of 

the Inuit, Lynette Hunter bases her 

article on a number of live and 

reported interviews carried out in 

Nunavut. She privileges the stories 

told by the women of the 

community, focussing on the 

relations between speech and 

writing, between teller and listener, 

and between traditional knowledge 

and textuality, foregrounding the 

potential of such modes of 

communication–distanced from 

Western notions of rationalist 

epistemology–for persuasion and the 

promotion of social understanding. 

Michelle Daveluy’s essay is a 

pivotal one: like the paper preceding 

it, it focuses on the oral Inuit 

communities of Nunavut, but it 

shifts the angle of discussion to that 

of the management of languages by 

official language policies. 

Complexifying the discussion, she 

opens her area of investigation out to 

Nunavik, examining how language 

promotion efforts are inhabited by 

tensions between bilingualism 

(Inuktitut and English) and 

trilingualism (Inuktitut, English, and 

French), dependent in turn on 

international as opposed to national 

perspectives. 

Jesse Archibald-Barber’s essay 

explores the debates which have 

been raging since Antiquity on the 

relations between language, 

technology, and perception, and their 

14 

par des écrivains francophones nés au 

Québec ou ayant migré de la France 

ou de la Tunisie lui permet de dégager 

des processus d’hybridité linguistiques 

et culturelles, et ce afin 

d’enquêter sur les transformations de 

la vision collective, voire sociétale qui 

est mêlée à la notion de transculturalisme, 

et de ramener à l’avant plan le 

dialogue des cultures qui sous-tendent 

la diversité qui est mise en scène dans 

telles littératures. La notion d’une 

parole primale en commun, qui, au fil 

des années, a fait l’objet de vifs 

débats dans les domaines de 

philosophie et de linguistique, 

constitue également le point de départ 

de l’article de Jane Koustas. Dans ce 

cas, cependant, l’accent est déplacé 

vers la production artistique qui a ses 

racines dans la mondialisation et 

l’intelligence connectées. Koustas se 

penche sur l’une des forces motrices 

du théâtre expérimental au Québec, à 

savoir Robert Lepage, qui a toujours 

su ramener à l’avant plan et 

promouvoir le transculturalisme par 

l’entremise de ses productions 

bilingues et multilingues. En se 

penchant sur la production et la 

réception de La Trilogie des dragons/ 

The Dragons’ Trilogy, Koustas nous 

met au grand jour la manière dont de 

telles œuvres font éclater les bornes 

linguistiques, culturelles et 

géographiques traditionnelles, de 

même que les notions de construction 

identitaire. 

L’exploration dans le présent numéro 

des liens entre la langue, l’expérience 

contingente, et la construction de 

l’identité, mais tout en déplaçant 

l’accent vers les pratiques d’histoire 

orale des Inuit, se poursuit avec la 

contribution de Lynette Hunter qui est 

fondée sur un nombre d’entrevues 

tant en direct que rapportées, qu’elle a 

effectuées au Nunavut. Elle privilégie

elations in turn with power. It 

investigates in what way certain 

hierarchies which have been 

identified in spheres as apparently 

discrete as speech and writing on the 

one hand and class perception or 

colonial practices on the other have 

been coterminous, and to what 

extent the dialectic stance which 

ultimately legitimates or 

subordinates is grounded in the 

ideological assumptions of the 

premise. His assessment of the 

dichotomies which in certain circles 

of cognitive theory such as the 

Toronto School have equated 

literacy with civilization and orality 

with the primitive aligns itself with 

previous critiques such as those of 

Derrida, which exposed the 

metaphysical paradox at the heart of 

the Western tradition. Archibald- 

Barber’s essay is followed by and 

dovetails with another paper 

discussing the encounter of oral and 

literate cultures. Kathleen Buddle’s 

article focuses on Aboriginal media 

initiatives in Alberta. Her paper 

explores the creation, regulation, and 

representation of cultural borders, 

which prove to be increasingly 

unstable. Buddle argues that the 

transformation of discursive 

production (notably visible in the 

newspaper industry, battleground 

governed by a politics of 

authorization) is concomitant with 

the transformation of inherited 

notions of indigenousness/ 

nationhood as well as of 

development or progress, and is thus 

central in policy-making processes. 

The theme articles are 

complemented by an Open-Topic 

section comprised of two papers 

which remain within the broader 

framework of interdependence, 

negotiation, and coordination which 

Introduction 

Présentation 

les récits racontés par les femmes de 

la communauté, tout et mettant 

l’accent sur les relations entre la 

parole et l’écriture, entre la conteuse 

et l’auditeur, et entre le savoir 

traditionnel et la textualité, ramenant 

à l’avant-plan le potentiel qui réside 

dans de tels modes de communication 

— et en tant que tel écartés des 

notions occidentales de 

l’épistémologie rationaliste — et ce à 

des fins de persuasion et la promotion 

de la compréhension sociale. 

L’article de Michelle Daveluy est 

essentiel au discours :àl’instar de la 

communication qui précède la 

sienne; elle se concentre sur les 

communautés inuit orales du 

Nunavut, tout en ramenant l’optique 

sous laquelle la discussion se déroule 

vers celle de la gestion des langues 

par des politiques linguistiques 

officielles. Elle ajoute de nouveaux 

éléments à un débat déjà complexe en 

élargissant la portée de sa thèse pour 

embrasser la région de Nunavik, et 

elle examine les façons dont les 

efforts visant à promouvoir des 

langues sont striés de tensions entre le 

bilinguisme (inuktitut et anglais) et le 

trilinguisme (inuktitut, anglais et 

français), le tout étant contingent des 

perspectives internationales plutôt que 

nationales. 

L’article de Jesse Archibald-Barber 

examine les débats qui vont bon train 

depuis l’antiquité, ainsi que les liens 

entre le langage, la technologie et la 

perception, et les relations qu’ont ces 

derniers éléments au pouvoir. Sa 

communication examine la façon dont 

certaines hiérarchies, qu’on a repérées 

dans des sphères de par toute 

évidence discrètes telles la parole et 

l’écriture de l’un côté et la perception 

de classe ou des pratiques coloniales 

de l’autre, ont été limitrophes, et 

15



has been the preoccupation of the 

preceding contributors. In Emily 

Gilbert’s essay, which re-examines 

the North American Monetary Union 

debates, the discussion of identity 

moves beyond notions of language 

and origin, but significantly remains 

rooted in the specificity of 

contingent experience and in 

considerations of place (the 

geographical catalyzing the 

economic landscape). Finally, 

Rachel Laforest presents a case 

study exploring public sector 

reforms. She foregrounds a 

transition in the nation’s governance 

practices, reflecting social and 

political changes in service 

provision, policy-making, and 

relationship building, particularly 

visible in the sector of family 

services, where the voluntary sector 

has emerged as a partner in both 

policy-making and service delivery. 

The review essay by Donna Patrick 

which concludes the issue takes us 

full circle. It picks up the theme of 

the issue by analyzing a selection of 

books concerned with 

comprehending contemporary 

Canadian issues through the lens of 

language and language policy. 

Patrick argues that knowledge of 

language issues and the ideologies 

and discourses surrounding them is 

crucial to understanding what shapes 

and distinguishes Canada as a nation 

in an increasingly post-national 

world. 

Marta Dvorak 

Associate Editor 

Notes 

1. According to the 2001 census 

released in January 2003, 18.4% of 

16 

jusqu’à quel degré la prise de position 

dialectique, qui, en fin de compte, soit 

légitime ou subordonne ces éléments, 

a ses racines dans les suppositions 

idéologiques de la prémisse. Son 

évaluation de la dichotomie qui, dans 

certains cercles préconisant la théorie 

cognitive tels que la Toronto School, 

ont assimilé l’alphabétisation à la 

civilisation et l’oralité à ce qui est 

primitif, cadre bien avec des critiques 

d’autrefois telles celle de Derrida, qui 

a mis au grand jour le paradoxe 

métaphysique qui réside au cœur de la 

tradition occidentale. L’article 

d’Archibald-Barber cadre bien avec 

l’article qui le suit et qui met la 

lumière sur la rencontre des cultures 

orales et écrites. L’article de Kathleen 

Buddle se concentre sur des initiatives 

des médias autochtones en 

Alberta.Son article explore la 

création, la réglementation et la 

représentation des frontières 

culturelles, qui s’avèrent être de plus 

en plus instables. Buddle soutient que 

la transformation de la production 

discursive (qui jouit d’un profil élevé 

dans l’industrie des quotidiens, soit un 

champ de mars qui est dirigé par une 

politique d’autorisation), soit 

concomitant avec la transformation 

des notions héritées d’origine 

indigène/statut de nation ainsi que du 

développement ou du progrès, et est 

donc essentiel aux processus 

d’élaboration de politique. 

Les articles portant sur le thème du 

présent numéro vont de pair avec une 

section de thème ouvert, qui se 

compose de deux communications qui 

demeurent à l’intérieur du cadre plus 

large d’interdépendance, de 

négociation et de coordination qui a 

été la préoccupation des auteurs 

précédents. Dans l’article d’Emily 

Gilbert, qui examine à nouveau le 

débat entourant l’Union monétaire de

all people living in Canada were 

born abroad–a figure up from 

16.1% a decade previously–and 

44% of the population of Toronto 

was born outside of Canada (a ratio 

already as high as 41% in the 1961 

census). 

2. Le Monde, “Terres du Canada,” 

June 1995, p. VIII. 

Introduction 

Présentation 

l’Amérique du Nord, le débat au sujet 

de l’identité se déplace au-delà des 

notions de langue et d’origine, mais 

pour l’essentiel demeure enraciné 

dans la spécificité de l’expérience 

contingente et dans les considérations 

du lieu (les faits de nature 

géographique catalysant le paysage 

économique). Et en guise de 

conclusion, Rachel Laforest nous 

propose une étude de cas qui se 

penche sur des projets de réforme 

dans le secteur public. Elle ramène à 

l’avant plan une transition au niveau 

des pratiques du gouvernement de la 

nation, ce qui témoigne des 

changements survenus au niveau de la 

prestation de services, de 

l’élaboration de politique, et de la 

formation de relations, services qui 

jouissent d’un profil élevé dans le 

secteur des services à la famille, où le 

secteur bénévole vient d’émerger en 

tant que partenaire aux plans de la 

formulation des politiques et de la 

prestation de service. 

Nous terminons le présent numéro par 

un essai critique, rédigé par Donna 

Patrick, ce qui nous ramène à notre 

point de départ. Il porte sur le thème 

du numéro en analysant une sélection 

d’ouvrages qui se concentrent sur le 

processus de comprendre des enjeux 

canadiens contemporains sous les 

optiques de langue et de politique 

linguistique. Donna Patrick soutient 

que la connaissance des dossiers 

linguistiques et des idéologies et des 

débats qui les entourent est essentielle 

à la compréhension de ce qui façonne 

et démarque le Canada en tant que 

nation dans un monde qui est en passe 

de devenir de plus en plus 

postnational. 

Marta Dvorak 

Rédactrice adjointe 

17



18 

Notes 

1. Selon le recensement de 2001 rendu 

public en janvier 2003, 18,4 p. 100 de 

tous les gens habitant au Canada 

étaient nés à l’étranger – soit une 

hausse de 16,1 p. 100 par rapport au 

chiffre enregistré une décennie auparavant 

– et 44 p. 100 de la population 

de Toronto étaient nés en dehors du 

Canada (soit une proportion qui avait 

déjà atteint les 41 p. 100 lors du 

recensement de 1961). 

2. Le Monde, « Terres du Canada », juin 

1995, p. VIII.

Catherine Khordoc 

Reconsidérer Babel : appropriation du mythe de 

Babel dans quelques textes québécois et 

franco-ontariens 

Ce qui menace notre époque n’est pas la Tour 

de Babel, mais cette tendance à tout fondre en 

un. À fondre la diversité historique, culturelle 

ou linguistique en un tout... 1 

Résumé 

Cet article examine quatre textes québécois et franco-ontariens où s’inscrit 

explicitement le mythe de Babel afin d’évoquer des préoccupations 

contemporaines ayant trait à la multiplicité de langues et de cultures qui se 

côtoient dans la société canadienne et québécoise. Or il ne s’agit pas 

simplement d’une cohabitation de ces langues et cultures, car à la longue, par 

leur frottement quotidien, elles donnent lieu à de nouvelles formes de cultures. 

Ainsi, le mythe de Babel n’évoque pas simplement la multiplicité des langues; 

la métaphore de la construction inachevée représente la culture qui est 

toujours en train de se former. 

Abstract 

This article reviews four Québécois and Franco-Ontarian texts in which the 

Babel myth is employed in an analysis of the contemporary problematics of a 

multiplicity of languages and cultures existing side by side in Canadian and 

Québécois society. It is argued that, rather than simply cohabiting, their 

closely contiguous daily existence has spawned new forms of culture. In 

essence, the Babel myth, rather than simply explaining the generation of a 

galaxy of different languages, evokes the metaphor of an unfinished edifice 

that represents a culture forever in the process of formation. 

Chaos, confusion, inachèvement, dispersion, perte, malédiction, voilà des 

termes qui, depuis fort longtemps, sont employés pour qualifier les 

événements décrits dans le mythe de la tour de Babel. Car la confusion de la 

langue unique — d’où sont issues les différentes langues parlées au monde 

— et la dispersion du peuple qui a tenté de construire la tour légendaire sont 

depuis fort longtemps considérées comme une malédiction qui tourmente 

l’humanité. Ce mythe vieux de plus de 3000 ans connaît depuis quelque 

temps un certain renouvellement dans les domaines littéraire et culturel 

parce qu’il évoque des questions ayant trait à la langue, l’identité et la 

collectivité auxquelles s’attardent artistes, intellectuels et chercheurs de 


30, 2004



l’époque contemporaine. Par ailleurs, comme le souligne Valérie Raoul, le 

mythe est pertinent « pour des sociétés où des populations de langues 

différentes vivent en proximité géographique, le partage de l’espace les 

forçant à essayer de se comprendre pour éviter une confrontation 

douloureuse » (131). Les interprétations récentes de ce mythe se veulent un 

peu plus nuancées et moins univoques que celles plus traditionnelles qui ne 

percevaient que l’aspect punitif dans la multiplicité langagière et la 

dispersion. Si Babel fascine penseurs et artistes depuis le Moyen Âge 

surtout par rapport à la perte de la langue « parfaite » et donc de la 

communication, ce qui retient notre attention actuellement, ce sont les 

diverses langues et cultures qui se trouvent non pas dispersées, mais plutôt 

rassemblées sur un seul territoire. 

Le Canada et le Québec, certes, sont des territoires particulièrement 

marqués par une telle multiplicité et cela ne date pas d’hier. En effet, depuis 

le début de son histoire, le Canada est traversé par une pluralité de cultures 

et de langues grâce à l’immigration qui s’est ajoutée aux peuples 

autochtones pour former le pays, bien qu’à certaines époques et dans 

quelques milieux, il y ait eu un désir de croire à une certaine homogénéité 

linguistique et culturelle, qu’elle soit notamment anglophone-protestante 

ou francophone-catholique. Il serait plus difficile, depuis au moins une 

vingtaine d’années sinon plus, de se laisser leurrer par de telles illusions 

mythiques. Comme le rappelle le sous-titre du livre de Clément Moisan et 

Renate Hildebrand paru récemment, Ces étrangers du dedans : une histoire 

de l’écriture migrante au Québec de 1937 à 1997, le caractère pluriel de 

cette société n’est pas un phénomène récent, mais, comme le constate Lucie 

Lequin, il avait « peu attiré l’attention. Par contre, depuis le début des 

années quatre-vingt, bon nombre de critiques éprouvent le désir de réviser 

l’unicité mythique du Québec » (32). Ainsi, la pluralité est un thème 

particulièrement présent dans le discours littéraire actuel, en partie à cause 

de la prolifération non seulement d’œuvres dites « migrantes », mais aussi 

d’ouvrages critiques et théoriques portant sur celles-ci, comme en 

témoigne entre autres l’ouvrage susmentionné publié en 2001. 

La littérature que l’on nomme communément depuis les années 80 

« écriture migrante » contribue à mettre en évidence la pluralité culturelle et 

linguistique au Québec et au Canada parce qu’elle « permet de faire 

entendre l’autre en direct, d’écouter ce que ces écrivaines et écrivains ont à 

dire sur le Québec ou sur le monde aujourd’hui » (Lequin 32). Au moyen de 

récits mettant en scène à la fois le deuil du pays d’origine et l’intégration au 

pays d’accueil, les écritures migrantes enrichissent la littérature québécoise 

et canadienne en y intégrant de nouveaux paysages, mythes et références 

culturelles et elles contribuent à complexifier le rapport à la langue et à 

l’écriture en représentant des expériences liées à l’exil et à l’immigration. 

Comme le souligne pertinemment Régine Robin, le phénomène d’une 

littérature où participent des écrivains d’origine haïtienne, française, 

20

Reconsidérer Babel : appropriation du mythe de Babel dans quelques textes 

québécois et franco-ontariens 

libanaise, marocaine, vietnamienne, latino-américaine, donne « à coup sûr, 

des thématiques autres, des formes autres, des transformations 

linguistiques, lexicales, parfois même syntaxiques, une hybridité culturelle 

affirmée, de nouveaux types d’écriture; la formation peut-être d’un nouvel 

imaginaire social » (9). Or les écrivains néoquébécois ne sont pas seuls à 

attester du caractère multiculturel du Québec; plusieurs auteurs dits « de 

souche », tels que Francine Noël et Monique Proulx, s’en inspirent pour 

explorer les transformations qui s’opèrent et les nouvelles visions qui se 

forment dans leur société. 

Un survol de quelques textes migrants et « de souche » nous permettra de 

mettre en lumière non pas le phénomène du multiculturalisme, que Sherry 

Simon définit comme étant « le chacun pour soi dans un empire de 

différences respectées » (Hybridité 19), mais celui du transculturalisme, 

c’est-à-dire, une interaction, voire une fusion, entre les cultures, qui 

dépasse la métaphore de la mosaïque canadienne évoquant un simple 

collage de cultures. Parmi les quatre périodes dégagées par Moisan et 

Hildebrand de la littérature migrante au Québec, la plus récente, qui débute 

selon les auteurs en 1986, se caractérise par le « transculturel », qu’ils 

définissent comme étant « la traversée des cultures en présence, les deux à la 

fois, une altérité culturelle vécue comme un passage dans et à travers 

l’autre » (17). 2 La notion de transculturalisme, selon Hédi Bouraoui, permet 

de tenir compte du « transvasement culturel entre les différentes ethnies » 

qui s’opère dans les textes que nous avons choisi d’analyser, c’est-à-dire, de 

« transcender à la fois sa propre culture et jeter un pont et se trans-verser 

dans l’autre » (« Troisième solitude » 178). En revanche, Bouraoui prévient 

que même là, il s’agit d’une « métaphore mythique idéale qui ne reflète pas 

la réalité » (« Troisième solitude » 178). 

Or une des métaphores du transculturalisme est certes mythique, et ce, 

littéralement, puisque cette étude examine cette problématique par 

l’entremise de l’inscription du mythe de Babel dans quelques textes 

québécois et franco-ontariens. Si le choix d’œuvres québécoises ou 

canadiennes-françaises parmi lesquelles se manifestent des variantes du 

transculturalisme est de plus en plus vaste, ce qui a motivé notre choix de 

textes dans l’étude présente est l’inscription explicite du mythe de Babel. Il 

nous sera donc possible de déceler non seulement comment ces textes 

représentent le transculturalisme à travers un intertexte commun, mais 

aussi, nous l’espérons, d’entamer un « dialogue » entre eux au moyen d’une 

approche comparative. Bouraoui suggère par ailleurs la nécessité d’établir 

« des dialogues de cultures allant des premiers habitants du pays (les 

Autochtones), aux peuples fondateurs (anglais et français), aux 

néo-Canadiens (les multiculturels), immigrés récents d’aujourd’hui » 

(« Troisième solitude » 180). Il est intéressant de noter d’ailleurs certains 

parallèles entre les expériences de personnages autochtones et immigrants 

dans quelques-uns des textes que nous examinons, mais nous ne les 

aborderons pas ici 3 . 

21



Ainsi, nous nous proposons d’examiner comment la référence 

intertextuelle au mythe de Babel est déployée dans ces textes et comment le 

mythe y est en fait réapproprié afin de mettre en scène la diversité inhérente 

des sociétés québécoise et canadienne. Moisan et Hildebrand affirment 

d’ailleurs l’importance de l’intertextualité, car elle « permet […] 

l’investigation d’une “transculturalité” vivante, d’une voie de passage 

entre des œuvres, en raison de leur coïncidence » (212). Notre approche est 

en fait doublement intertextuelle puisqu’il s’agit d’étudier d’une part 

l’intertexte babélien et d’autre part les croisements que l’on dégagera entre 

les œuvres rassemblées ici à cause de cet intertexte. 

Pour démontrer le renouvellement de ce récit biblique, il faudrait avant 

tout rappeler le mythe originel raconté dans le livre de la Genèse de l’Ancien 

Testament (11, 1-9). Il n’y avait qu’une seule langue et en découvrant une 

plaine, le peuple du Shinear décide de s’y installer en construisant une ville 

et une tour. La tour devait être si haute qu’elle atteindrait les cieux, mais en 

fait, le peuple n’y est jamais parvenu, car, en voyant ce qui se passait sur 

terre, Iahvé a décidé de mettre fin au projet. C’est en confondant leur langue 

et en dispersant le peuple aux quatre coins du monde que Iahvé a mis fin à la 

construction de la ville et de la tour. On appela la ville « Babel », mot qui en 

hébreu signifie confusion, parce que le chantier est devenu un lieu de 

confusion où plus personne ne se comprenait. Ainsi, ce mythe — car il 

s’agit bien d’un mythe au sens strict 4 — constitue une tentative 

d’explication de l’avènement des nombreuses langues sur la terre. Malgré 

la concision de ce récit, qui ne compte que neuf versets, on ne peut 

sous-estimer son retentissement au long des siècles, et ce, non seulement au 

niveau de l’exégèse, mais aussi au niveau des idées reçues portant sur la 

langue. 

Le récit lui-même n’offre aucun indice qui pourrait suggérer comment 

expliquer les actions du peuple et de Iahvé, ni, en l’occurrence, si les 

événements constituaient effectivement un châtiment divin, comme les 

exégètes se sont accordés à les interpréter pendant de nombreux siècles, 

contre l’orgueil de l’humanité qui osait tenter d’atteindre, sinon de dépasser 

Dieu. Si l’on accepte cette interprétation d’une punition, il s’ensuit que 

quelque chose de précieux a été perdu à Babel, à savoir la langue unique, 

parfaite, représentant l’unité humaine. La suite de ce raisonnement 

révélerait donc que la confusion et la dispersion babélienne, ainsi que la 

diversité des langues puis des cultures, sont en fait des conséquences 

catastrophiques pour l’humanité. Il est d’ailleurs révélateur que certains 

auteurs, surtout au XVIII e siècle, ont lié à leurs conceptions d’utopies la 

notion de retrouver la langue parfaite originelle disparue à Babel. 5 Or le 

théologien Bernhard Anderson affirme que cette interprétation n’est pas 

ancrée dans le texte : « there is no basis for the negative view that pluralism 

is God’s judgement upon human sinfulness » (177). Nous verrons en effet 

22



que l’interprétation traditionnelle du mythe est remise en question dans les 

textes qui seront analysés. 

Venons-en à présent aux textes littéraires contemporains qui reprennent 

le mythe de Babel. Parus entre 1987 et 1999, les textes en question, soit 

Babel-Opéra de Monique Bosco, Ainsi parle la Tour CN de Hédi Bouraoui, 

Babel prise deux, ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique, de Francine 

Noël, et L’Autre rivage 6 , une collection de poèmes d’Antonio D’Alfonso, 

inscrivent explicitement la thématique babélienne. En effet, Bosco, 

Bouraoui et Noël citent intégralement ou paraphrasent le récit de Babel, 

mais cela dans un esprit contestataire suggérant que les conséquences de 

Babel n’imposent pas nécessairement la fin de la construction de la Tour ni 

la mésentente entre les peuples parlant différentes langues. 

Sans vouloir tomber dans le piège qui réduirait l’identité à l’origine, il 

nous paraît tout de même pertinent de rappeler les origines diverses de nos 

auteurs : d’origine juive, Bosco s’est installée à Montréal il y a plus de 50 

ans, ayant vécu une première émigration de l’Autriche vers la France peu 

avant l’éclatement de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale; Bouraoui, d’origine 

tunisienne, habite à Toronto après avoir passé plusieurs années en France; 

issu d’une famille immigrante italienne, D’Alfonso est né à Montréal où il a 

fréquenté l’école anglaise et vit actuellement à Toronto; et Francine Noël 

est québécoise « de souche » vivant à Montréal. Si, dans le cas des trois 

premiers auteurs, on peut se douter d’un intérêt relevant d’expériences 

personnelles pour les langues, les déplacements, les questions identitaires, 

entre autres, Francine Noël de son côté s’intéresse dans son œuvre aux 

effets qu’occasionnent les populations immigrantes sur la société 

d’accueil, à savoir la culture québécoise et plus particulièrement 

montréalaise. 

Dans ces quatre textes, Babel symbolise la société contemporaine, mais 

précisons qu’il s’agit d’un cadre post-babélien. Urbaine et cosmopolite, 

Babel n’est plus le lieu de la dispersion, mais plutôt celui où se réunissent les 

diverses langues et ethnies. La Tour CN, dotée de la capacité de parler dans 

le roman de Bouraoui, affirme que « les voix plurielles […] ne sont pas 

aussi dispersées que Dieu l’a voulu en première instance » (APTCN 321). 

Les textes de Bosco, de Noël et de D’Alfonso sont situés à Montréal, alors 

que celui de Bouraoui est ancré à Toronto, deux métropoles connues bien 

sûr pour leur multiculturalisme foisonnant ainsi que la pluralité de langues 

qui y sont parlées. Bien que la diversité culturelle et linguistique ne soit pas 

perçue de manière négative en tant que telle, un des thèmes récurrents dans 

les quatre textes évoque les défis et les remises en question identitaires que 

suscite cette diversité : comment s’intégrer à la nouvelle société sans trahir 

ses origines et ses traditions? Comment accepter ceux qui souscrivent à 

différentes traditions et croyances et qui parlent des langues autres que 

celles du groupe dominant? Bref, comme l’exprime si bien Édouard 

23



Glissant, « comment être soi sans se fermer à l’autre, et comment s’ouvrir à 

l’autre sans se perdre soi-même? » (23). 

Dans son roman quelque peu farfelu et fantastique, mais tout aussi 

lucide, Bouraoui donne la parole à la Tour CN, qui se charge de raconter ce 

qu’elle entend à l’intérieur de ses propres murs et par l’entremise des 

signaux qu’elle capte en tant que tour de télécommunications. Cette tour, 

qui se dit être l’« anti-Babel », parce que construite à Toronto, ce « lieu de 

rencontres » où plus de 286 langues sont recensées (APTCN 11), rapporte 

les mots et les maux de personnages qui travaillent en son sein. Les 

constructeurs et les travailleurs de cette anti-Babel représentent la diversité 

des groupes ethniques canadiens : une anglophone de souche, un 

Québécois, un Franco-Ontarien, des immigrants venus entre autres 

d’Afrique, d’Italie, de France et de Malaisie et une famille autochtone. 

Malgré le ton ludique de ce roman, on y décèle un côté plutôt critique. Les 

personnages peu développés sont délibérément emblématiques de leur 

ethnicité et leur rencontre auprès de la Tour CN constitue un microcosme de 

la mosaïque canadienne. Mais cette mosaïque représente un échec, car elle 

n’invite pas une réelle communication entre ces différents personnages, qui 

se maintiennent chacun dans sa « solitude » respective. Les rapports entre 

Kelly, la Canadienne anglaise qui dirige les ressources humaines, et les 

autres employés sont froids; et lorsque celle-ci deviendra la maîtresse de 

Pete de Loon, le personnage autochtone qui a participé à la construction de 

la Tour, il se trouve dans une position soumise. En fait, deux personnages 

marginaux, l’Amérindien et l’Africain, ne se lieront d’amitié que lorsqu’ils 

auront tous les deux perdu leur emploi à la Tour CN. À partir d’une 

perspective qu’elle décrit comme « de souche » parce qu’elle est « née » à 

Toronto, la Tour CN lamente la troisième solitude, qui s’ajoute aux deux 

autres que l’on connaît; elle identifie les différents ghettos qui constituent sa 

ville — tant ceux où habitent les Anglo-Saxons de vieille souche que ceux 

où sont rassemblés divers groupes ethniques — et elle commente les 

difficultés qu’ont les immigrants à s’intégrer et à se faire accepter par la 

société d’accueil, car toute la bonne volonté de l’immigrant ne suffira pas 

s’il n’y pas également une certaine ouverture de la part de l’accueillant. 

Pourtant, malgré les divisions apparentes, la Tour voit une raison d’être 

optimiste puisqu’elle a été érigée en fait par tous : « Dans mon chantier se 

sont conjugués les langues de rocailles et le langage du cristal, la parole 

d’acier et les phrases agrippantes du mortier… Aucune voix n’a été 

occultée! Toutes se sont unies pour relever le défi. D’une hauteur jamais 

atteinte. Au lieu de noyauter les voix dissidentes, les Torontois les ont mises 

à l’unisson » (APTCN 314). En effet, malgré les difficultés qui peuvent 

survenir dans un lieu aussi multiculturel que Toronto, la Tour CN constate 

de son point de vue privilégié que les différents groupes ethniques ont tout 

de même des rapports assez harmonieux, surtout en comparaison à d’autres 

endroits dans le monde où les confrontations entre groupes ethniques sont 

24



certes plus tendues, voire violentes. La Tour CN constate d’ailleurs qu’il est 

ironique que le « quart de la population [du Canada] [veuille] sortir alors 

que les neuf-dixième du Tiers monde meurt d’envie d’y rentrer! » (APTCN 

21). 

Comme la Tour CN « de souche », la narratrice principale du roman de 

Francine Noël est une « Québécoise de souche », quoique son prénom, 

Fatima, avec sa résonance arabe, puisse suggérer le contraire. Si, dans le 

roman de Bouraoui, la narratrice incarne le projet babélien de s’établir dans 

un lieu, la profession de Fatima rappelle clairement la composante 

linguistique du mythe, car Fatima est orthophoniste : elle aide ses patients à 

recouvrer la langue confondue. Les personnages féminins, d’ailleurs, se 

rattachent tous à des thèmes langagiers : Amélia, la meilleure amie de 

Fatima, est traductrice de métier et parle au moins trois langues, et Linda, la 

patiente de Fatima, a perdu l’usage de la parole et au lieu de recouvrer sa 

langue maternelle — le français —, elle insiste pour faire sa thérapie en 

anglais afin de pouvoir communiquer avec son petit ami d’origine italienne. 

Selon Simon, ces personnages incarnent les deux « interprétations du 

babélisme de Montréal […] L’une est joyeuse, l’autre tragique » (Trafic 

134). Pour Simon, Amélia représente l’interprétation joyeuse de Babel 

parce que son passage entre les langues lui procure « une source de 

libération », alors que Linda souffrira des « blessures que peut infliger la 

confrontation des langues » (Trafic 134). Ce n’est pas si simple, cependant, 

car il ne faut pas oublier qu’Amélia sera tuée dans un accident d’avion, 

justement lorsqu’elle aurait décidé de se défaire de ses multiples 

appartenances culturelles (française, espagnole, québécoise) en choisissant 

de n’être désormais que québécoise et que Linda, elle, recouvrera l’usage 

de la parole en dépit de — ou peut-être à cause de — son refus de privilégier 

uniquement sa langue maternelle. Il est par ailleurs intéressant de noter que 

les personnages masculins sont eux aussi marqués par des thèmes 

babéliens, notamment celui de l’espace, puisque Louis et Réjean sont 

architectes et Guillaume est urbaniste 7 . Situé à Montréal et plus 

particulièrement dans le quartier de Fatima, dont la rue est « au confluent de 

plusieurs petites sociétés distinctes » (BPD 37), ce récit fait allusion, 

comme le roman de Bouraoui, à une situation post-babélienne; c’est-à-dire 

que les différentes langues et cultures sont bel et bien arrivées au 

rendez-vous. Fatima, qui sait dire « quelques phrases en portugais, en grec, 

en ukrainien » afin de pouvoir échanger avec ses voisins quelques mots 

dans leur langue d’origine (BPD 163), surnomme d’ailleurs sa ville Babel 

en y ajoutant des épithètes telles que « joyeuse » et « effervescente » 

indiquant son parti pris. 

Fatima bute cependant contre un dilemme. Malgré la réjouissance que lui 

procure la diversité des langues et des cultures à Montréal, elle se demande 

comment la culture traditionnelle québécoise, et de surcroît la langue 

française, vont survivre au milieu de cette diversité. D’une part, à force 

d’accepter et d’encourager le maintien de traditions culturelles des 

25



immigrants, la culture québécoise « de souche » se voit réduite en n’en être 

qu’une parmi les autres, sans statut privilégié; d’autre part, l’attirance vers 

l’anglais remet en question l’importance du français comme langue 

nationale. En dépit de la Charte de la langue française, Fatima constate le 

recours à l’anglais parmi les jeunes : « En classe, ils parlent peut-être 

français, mais pas dans la rue : là, quelle que soit leur origine ethnique, c’est 

en anglais qu’ils gueulent et s’interpellent en attendant leur autobus » (BPD 

37). Le français devrait être, selon elle, le « lien entre les peuples; […] un 

mortier soudant toutes les briques de l’édifice » (BPD 363). 

Les textes de Bosco et de D’Alfonso, au contraire des deux ouvrages 

précédents, évoquent des expériences et des sentiments liés à l’immigration 

à partir du point de vue de l’immigrant. D’Alfonso, à travers des poèmes en 

vers et en prose, aborde les difficultés que présentent la perte de la langue 

maternelle et le choix de la langue d’adoption, étant donné les enjeux 

associés aux deux langues officielles du pays. Le poème intitulé « Babel » 

dans le recueil de d’Alfonso est composé en quatre langues : français, 

anglais, italien et espagnol, sans aucune traduction ou explication des mots 

étrangers8 . Sa perspective sur les conséquences babéliennes étant plutôt 

négative, ce poème fait allusion à la confusion des langues, car le lecteur qui 

ne peut lire ces langues se verra dans l’impossibilité d’en saisir le sens. Si les 

douze premiers vers sont composés chacun dans une langue différente, 

l’éclatement langagier atteint son apogée dans les trois derniers vers où les 

langues s’entremêlent à chaque mot. Même le lecteur versé dans ces quatre 

langues ressentira un certain effet de confusion en essayant de comprendre 

ces vers. Pour ce qui est du contenu du poème, il évoque la souffrance que 

provoque l’émigration et le sentiment de non-appartenance éprouvé par les 

émigrants et parfois les générations qui suivent. Le sujet affirme être né à 

Montréal et avoir été « élevé comme Québécois », cependant, il lui a fallu 

parler en anglais puisque c’est « the tongue of power » (AR 47). 

Effectivement, l’émigration qui, dans un autre poème du même recueil, est 

définie comme le « vrai divorce », cause la perte de la langue maternelle et 

empêche la communication, même avec un interlocuteur qui partage la 

même langue. « Quelle langue dois-je utiliser pour venir jusqu’à toi? En 

dépit du son familier des mots, nous n’avons pas la même grammaire » (AR 

53). D’Alfonso lamente par ailleurs la perte d’identité et d’une culture 

unifiée qui s’ensuit de l’émigration. Dans le poème intitulé « Être WOP », le 

poète s’interroge quant à l’importance — ou la perception de l’importance 

— d’une appartenance nationale. 

Les cultures d’être ce que l’être ne peut plus jamais redevenir. Ici 

ou là : des identités sans culture. La culture italienne : qu’est-ce 

qu’être Italien en dehors de l’Italie? « N’est pas Italien celui qui vit 

en dehors d’elle. » Que signifie cette phrase? Peu importe où tu vis. 

Tu vis ta culture. Recharge tes batteries pour devenir ce que tu es 

essentiellement. (AR 62) 

26



Bosco, pour sa part, évoque la dispersion babélienne par la double 

immigration de la narratrice Myriam, qui ne se remet qu’avec beaucoup de 

difficultés de ses expériences de l’exil. Même en tant que francophone, 

malgré ses nombreux efforts, elle ne parvient pas réellement à se sentir 

intégrée dans son pays d’adoption, soit le Canada et plus particulièrement le 

Québec. Elle est bien consciente de la nécessité de s’intégrer, mais il y a 

aussi la part du peuple d’accueil qui doit être prêt à recevoir, à accepter, les 

immigrants. Déjà évoquée dans notre discussion du roman de Bouraoui, 

cette notion d’accueil est aussi réitérée dans le texte de Noël lorsque Fatima 

se demande si on a « jamais souhaité la bienvenue en français aux 

immigrants » (BPD 363). Comme Bouraoui, Bosco fait aussi allusion aux 

solitudes canadiennes qui, selon Hugh MacLennan, n’en comptaient que 

deux dans les années 40, mais qui, à présent, en comptent trois : « L’autre 

tiers, ma foi, composé de tous les persécutés de l’Ancien Monde. Je me plais 

à faire partie de ce tiers état (sic) » (BO 58). Cette troisième solitude, 

évoquée par de nombreux écrivains contemporains, dont Bouraoui, Bosco 

et Régine Robin, n’est pas homogène puisqu’elle regroupe effectivement 

les Autochtones et tous les immigrés, peu importe les origines 

individuelles. 

Similairement à L’Autre rivage, le texte de Bosco représente Babel de 

manière négative. Cependant, si dans les poèmes de D’Alfonso on lamente 

surtout la perte du pays et de la langue d’origine due à l’émigration, les 

souffrances évoquées dans le texte éclectique de Bosco sont d’un tout autre 

ordre. Myriam tient Dieu pour responsable de tous les malheurs de la terre. 

Elle affirme que dès l’épisode de Babel, Dieu a abandonné sa création 

humaine et n’a rien fait pour éviter les désastres qui ont provoqué les 

exodes, les génocides, les famines et les autres événements tragiques dans 

le monde. « Dieu s’est détourné. Son châtiment d’indifférence est plus cruel 

aujourd’hui que sa colère d’hier » (BO 11), la colère faisant référence à la 

réaction de Iahvé lors de l’épisode babélien. Myriam elle-même a survécu à 

la Shoah, car sa mère l’a amenée en France où elles ont pris un autre nom et 

ont camouflé leurs origines juives afin d’éviter le sort qu’ont connu tant 

d’autres Juifs en Europe. Outre les horreurs flagrantes qu’a connues 

l’humanité tout au long de l’histoire, Myriam dénonce les injustices 

quotidiennes subies par les minorités et les plus faibles de la société : 

Voici Babel. Une autre Babel. La Babel éternelle d’aujourd’hui. La 

tour la plus haute à ce jour. Édifiée contre les lois de la pesanteur. 

Offensante tour, cherchant à s’élever dans les nuages, loin du sol, 

grâce à des ouvriers de toutes origines et couleurs. Misérables 

attirés par des salaires fabuleux. Eux n’y habiteront pas. Jamais. 

Sitôt terminé le monstrueux gratte-ciel, on les retournera à leurs 

wigwams, huttes, casemates, roulottes. Du nord au sud ils sont 

venus. Non, tous ne parlent pas la même langue ni n’honorent le 

même Dieu. Ils font ce qu’on leur dit. En silence. (BO 10) 

27



Ce passage rappelle les propos de la Tour CN dans le roman de Bouraoui, 

car cette tour aussi a été érigée à l’aide d’ouvriers venus des quatre coins du 

monde ainsi qu’avec des Autochtones qui, ne souffrant pas du vertige, ont 

pu travailler au sommet de la tour presque achevée. Mais ils ont vite été 

oubliés et n’ont pas été reconnus pour leurs efforts et les risques qu’ils ont 

dû prendre dans ce chantier. Le ton adopté dans le texte de Bosco est 

cependant rendu plus tragique par le langage sobre et par une narratrice trop 

affligée par les séquelles de l’exil et de la solitude pour pouvoir en faire le 

deuil. 

Si Myriam reproche à Dieu l’état lamentable dans lequel se trouve le 

monde moderne, Fatima, dans Babel, prise deux, se révolte contre un Iahvé 

qui aurait refusé aux êtres humains le droit de se définir eux-mêmes ou de se 

faire un nom. Constatant que la tour est en effet construite grâce à des 

constructeurs différents, Fatima attribue leur échec à un caprice divin. À la 

suite de ses lectures sur le mythe de Babel, elle résume : 

Le projet de Babel consiste à se rassembler dans une Cité pour « se 

faire un nom ». Ce que j’interprète comme un désir de se définir 

soi-même plutôt que de l’être par une entité supérieure. […] Les 

peuples constructeurs sont à la fois différents et semblables, et leur 

rassemblement est possible, car, littéralement, ils sont parlables 

[…] la fin de l’épisode est amenée par Yahvé qui, voyant les 

hommes ainsi réunis, se dit : “Maintenant, aucun dessein ne sera 

irréalisable pour eux!” Mauvais ça! Alors, tel un Jupiter en christ, il 

sort ses foudres, il confond les langues des hommes et les disperse 

à nouveau. La Tour est fauchée et ainsi, la construction de la Cité 

terrestre, ajournée. (BPD 196) 

Ainsi, Fatima blâme Dieu d’avoir empêché le peuple babélien de se 

définir lui-même de la même manière qu’elle tient pour responsables les 

« méchants zanglais » (BPD 363) de la condition de colonisés des 

Québécois. 

Depuis Babel, c’est sous le signe de la confusion, du désordre et du chaos 

que le monde existe. Les quatre auteurs sont explicites à ce sujet à divers 

degrés : dans Babel-Opéra la « Terre entière est déboussolée » (BO 13) et le 

monde n’est que « dispersion » (BO 85); dans le roman de Bouraoui, « Dieu, 

en Tour Babel, […] fit proclamer la confusion comme style de vie » 

(APTCN 135). Bien que le roman de Noël prône généralement une vision 

positive du symbole de Babel, il n’occulte pas les difficultés que présente 

« le déferlement de ces hordes meurtries vers nos pays dits riches » (BPD 

402). Dans cette même veine, l’œuvre de D’Alfonso souligne le 

déchirement ou, pour emprunter sa métaphore, le divorce que cause 

l’immigration. Malgré la cohabitation des peuples et des langues, la 

situation urbaine est loin d’être utopique : Bosco compare la prolifération 

des gratte-ciel à des « métastases du cancer originel » (BO 10). Ces tours, 

dans le roman de Bouraoui, « envahissent l’atmosphère de par derrière leurs 

28



myriades de cages à poules » (APTCN 51). Et dans le roman de Noël, être 

dans un tel immeuble donne à Fatima le vertige. Les gratte-ciel font 

d’ailleurs allusion à l’urbanisme moderne où tous habitent à proximité les 

uns des autres sans réellement former de communauté, constituant ainsi en 

quelque sorte les avatars de la tour de Babel, où la construction est toujours 

en cours, mais où la communication et la cohérence qui régnaient lors de la 

construction originelle n’existe plus. 

Dans tous les cas, la représentation urbaine reflète la multiplicité et 

l’hétérogénéité, qui ne sont pas toujours faciles à vivre. Comme le souligne 

Pierre Nepveu, il ne faut pas négliger, par idéalisme, « les problèmes 

concrets qu’impliquent » les transformations qui mènent à la 

transculturation, processus essentiel, et en quelque sorte inévitable, dans 

une société où cohabitent divers groupes ethniques (18). Chez Noël, il 

s’agit de la difficulté de préserver le français et d’essayer de réduire l’effet 

de ghettoïsation qui se produit avec l’immigration croissante. La 

ghettoïsation est également évoquée dans le roman de Bouraoui, qui fait 

allusion aussi à la nécessité, pour les immigrants, de réconcilier le passé et le 

présent. Souleyman, le personnage africain dans Ainsi parle la Tour CN, 

« veut régler ses comptes avec son pays d’origine », qui « dans son cœur 

ronge comme un cancer », et avec « son pays d’adoption », qu’il habite 

depuis dix ans, mais où il n’a pu obtenir, malgré son doctorat, qu’un travail à 

temps partiel en tant qu’opérateur d’ascenseur dans la Tour CN (APTCN 

50-51). Celle-ci affirme que « Souleyman sait que la couleur de sa peau est 

son vrai atout, sa carte perdante aussi », faisant allusion à la fois à la 

politique de discrimination positive en place dans certains secteurs au 

Canada et au racisme qui s’insinue malgré tout dans les pratiques 

d’embauche (APTCN 51). De même, le personnage italien, Rocco 

Cacciapuoti, qui a su s’intégrer dans une certaine mesure, étant homme 

d’affaires assez prospère élu à la Chambre des Communes, a compris, en 

adoptant la citoyenneté canadienne, qu’il n’était « plus Italien » mais que 

malgré tout il ne serait « jamais Canadien » (APTCN 226). Une expérience 

semblable est évoquée dans le texte de D’Alfonso : « Je ne suis pas 

nord-américain (sic), même si je travaille sur ce continent. Trop souvent j’ai 

souffert d’être celui qu’on remarque dans une foule » (AR 86). 

Ces fragments pourraient suggérer l’échec du multiculturalisme 

canadien ou québécois; or aucun des textes n’en reste là. En exploitant le 

mythe de Babel comme structure significative, ces textes visent une 

reconsidération de la symbolique de ce mythe. Traditionnellement, le 

mythe de Babel a été interprété comme étant le récit d’une perte tragique — 

perte de la langue unique et de l’homogénéité sociale —, et de là découle la 

notion d’une condamnation divine. Pourtant, il n’y a rien dans le texte 

originel qui appuie cette interprétation. Il serait donc tout à fait possible de 

poser un autre regard sur les actes de Iahvé en proposant qu’il aurait lancé un 

défi à l’humanité, plutôt que de lui infliger une malédiction : apprendre à se 

comprendre en dépit des multiples langues, pour enfin pouvoir construire 

29



une ville et une tour ensemble. Anderson affirme que l’homogénéité 

babélienne ne figurait pas dans les desseins de Dieu : « Diversity is not a 

condemnation. […] First, God’s will for his creation is diversity rather than 

homogeneity » (177). C’est ainsi que Fatima, dans le roman de Noël, voit 

les choses : 

Pour moi, Babel est un symbole positif. Ce n’est pas un cauchemar 

niveleur, mais le rassemblement des différences; un lieu d’asile et 

de tolérance. Ce mythe me rejoint dans mes aspirations les plus 

profondes. Il exprime un désir, légitime, d’autodétermination : 

pouvoir parler et agir librement. Construire, se construire. C’est 

cela, Babel, le Verbe et la Pierre. (BPD 402-03) 

Or bien que Fatima soit ouverte à la pluralité culturelle et qu’elle soit 

prête à prononcer quelques mots à ses voisins dans leur langue maternelle, 

les constructeurs de sa nouvelle Babel doivent avoir une langue commune 

afin d’être parlables, en l’occurrence, le français. Cela suggère qu’il est 

acceptable d’imposer le français à tous, à Montréal et au Québec du moins, 

reléguant les autres langues à leur valeur folklorique et surtout au domaine 

privé, alors que, dans le contexte canadien ou américain, Fatima conteste le 

fait que l’anglais soit la langue commune qui élimine les autres langues. Le 

discours de Fatima est donc contradictoire puisque le français peut être 

imposé aux immigrants sans que cela ne soit une forme de colonisation, 

tandis que la langue anglaise est hégémonique. La question de la langue au 

Québec n’est certes pas facile, comme le fait remarquer Simon Harel : 

Les « parlers » immigrants correspondant à autant de langues 

maternelles, faut-il les taire en raison d’impératifs politiques et 

culturels puisque le Québec dans cette perspective doit exclusivement 

parler français? Ou encore, une alliance conjoncturelle 

peut-elle être établie entre les langues immigrantes et le français, 

pacte de circonstance qui viserait à expulser l’anglais de sa 

citadelle? Faut-il plutôt valoriser une traversée des langues et des 

cultures, car le français, référentiel au faible pouvoir d’acculturation 

en terre nord-américaine, permettrait cette coexistence 

pacifique d’énonciations hétérogènes? On le voit, toutes ces 

interrogations tournent autour d’une problématique où la langue 

est investie d’un pouvoir decohésion etdestructuration. (310-11) 

En fait, la cohabitation des langues à Montréal, qui se reflète d’ailleurs 

dans le texte de Noël, contribuera peut-être, comme le suggère Valérie 

Raoul, au développement d’une langue « bâtarde ou métissée » qui 

deviendra « une lingua franca, le lieu commun d’une communauté mixte » 

(138). 

Le choix de langue n’est pas moins politique pour la Tour CN qui, bien 

qu’« anglaise », raconte son récit en français : « j’aime prendre la parole de 

la minorité officielle » (APTCN 21). On pourrait l’accuser de 

condescendance, ce qu’elle démentirait aussitôt; elle affirme que c’est 

30



simplement « par amour d’autres langues écartées par l’histoire » qu’elle 

opte pour le français. Au contraire, chez D’Alfonso, la langue n’est pas une 

question de choix, car l’exil lui a volé sa langue et lui en a imposé une autre : 

il précise que lorsqu’il écrit « [j]’ai en tête la mémoire d’une langue et 

j’exprime cette mémoire dans une autre langue » (AR 85). Cependant, ces 

traces contribuent en fait au processus de transculturation et D’Alfonso en 

est conscient lorsqu’il affirme : « j’offre de nouvelles références, une autre 

vision de la vie d’ici et d’ailleurs. Je suis une autre voix qui vient par une 

autre voie » (AR 95). 

Notons par ailleurs que la question de la langue n’est pas simplement un 

thème récurrent dans les quatre textes; le plurilinguisme s’y inscrit 

explicitement par l’entremise de mots, de phrases ou d’expressions en 

d’autres langues intégrés au français. Par exemple, dans Babel, prise deux, 

Fatima emploie de nombreuses expressions anglaises dans son journal et 

elle transcrit aussi certaines expressions espagnoles qu’utilise Amélia. 

Nous avons déjà signalé les langues dans lesquelles est composé le poème 

« Babel » dans le recueil de D’Alfonso, mais il est aussi important de 

souligner que l’italien, langue maternelle du poète, se manifeste dans 

plusieurs autres poèmes. Comme le remarque Simon, le plurilinguisme qui 

se manifeste dans le roman de la ville québécois des années 80 fait résonner 

« le désordre et la confusion de la ville cosmopolite; elles [les voix] disent la 

multiplicité des codes qui circulent dans l’espace public et les tensions qui 

se créent quand ils entrent en contact » (Trafic 131). Le plurilinguisme dans 

ces textes-ci contribue à développer davantage la problématique 

babélienne en la déployant non seulement au niveau thématique, mais 

également au niveau du code. 

Pour revenir à la pluralité canadienne et québécoise, aucun des textes ne 

nie le caractère pluriel du pays. En effet, les textes de Noël, de Bosco et de 

Bouraoui font appel au mythe de Babel afin de mettre en scène le processus 

de construction qui s’opère dans l’évolution de la culture et de la nation. 

Dans Babel, prise deux, Fatima se rend compte que l’avenir du Québec 

dépend des immigrants qu’elle implore de prendre la relève dans la 

construction du pays, car les « filles et fils de paysans français » ne suffisent 

plus à la tâche (BPD 363). Malgré le ton plutôt pessimiste et désespéré de 

Babel-Opéra, le texte se clôt avec un appel rempli d’espoir à reconstruire 

une Babel tolérante et généreuse : « D’édifier une Babel enfin fraternelle où 

chacun a le droit de vivre selon les lois de son cœur, toutes origines 

confondues » (BO 93). Et dans le roman de Bouraoui, un projet commun 

pourrait permettre un nouveau commencement d’une société plus juste. Un 

des personnages autochtones propose en effet que l’on « oublie les 

culpabilités, les remords, les injustices, les atrocités… Bâtissons ensemble 

des tours de soleil accessibles à tous » (APTCN 345). Il est intéressant de 

noter, par ailleurs, que dans les textes de Bosco et de Noël, il est question, 

comme chez Bouraoui, du rôle des Autochtones dans le processus de 

transculturation. 

31



Si l’appel à rebâtir Babel, dans le roman de Noël, fait allusion à 

l’émancipation politique du Québec, c’est tout à fait le contraire dans Ainsi 

parle la Tour CN de Bouraoui, où la narratrice, imposante par sa hauteur, 

adopte une vision fédéraliste d’un Canada uni : bien qu’elle soit 

« anglaise », elle se « narre en français […] pour convaincre le Québec de 

rester dans le giron de notre mère canadienne » (APTCN 21). Des opinions 

politiques irréconciliables, peut-être, mais en fait, la conception du 

nationalisme, québécois ou canadien, est secondaire puisque la question du 

transculturalisme qui nous préoccupe constitue en fait une remise en 

question du concept de nation. Or qu’il s’agisse d’un Québec indépendant 

ou d’un Canada avec ses dix provinces et trois territoires, l’appel à 

construire, et pas n’importe quoi, mais une tour, est une métaphore 

appropriée pour mettre en lumière le processus de transculturation d’où 

découle une certaine redéfinition de la nation. Si, selon Nepveu, la culture 

c’est « l’expérience même de la rupture et de l’indétermination : elle n’est 

pas un lien, elle est un processus infini, inachevable, de liaisons à même une 

série tout aussi infinie de ruptures » (40), la tour de Babel, qui demeure 

inachevée à tout jamais et marque l’avènement des langues donnant éventuellement 

naissance aux cultures, en est un symbole fort approprié. 

Ainsi, toujours selon Nepveu, « toute culture se définit d’abord par sa 

capacité d’auto-altération, de dépaysement, de migration » (19). Le mythe 

de Babel se prête à symboliser les cultures québécoise et canadienne 

puisqu’il décrit justement la volonté d’un peuple de se définir et de se 

transformer en prenant la résolution de construire une ville et une tour. 

L’inscription du mythe de Babel dans les textes étudiés souligne la 

représentation de sociétés traversant des périodes de remises en question 

identitaires, de redéfinitions collectives et de contestations quant à la valeur 

intrinsèque de la notion d’homogénéité linguistique et culturelle. Ce n’est 

pas une coïncidence, non plus, si des auteurs canadiens et québécois — et 

d’origines variées — ont recours au mythe de Babel afin d’évoquer la 

problématique de la cohabitation de langues et de cultures ainsi que 

l’éventuelle hybridité qui en résulte, puisque cela fait partie de leur 

quotidien. 

Comme le remarquent Moisan et Hildebrand, une des conséquences de 

l’écriture migrante illustre clairement la notion de la culture comme étant 

« en constante mutation » (326) et, par extension, ces textes qui tentent de 

reconstruire une tour de Babel soulignent en fait la mutabilité de la culture, 

avec les tensions que cela produit. En outre, si ces textes sont eux-mêmes 

issus de cette évolution ou mutabilité, ils contribuent également à la prise de 

conscience croissante que culture et identité ne sont effectivement ni 

stables ni inertes. Le mythe de Babel est un symbole particulièrement apte à 

souligner le processus constamment en évolution de la culture car, comme 

le constate Willis Barnstone, après la destruction de Babel, « the deity 

implicitly challenged us to look up again and rebuild the tower of another 

32



Babel. […] With the destruction of Babel, God gave us not only tongues and 

their anxiety but a knowledge of mutability » (3-4). Bien que nous n’ayons 

pu examiner tous les éléments reliés à Babel dans ces quatre textes, force est 

de constater qu’ils répondent tous à cet appel en érigeant des tours (des tours 

littéraires), chacun à sa manière, dans et grâce à la diversité linguistique et 

culturelle. Donc, la confusion et le chaos existent, certes, à divers degrés, 

mais ne sont pas nécessairement négatifs; il est temps de voir Babel 

autrement, c’est-à-dire en tant que lieu où les possibilités de construction, 

de reconstruction, de rénovation et d’innovation sont infinies. Ainsi, pour 

finir, Paul Zumthor, lui-même un écrivain migrant du Québec, déclare que 

« nous ne sommes pas au terme de Babel. Nous en sommes au commencement. 

À chaque instant de l’histoire on en est au commencement, devant le 

chantier ouvert, les fosses argileuses qui promettent la brique, les puits de 

naphte offrant leur bitume, et l’architecture en train d’esquisser les plans » 

(213). 

Notes 

1. Robert Kroetsch, Labyrinths of Voice, cité dans Lola Lemire Tostevin, Kaki, 

traduction de Robert Dickson, Sudbury : Prise de Parole, 1997, p. 149. 

2. Les trois autres périodes qu’ils identifient sont l’uniculturel, le pluriculturel et 

l’interculturel. 

3. Nous avons étudié les rapports entre les cultures migrantes et autochtones dans un 

article intitulé, « Les deux “Autres” : la figure de l’Autochtone dans l’écriture 

migrante », qui paraîtra sous peu dans le numéro 55 d’Études canadiennes. 

4. Mircea Eliade définit le mythe en tant qu’ « histoire sacrée; il relate un événement 

qui a eu lieu dans le temps primordial, le temps fabuleux des “commencements” 

». Mircea Eliade. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard, 1963, 15. 

5. Voir à ce sujet Hubert Bost, Babel : du texte au symbole, Genève : Labor et Fides, 

1985, p. 157-66. 

6. Les références à ces textes se trouveront entre parenthèses à la suite des citations 

et les textes seront identifiés par les sigles suivants : BO pour Babel-Opéra, BPD 

pour Babel, prise deux, APTCN pour Ainsi parle la Tour CN, et AR pour L’Autre 

rivage. 

7. Au sujet de la division entre les sexes dans Babel, prise deux, voir la discussion de 

Valérie Raoul dans « Immigration from a Québécois Perspective : Francine 

Noël’s Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique and Monique 

Proulx’s Les aurores montréales »inTextualizing the Immmigrant Experience in 

Contemporary Quebec, ed. Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx. Westport, 

Connecticut: Praeger, 2004, p. 162. 

8. Notons d’ailleurs que le poème “Babel” ne subit aucune modification entre la 

version qui paraît dans l’édition anglaise de ce recueil, The Other Shore, et celle 

dans l’édition française. 

Ouvrages cités 

Anderson, Bernard W. « The Tower of Babel: Unity and Diversity in God’s Creation. » 

From Creation to New Creation. Minneapolis : Fortress, 1994. 165-178. 

Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven : 

Yale University Press, 1993. 

33



Bosco, Monique. Babel-Opéra. Montréal : Trois, 1989. 

Bouraoui, Hédi. Ainsi parle la Tour CN. Vanier, Ontario : L’Interligne, 1999. 

_____. « La troisième solitude » Métamorphoses d’une utopie. (sous la direction) 

Jean-Michel Lacroix et Fulvio Caccia. Paris : Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle / 

Éditions Triptyque : 1992. 175-183. 

D’Alfonso, Antonio. L’Autre rivage. 1987. Montréal : Noroît, 1999. 

Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du Divers. Paris : Gallimard, 1996. 

Harel, Simon. Le Voleur de parcours : Identité et cosmopolitisme dans la littérature 

québécoise contemporaine. Montréal : XYZ, 1999. (Première édition 1989) 

Lequin, Lucie. « L’épreuve de l’exil et la traversée des frontières : Des voix de 

femmes » Québec Studies 14 (printemps-été 1992) : 31-39. 

Moisant, Clément et Renate Hildebrand. Ces étrangers du dedans : une histoire de 

l’écriture migrante au Québec (1937 – 1997). Montréal : Nota Bene, 2001. 

Nepveu, Pierre. « Qu’est-ce que la transculture? » Paragraphes 2 (1989) : 15-31. 

Noël, Francine. Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique. Montréal : 

VLB, 1990. 

Raoul, Valérie. « Le “lieu commun” à redéfinir dans “Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons 

tous découvert l’Amérique” de Francine Noël : la ville, le verbe et le vertige » 

Cultural Identities in Canadian Literature / Identités culturelles dans la 

littérature canadienne. (s. la dir.) Bénédicte Mauguière. New York : Peter Lang, 

1998. 131-141. 

Robin, Régine. « À propos de la notion kafkaïenne de “littérature mineure” : quelques 

questions posées à la littérature québécoise », Paragraphes 2 (1989) : 5-14. 

Simon, Sherry. Hybridité culturelle. Montréal : L’île de la tortue, 1999. 

_____. Le Trafic des langues : traduction et culture dans la littérature québécoise. 

Montréal : Boréal, 1994. 

Vigeant, Louise. « Les dessous des préfixes… » Jeu 72 (septembre 1994) : 39-48. 

Zumthor, Paul. Babel ou l’inachèvement. Paris : Seuil, 1997. 

34

Jane Koustas 

Abstract 

Robert Lepage’s Language/Dragons’ Trilogy 

Recognized as a major player on the international theatre scene, Quebec 

dramatist, cineaste, actor, author and director, Robert Lepage stages the 

mixing, colliding and interference of cultures through international and 

transcultural theatre that works on the interface of languages and cultures. 

This article considers his representation of globalization, multiculturalism 

and transculturalism in The Dragons’ Trilogy/ La Trilogie des dragons. First 

staged in Quebec in 1985, the spectacle toured for seven years in over thirty 

cities across the world. The revival of the play for the 2003 Festival des 

Amériques in Montreal was heralded as a major theatrical event that 

provided an opportunity to consider the evolution of Quebec theatre and 

society using La Trilogie as a reference point. The author considers the 

differences between earlier and recent productions and focuses on the 

production’s enduring power and relevance in the current climate of 

globalization. 

Résumé 

Robert Lepage, dramaturge, cinéaste, comédien et metteur en scène 

québécois s’est vu mériter une place d’honneur sur la scène internationale du 

théâtre grâce à des spectacles à grand succès qui mettent en scène la 

mondialisation, le multiculturalisme et le transculturalisme. Dans le présent 

article, nous considérons l’importance du spectacle La Trilogie des dragons/ 

The Dragons’ Trilogy dans l’œuvre de Lepage. Montée pour la première fois 

au Québec en 1985, la production a fait une tournée internationale de sept 

ans dans plus de trente villes autour du monde. Lors de la reprise à Montréal 

en 2003 dans le cadre du Festival des Amériques, on a reconnu l’importance 

du spectacle dans l’histoire du théâtre québécois en l’identifiant comme un 

point de repère dans l’évolution de ce théâtre ainsi que dans celle de la 

société québécoise. Nous examinons les différences entre les premières et 

plus récentes versions en signalant la pertinence et la force toujours actuelles 

de cette production surtout dans le contexte de la mondialisation. 

In his 2001 study, The Grammars of Creation, translation scholar and 

philosopher George Steiner reflects on the changing role of language in a 

globalized world. He notes: 

Anthropology and ethno-linguistics are arguing for the probable 

existence not only of a smaller number of language nodes from 

which all subsequent tongues derive but for the possibility of one 


30, 2004



Ur-Sprache, that primal speech which positivist linguistics and 

cultural history had rejected as fantasm. Ur, this untranslatable 

German prefix connoting the immensities of retrospection and the 

location of an absolute “first” or “prime,” is becoming the code 

word, the signature-tune in our new manuals. (14) 

Robert Lepage, recently recognized in 2001 as one of the “world leaders 

of creative genius” (Harbourfront Centre), has also discussed the 

possibility of an international language that spans traditional linguistic and 

cultural boundaries. He states: 

I’ve become interested in language as a universal thing. You know 

that they discovered a sort of proto-European language? It is made 

up of 22 words that feature in absolutely every language in the 

world from English to Japanese […]. It gives me the hope that 

everyone can keep their own culture and speak their own language, 

but we’ll one day have a secondary language. (Whitely 1999) 

While Steiner’s idea of Ur-Sprache is clearly founded in the 

philosophical, historical and linguistic origins of language, Lepage’s 

secondary language consists of already existing words grouped together 

because of globalization, the Web society and connected intelligence. 

Indeed, as this paper will argue, the notion of a language or, indeed, 

languages that transgress or transcend traditional linguistic, cultural and 

geographical boundaries is central to Lepage’s work. He has won 

worldwide recognition through his exploration of border crossings, 

transnational identities, and spaces beyond and between geographical 

limits, cultural identity and translation. I have argued elsewhere1 that 

Lepage takes his audience on a transcultural journey and invites it to 

experience the in-between space, that of the hourglass described by Patrice 

Pavis (1990) in his discussion of multicultural theatre, and I will attempt 

here to place this in the context of “théâtre à l’heure de la globalisation” 

(Bélair 2002). 

Lepage has justifiably earned the reputation of “une sorte de globetrotter 

international” (Thébaud 1999). Nonetheless, he is an ardent Quebec 

nationalist who continues to maintain his headquarters in Quebec City, his 

hometown, and states unreservedly, “Quebec is a closed, incestuous society 

that I am proud to be a part of” (Grescoe 2001, 132). However, Lepage and 

his productions travel the world earning for their creator recognition as “a 

renaissance man—author, director, designer, media-mixing artist and actor 

[…] one of the major creative forces in the world” (Harbourfront Centre 

2001). While all of Lepage’s multi, intercultural and linguistic productions 

could be accurately described as “théâtre sans frontières” (Donohoe and 

Koustas 2000), La Trilogie des dragons,orThe Dragons’Trilogy, featured 

in the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques May 2003 in Montreal and one of 

Lepage’s first and greatest successes, is of particular interest. Through its 

deliberate attempt to stage the mixing, colliding and interference of 

36


cultures, it illustrates the notion of glocalization, the internanimation of the 

local and global as described by Roland Robertson (1992) as well as that of 

deterritorialization, discussed, for example, by John Thomlinson (1999). In 

his Globalization and Culture, Thomlinson defines the term as “the loss of 

the ‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social territories” and 

identifies it as the “cultural condition of globalization” (qtd. in Varsava 

2002, 704) to which, I will argue, language is also central. 

Recognized as “un spectacle envoûtant” (Bennett 1985) when it first 

opened in Quebec City in the fall of 1985, and heralded as “imagistic theatre 

at its best” (Crew 1988) when it played in Toronto for a second time in 1988, 

The Dragons’ Trilogy was declared a “masterpiece” by the The Times of 

London, praised for its “dazzling originality” and “strong universal appeal” 

by the Irish Times and described as “exhilarating” by the New York Times 

(qtd. in Manguel 1989, 34). In 1989, “les dragons enflamment le tout-Paris” 

(Bury 1989, 11). The production toured for seven years in over 30 cities. 

Influential British theatre critic Irving Wadle said the show “triumphantly 

demolishes the idea of Canada’s cultural dependence on Europe and the 

United States” (qtd. in Whiting 2003). It is by far the most widely travelled, 

frequently produced and most studied of Lepage’s works. An entire issue of 

Jeu was devoted to the play in 1987. While the production’s initial success 

in Canada could perhaps be partially attributed to the public’s fascination 

with “imagistic theatre at its best” (Crew 1988) as well the play’s relevance 

during the heady times of the Canadian multicultural debate, its 

international and lasting appeal is of particular interest and is central to the 

present study. The Trilogy, subtitled “the Orient revisited,” “returned 

triumphant” (Whiting 2003) as “the cornerstone” for the 2003 Festival de 

Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal. The Montreal performance alone 

generated no less than 30 reviews including pieces in Le Monde and 

Swedish and German newspapers. 

In an article in which she discusses the “remake” of the production, 

Marie Gignac, one of the original performers, suggests that The Dragons’ 

Trilogy was also the cornerstone of the company. She states: 

La Trilogie a longtemps été un spectacle référence pour nous. 

C’est là qu’on a posé les bases de notre langage artistique. Toutes 

les thématiques que nous abordons, les univers, comme l’Orient, la 

quête d’identité, personnelle et collective, le rapport à l’autre, la 

quête de l’autre, le frottement avec les autres cultures, La Trilogie 

contenait tout ça … . (qtd. in Lessard 2003) 

Jean-Louis Perrier of Le Monde affirms that Lepage himself recognized 

it as a seminal work (2003, 32). Furthermore, it was a turning point in 

Quebec theatre in general. In an article poignantly entitled “Je me 

souviens,” Voir critic Luc Boulanger reflects on the magical première 

performance and on the production’s lasting impact. Lepage had 

discovered a new way to do and view theatre. Boulanger observes: 

37



Un choc théâtral. Un moment de grâce. Un pur ravissement. Un 

envoûtement. Les superlatifs manquent. Tous ceux qui, comme 

moi, en juin 1987, ont vu dans le hangar humide et désaffecté du 

Vieux-Port de Montréal la première mondiale de l’intégrale de La 

Trilogie des dragons en gardent un souvenir impérissable. […] Le 

spectacle du Théâtre Repère est emblématique de l’ouverture sur 

le monde de la dramaturgie québécoise. […] Cette génération de 

créateurs voulait en finir avec la québécitude pour se pencher sur 

Tchekhov et Beckett, l’Allemagne et le Liban, Fassbinder et 

Charles Manson. En montant un spectacle trilingue racontant la 

vie de trois générations de personnages dans les Chinatowns de 

Québec, Toronto et Vancouver, Robert Lepage sortait des cuisines 

brunes et des tavernes enfumées pour voyager de par le monde. 

Marie-Hélène Falcon, the organizer of the Festival de Théâtre des 

Amériques identifies The Dragons’ Trilogy as an “œuvre qui a changé la 

face du théâtre au Québec” (St Hilaire “Acte de transmission”). Its 

importance was such that its revival was seen as an opportunity to consider 

the evolution of Quebec theatre and society using La Trilogie as a reference 

point. In “Redécouvrir Lepage,” Josée Chaboillez notes: 

La Trilogie des dragons permet également de constater le chemin 

parcouru, non seulement artistiquement, mais socialement et 

collectivement. En effet, jamais autant qu’aujourd’hui l’Asie et 

l’Orient tout entier, n’aura été si accessible et si convoité par les 

Occidentaux. L’étranger, le Chinois du Québec des années 20 et 

même son fils, le Torontois Mr. Lee des années 50, s’ils gardent 

leur spécificité et même leur mystère, n’ont jamais été aussi 

proches de nous. En refaisant le voyage des dragons vert, rouge et 

blanc, c’est aussi le trajet des 16dernières années qui sedessine. 

With the exception of “The White Dragon,” the production remained 

much the same though an entirely new cast, and notably the presence of two 

non-Québécois actors, added a new dimension. Having “triumphed” in 

Montreal, the production continued to draw rave reviews in Limoges, 

Berlin, Zagreb and Madrid and returned to Quebec in December 2003. 

Monique Giguère of Le Soleil sums up the tour as follows: 

Le succès a un bail avec Robert Lepage. En 25 ans de carrière au 

théâtre, une pluie d’honneurs s’est abattue sur l’auteur-acteurmetteur 

en scène-dramaturge-cinéaste. Sacré prophète en son 

pays, Robert Lepage promène un nom mythique sur les scènes du 

monde entier. Ses œuvres ne vieillissent pas. Créée pour la 

première fois en 1985, La Trilogie des dragons poursuit depuis 18 

ans sa fabuleuse odyssée aux quatre coins du globe. (2003, B3) 

As with all Lepage productions, The Dragons’ Trilogy drew its 

inspiration from a concrete visual source—in this case, a parking lot in 

Quebec City. The present company, Ex Machina, was first called Théâtre 

38


Repère, Repère an abbreviation for Ressources, Partition, Evaluation and 

Représentation. As Lepage explains when referring tothe first production: 

Once you find that first resource, that first image, everything falls 

into place. Take The Dragons’ Trilogy. The parking lot gave us 

three levels: if you scrape the surface, you find things of everyday 

life, of today; if you dig deeper, you find the past, mysterious 

objects found in the earth; and finally, if you keep on digging, 

you’ll reach China. Chinese philosophy is essentially Taoist 

philosophy, a belief in the harmonious interaction of all things in 

the universe. Well, there are three important Chinatowns in 

Canada, Vancouver, Quebec City, and Toronto. That gave us the 

west, the centre, and the east. The parking lot became a sort of toy 

model for the universe. (Manguel 1989, 37) 

Originally a trilingual (English, French and Chinese) and, with the 

addition of Japanese, now a quadrilingual production, The Dragons’ 

Trilogy was billed as a “lyrical epic about the meeting of cultures” (Ex 

Machina). According to Dominique Lachance (2003), the audience is 

confronted with five languages, “de grands pans en anglais, d’autres en 

québécois, certains en français, plusieurs en chinois et quelques-uns en 

japonais.” The production takes the audience on a cultural and linguistic 

voyage that spans 75 years and three cities: Quebec, Toronto and 

Vancouver. Jason Whiting, The Globe and Mail theatre critic, describes the 

production as follows: 

Divided into three acts running two hours apiece, The Dragons’ 

Trilogy follows the lives of two French girls, close friends in 

Depression Era Quebec, and charts what occurs when their lives 

are swept apart across three different decades and cities. Rounded 

out by six other actors who play multiple roles, The Dragons’ 

Trilogy is a work of powerful symbolism and imagery centring on 

the themes of war, exile and cultural identity. 

As in most of his productions, Lepage bypasses traditional target versus 

source text models: there is neither a translation nor original version nor 

even an official script or text. The actors switch back and forth among 

languages as they “decide for themselves what they should say” and 

“improvise their own text” (McAlpine 1996, 139). The cultural and 

linguistic differences central to the production are exploited and exploded. 

As Marta Dvorak notes, “ce sont les processus d’osmose culturelle que R. 

Lepage met en scène, relevant le défi qui consiste à faire comprendre ses 

pièces dans le monde entier par des publics unilingues sans avoir recours à 

la traduction” (1996, 57). 

The three plays, acts or stories entitled “The Green Dragon,” “The Red 

Dragon” and “The White Dragon,” named after the sets of counters in 

Mah-Jong, intertwine, overlap and echo each other just as the languages 

collide and combine. James Campbell states: 

39



The three plays […] encompass a sequence of stories, each one 

emerging from the last, one echoing another, picking up symbols 

and emblems and metamorphosing them […] (1991, 20). 

The first part (1910-35), “The Green Dragon,” symbolizing water and 

traditionally corresponding to spring and birth, takes place in Quebec City. 

Jeanne and Françoise, twelve-year-old cousins and close friends, are 

fascinated and terrified by nearby Chinatown and particularly by the 

laundryman, Mr. Wong. The arrival of William Crawford, a British shoe 

salesman who grew up in Hong Kong, changes their lives dramatically. 

Crawford teaches Mr. Wong to gamble and, in exchange, is introduced to 

opium. Later, Jeanne, sixteen and pregnant by her first love, is given to 

Wong as payment for a gambling debt incurred by her alcoholic father. She 

is then forcibly married to Wong’s son, Lee. 

“The Red Dragon” (1935-50), symbolizing earth and associated with 

summer and fire, finds Jeanne in Toronto where she works in Crawford’s 

shoe store and lives with Lee and his two aunts. Her daughter, Stella, now 

five, contracts meningitis. Jeanne is reunited with Françoise when the latter 

travels to Camp Borden as part of the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. 

Later, Françoise fulfills her dream of travelling to England. Having learned 

she has cancer, Jeanne entrusts Stella to the care of Sister Marie-de-la Grâce 

and the Hôpital St. Michel Archange in Quebec City against Lee’s wishes. 

Jeanne subsequently commits suicide. Meanwhile, Yukali, the daughter of 

a geisha who was killed in Hiroshima and of an American military officer, 

symbolically buries her mother twenty years after the bombing. 

In the “The White Dragon” (1960-90), the symbol of air and autumn, 

Pierre, Jeanne’s son, now established in Vancouver, meets Yukali in his art 

gallery. In the earlier version, Crawford, returning to Hong Kong, perishes 

when his plane plunges into the ocean and Stella dies as a result of 

questionable medical care. In the more recent productions, Pierre meets 

Crawford in Vancouver where the latter is starring in a film on geriatric 

junkies in Toronto. 2 Crawford commits suicide by immolation as images of 

his childhood in Hong Kong flash before his eyes. In addition to balancing 

the first and final acts, Crawford’s return allows for greater development of 

this character: he no longer appears as the token Englishman. Pierre returns 

momentarily to Quebec to console his mother, Françoise, who was Stella’s 

godmother, and to announce his decision to travel to China. The final scene 

finds Pierre and Françoise in the parking lot to catch a glimpse of Halley’s 

comet. 

Reducing a six-hour play to a scanty plot summary hardly does justice to 

a production that relies heavily upon the many languages of theatre of 

which dialogue is only one. As Alberto Manguel notes: 

What unfolds on this sandy stage over the next few hours […] is the 

history of the Chinese as played out in Canada’s three major 

40


Chinatowns: Quebec City in the thirties, Toronto in the forties, and 

Vancouver today. But the subject matters less than the execution. 

Sight, sound, dance, mime and music, as well as dialogue in 

French, English, Chinese and Japanese blend in a spectacle that 

engages innumerable senses and skills. (1989, 34) 

The production is staged in a sort of giant sandbox that is used initially as 

a parking lot. The transformation of the parking lot into three Chinatowns, a 

“sort of toy model for the universe” (Lepage qtd. in Manguel 1989, 37), 

relies heavily, as the following programme description suggests, on the 

intermingling, interference and intersection of cultures, personal and 

collective histories, journeys, prejudices, symbols and philosophies as well 

as languages. 

From a Quebec City Chinatown (1910) to the parking lot it has 

become today, from the kitsch China clichés to the great Oriental 

philosophies, the protagonists take a long journey, like a network 

of roads meeting and cutting themselves, meeting again, passing 

each other, coinciding or simply running parallel. Going west 

(from Quebec to Toronto, then to Vancouver), the characters head 

towards this Orient they will reach nowhere but in themselves, an 

Orient made of their own fears and of their dreams. … a lost 

paradise that could probably mean the meeting of their own 

mortality. (Ex Machina) 

Like many trips, Jeanne’s, Françoise’s and Pierre’s journeys, both into 

their past and themselves, involve language. French, English, Chinese and 

Japanese are spoken simultaneously, sequentially or in combination. In 

several scenes, notably the first one, the audience hears the same lines 

spoken in Chinese, as well as in either French or English. Deliberately 

heavy accents also suggest the underlying presence of another language. 

Hence, the Chinese laundry owner’s line, “The store is burn,” is understood 

by the English shoe salesman as “A star is born” suggesting confusion not 

only of languages but also, ironically, of cultural landmarks. Actress Marie 

Michaud explains, “For example, simple linguistic confusion between ‘the 

store is burned’understood as ‘a star is born’points to one of the themes of 

the Trilogy: the desirability of an end to the inevitable clash of commerce 

between nations, societies and a celestial unity” (qtd. in Mark Taper Forum 

1990, 8). Furthermore, there is neither an original nor a target language 

version of the play nor, for the most part, any simultaneous translation 

during the production. Experiencing several cultures and languages 

simultaneously, the audience must remain on the interface rather than on 

either side of the source/target linguistic or cultural divide. Lepage 

bypasses or deforms the filter of translation thus destabilizing traditional 

notions of identity and translation: his work, wherever it is produced, is not 

Quebec theatre in translation but international and transcultural theatre that 

works on the interface and depends on the interference of languages and 

cultures. According to Sherry Simon, Lepage’s productions “challenge the 

41



idea of translation as transmission, to replace it with a concept of 

translational culture” (Simon 2000, 215). Indeed, his theatre owes its 

international success to its refusal to identify with any one culture. As 

Stephen Godfrey notes, Lepage seems to have a “God’s eye view of the 

world” (1990, D4). Sherry Simon observes: 

C’est dans l’espace qui sépare les langues que s’expriment les 

tensions de l’identité culturelle, les pressions centrifuges d’éclatement 

et centripètes d’enfermement. En même temps, ce caractère 

plurilingue place le spectacle dans le circuit international des 

échanges culturels. (1994, 156-57) 

As Jeanne Bovet suggests, Lepage’s intention is not to transport the 

audience to another culture where it is subsequently made to feel 

comfortably at home. Instead, he invites the audience to experience both the 

transposition as well as the confusion that frequently accompanies 

experiencing a new or different language or culture. Bovet states: 

La parole a en fait subi exactement le même sort que les langues 

scéniques paraverbaux, à savoir que c’est sa dimension d’objet 

intangible, plutôt que sa dimension référentielle, qui est mise en 

évidence par les expérimentateurs québécois actuels. En d’autres 

mots : la parole n’est plus exploitée pour son traditionnel pouvoir 

dénotif mais aussi, et quelquefois même exclusivement, pour ses 

effets connotifs. (1991, 2) 

Instead of a text “dénotif et politisé,” Lepage proposes language that is 

“connotif et poétisable” (Bovet 1991, 1), hence the decision not to translate: 

it is frequently the incomprehensibility of the spoken words, their sounds, 

their disorienting effect on the audience and their determining role in a 

power relationship that motivates the production. James Campbell noted 

after opening night of the London production, “Substantial parts of The 

Dragons’ Trilogy are in French, and a tiny amount in Chinese but it is 

doubtful that any monoglot in the first night audience felt left in the dark” 

(1991, 20). Furthermore, the inaccessibility of language forces the 

spectator to rely on the other languages of theatre that Lepage uses so 

ingeniously. Simon observes: 

Les représentations transnationales de Lepage proposent une 

solution originale à l’éternel problème de la mobilité de l’œuvre 

d’art en particulier de celle faite de mots. Misant sur la primauté du 

visuel, intégrant une pluralité de langages, les performances de 

Lepage ne poseront pas les mêmes dilemmes de traduction que des 

productions où le texte s’imposent dans sa densité. (1994, 164) 

Similarly, Paul Thompson, former director of Montreal’s National 

Theatre School notes, “It is his picture-making ability that allows his plays 

to travel so well internationally. His work transcends the limitations of 

language” (qtd. in Bemrose 1998, 53). Indeed, as Hébert and Perelli-Contos 

illustrate, it is in his capacity as a “faiseur d’images” (2001, 59) that Lepage 

42


transcends linguistic boundaries. It is a theatre of non-translation, in the 

sense of target and original text, and of cultural non-identity in that it is 

transnational and “multi-identitaire.” 

However, it is important to note that multi or plurilingualism in Lepage’s 

theatre is not an arbitrary combination of disparate languages, a mere nod to 

Canada or Quebec’s multilingual, multicultural status nor a simple political 

statement about the status of French and francophones in a multi or 

plurilingual nation. It is, rather, as Patrice Pavis argues for the case of Peter 

Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Eugenio Barba, a careful and deliberate 

sorting of signs and ideas comparable to the controlled passage of grains of 

sands in an hourglass. Pavis qualifies this as intercultural theatre that 

requires spectators to position themselves at the interface, in the between 

zone, not in an effort to become the Other but, rather, to appreciate the 

interaction between the familiar and the foreign or, indeed, in the case of 

Lepage, between two or more “foreign” cultural signs, histories and 

languages. Pavis states, “Pour comprendre la culture étrangère source, le 

spectateur ne doit pas se transplanter en elle, mais se situer par rapport à elle, 

assumer la distance temporelle, spatiale, comportementale entre les deux” 

(1990, 217). Important as well in Lepage’s work is, as Jeanne Bovet 

explains, the exploration of the power of language as a sound, as a 

determinant in the dynamics of relationships (who speaks what language 

when and to whom), and of personal identity: 

Nous avons découvert que les passages plurilingues n’étaient ni de 

simples reflets de la réalité cosmopolite actuelle, ni de pures expérimentations 

sonores, mais l’expression sonorisée d’une idéologie 

humaine authentique à laquelle aspirent les personnages. 

1. L’acceptation de soi, figurée par l’importance de la langue 

identité; 

2. Le nécessaire évincement de la langue preuve audible des 

décalages culturels au profit des langues sensoriels du corps et de 

l’art, modes d’échanges universels. (1991, 2) 

It is important to note, however, that both the model and the multicultural 

theatre described by Pavis are not without their critics. Just as Rustom 

Bharucha attacks Peter Brook’s and others’ appropriation of Eastern 

theatre, describing it as a “continuation of colonialism, a further 

exploitation of others” (1993, 14), Jennifer Harvie, in an article 

significantly entitled “Transnationalism, Orientalism and Cultural 

Tourism: La Trilogie des dragons and The Seven Streams of the River Ota,” 

denounces Lepage’s use of the East as “a vehicle for Western fantasies, 

denying the East’s own autonomy and self-determination” (2000, 123). It is 

interesting to note that Pavis praises Brook, to whom Lepage is frequently 

compared. Pavis admires “his” Mahabharata, noting Brook’s intention to 

“bring India and its culture closer to the Western audience, to produce signs 

that facilitate the identification of reality that is familiar to the audience” 

43



while still preserving “Indian rootedness” (1990, 192). Bharucha, however, 

interprets this production as an “appropriation and reordering of 

non-Western material within an orientalist framework or thought and 

action, which has been specifically designed for the international market” 

(1993, 68). Similarly, Harvie accuses Lepage of adopting a “tourist gaze” in 

a production that “engage[s] Orientalist East/West binary constructions 

that are probably disruptive” (2000, 111). Simon, however, interprets the 

interaction between East and West very differently, suggesting that the 

relationship is not one of permanent dominance and conflict but resembles 

instead an evolving landscape like the shifting sands in the parking lot. She 

notes, “East and west are not, however, two different places, two separate 

realities, but pieces in an ever-moving and changing configuration of 

identities” (2000, 220). Furthermore, as the programme notes quoted above 

suggest, Lepage is keenly aware of the “kitsch China clichés” he is staging. 

Rather than promoting them, he seeks to expose, exploit and even explode 

them. As Ray Conlogue observes: 

Cultural values range from sentimentalized kitsch to profound 

philosophical differences, an idea seen in a delicate and 

extraordinary scene where old Wong remembers China. Blinds are 

drawn in the parking lot hut and shadow puppets of a sailing junk 

and a house are seen by candlelight. The images are kitsch— 

Chinese junk, a house like a pagoda—but they are real to Wong, 

and they are fading. In the end, he burns the paper junk and the 

paper pagoda (1986, D9). 

The 2003 version addresses, though perhaps does not entirely resolve, 

this problem by introducing non-Québécois actors of “authentic” origin: 

Crawford is played by Tony Guilfoyle, a Brit, and Yukali by Emily Shelton, 

of Japanese origin. Karen Fricker suggests, however, that this merely 

highlights the issue. She notes: 

The point of contention here has always been to what extent the 

naivete and objectification that central characters Jeanne and 

Françoise initially exhibit toward both the Chinese and English 

emigrants to their community is actually endorsed by the 

production itself. The view of outside cultures presented is initially 

built from a limited group of images and stereotypical behaviours: 

mah jong, tai chi; the stooped opium-smoking, gambling China 

man; the efficient but prissy Brit; the exquisite geisha. There is 

definite progress indicated, however, toward a more rounded and 

complex vision of the non-Québécois characters, underlined here 

by what appears to be conscious (and sometimes overbearing) 

overacting of the national clichés early on. In this context, the 

casting of one English and two [sic] Asian actors to play the 

foreign roles (the original cast were all white Quebecers) feels like 

a misstep: It makes literal what the production seems otherwise at 

great pains to point out are externalized, distant impressions of 

otherness. (2003) 

44


Nonetheless, that the “foreign” characters are not played by Quebec 

actors suggests that, however stereotypical or clichéd they may remain, 

Crawford and Yukali are no longer being interpreted entirely from the 

outside. Indeed, as Jean St-Hilaire suggests, commenting on the 2003 

performance, their role is to expose the stereotyping, misery and 

ghettoization this population suffered. He observes: 

Du reste, il me semble que ce texte creuse comme jamais dans la 

culpabilité que Québécois et Canadiens anglais peuvent ressentir à 

l’endroit de leurs compatriots chinois. Ils sont venus, ils ont tenus 

[sic] les emplois les plus humbles, ils ont construit à grand prix de 

vies les tronçons les plus difficiles du chemin de fer qui a ouvert ce 

continent, puis ils se sont repliés dans leurs ghettos, là où on voulait 

les voir, et pas ailleurs. (St Hilaire “Bâtie”) 

Wong and his son Lee’s stories are not held up to a tourist gaze but are 

instead woven into the multicultural, multilingual fabric that becomes The 

Dragons’Trilogy. They thus help to portray “the vast cultural landscape of 

Canada” (Giuliano 1986, 40) and offer “une preuve à l’interpénétration des 

cultures” (Bradfer 1989). Just as no one language is seen to be the dominant 

or “source” language, no one story or culture is portrayed as central. After 

one of the earliest productions in 1988, theatre critic Stewart Brown noted, 

“The Dragons’ Trilogy is a thrilling theatrical adventure—a three city, 

trilingual (English, French, Chinese) excursion through 55 years of 

Canadian history—which emphasizes the Oriental impact on Canada’s 

sociocultural face, rather than the usual British, French, American 

influences” (1998, C8). With respect to Pierre and Yukali’s relationship, 

Dvorak notes: 

Le jeune couple incarne les phénomènes d’immigration et 

d’exogamie qui engendrent le processus d’osmose culturelle. À 

travers la confrontation des histoires, des cultures, des peuples, de 

codes d’expression qui vont bien au-delà des mécaniques d’une 

langue, les spectacles de Lepage estompent les lignes de démarcation 

traditionnelles entre un Québec catholique et francophone 

et un autre qui est protestante et anglophone, les deux occupant des 

espaces symétriques séparés par zone tampon constituée 

d’immigrants allophones. (1996, 66) 

The production’s very interest lies in its ability to show the combination 

and clash of cultures. Ray Conlogue noted during the first run: 

It is spoken mostly in English, French and Chinese and, according 

to the company, is an attempt to understand the spiritual life of 

Canada where people live in the crash and cacophony of different 

cultures, even as the values of their ancestral culture recede in time. 

(1986, D9) 

45



Indeed, the “crash and cacophony” or confrontation of cultures and the 

volatile nature of the Other form the framework of the play, the final 

outcome of which is, however, harmony. As Lorraine Camerlain notes: 

La multiplicité des cultures et des langues constitue le fondement 

de La Trilogie et la quête intérieure dont la pièce est la manifestation. 

Jamais les langues ne se font véritablement obstacle; elles 

s’accordent, à la poursuite d’un objectif commun. On ne parle pas 

exotiquement anglais, chinois ou japonais. Les langues étrangères 

s’intègrent au projet, au propos du spectacle. (1987, 85) 

The progression from cacophony to understanding, from the initial 

scenes where Chinese, English and French are all spoken exotically 

depending on the interlocutor to the final scenes where East meets West 

through the characters of Pierre and Yukali, where the Occident and the 

Orient are reconciled and harmonized, is demonstrated through language. 

Furthermore, just as the individual and local stories intertwine, intersect 

and blend in such a way as to convey a universally understood message, the 

languages collide, combine, coexist and converge so that, while retaining 

their distinctiveness, they achieve a universality beyond that within the 

reach of any one language. Dvorak observes: 

[…] il est clair que grâce à la désacralisation du texte, grâce à 

l’emploi de l’image, du geste, de la danse, de la musique, du corps, 

celui-ci transcende la traduction, incitant les spectateurs, où qu’ils 

soient, à quelque nationalité qu’ils appartiennent, quelle que soit 

leur langue, à être des co-créateurs actifs dans une œuvre 

d’exploration, non seulement pour trouver du sens ailleurs que 

dans les mots, mais pour construire du sens. (1996, 70) 

Lepage reports in an interview that he had been told: “C’est extraordinaire. 

Vous êtes québécois mais vous êtes universels” (Perelli-Contos and 

Hébert 1984, 66). Similarly, the stories, which recount the local, attain 

universal meaning. As Daniel Latouche explains: 

De toute évidence, cette pièce a été écrite pour elle-même et non 

pas pour un quelconque public international. Elle ne cherche pas 

de raccourcis pour atteindre un prétendu universel. Elle est ce 

qu’elle est et c’est parce qu’on s’y trouve si facilement que les 

autres font de même. (1987) 

Lepage explains this emphasis on the local and its importance in 

transcultural, universal theatre and emphasizes the relevance of the local to 

the global perspective. 

[…] Et l’erreur que nous avons faite avec Les plaques tectoniques, 

c’est d’avoir voulu créer un projet universel, qui n’aurait pas eu de 

point d’attache; on s’est cassé la gueule. Nous n’avions pas eu le 

sentiment de parler de vraies choses, nous n’arrivions pas à 

toucher les gens de la même façon que dans les autres projets. […] 

Ceux qui essaient de faire du théâtre international ne sont pas 

46


universels parce qu’ils ne parlent pas de leur réalité. À la suite de 

cela, nous avons réajusté notre tir en créant des scènes qui se 

déroulent à Québec ou à Montréal, alors nous avons senti que nous 

touchons des gens, peu importe où nous jouions. (qtd. in 

Perelli-Contos and Hébert 1984, 66) 

This combination, layering or intertwining of local and transcultural stories 

and their concomitant languages to create a universally understood 

message is illustrated in moments such as the following. 

When “The Green Dragon” begins, the parking lot attendant is digging in 

the parking lot and disembodied voices begin reading “I have never been to 

China” in English, French and Chinese sequentially. Establishing from the 

outset that the production is not about China but about the Chinese- 

Canadian experience, “It used to be Chinatown,” the monologue continues 

and describes how the layers of sand represent the history of the space and of 

the place. The languages continue to be layered, as the text is read in three 

languages one after the other, but gradually, as the layers of sand disappear 

or blend, as one digs all the way to China and the digging approaches the 

central core, the spot where there is no longer any distinction, the languages 

too blend as the readings become almost simultaneous. The stories of the 

English, Québécois and Chinese individuals and communities that once 

inhabited the parking lot have now combined to create a storied landscape 

in which they, and their languages, are united. 

In “The Red Dragon,” Jeanne, having learned she has cancer, entrusts her 

handicapped daughter Stella to the care of Sister Marie de la Grâce. As 

Sister Marie de la Grâce explains, her familiarity with the Chinese language 

and customs is the result of her missionary work. Consequently, she was 

sent to “act as an intermediate” (Ex Machina), to complete the admission 

papers, and also to accompany Stella to Quebec City. Before leaving, she 

invites Jeanne to join her in reciting the “Hail Mary.” She prays it in 

Chinese, claiming that this is in recognition of Stella’s upbringing in a 

partially Chinese environment and is also an attempt to help Lee accept the 

decision. Jeanne prays in French. Moments later, and while the other two 

are praying, Yukali recites the same prayer in Japanese as she symbolically 

buries her mother, killed in Hiroshima. Next, Françoise, still childless, also 

invokes the intervention of the Virgin. Amultilingual chorus is thus formed 

by the four women united in their pleas for a blessing on the mother-child 

relationship. 

Later, Pierre and Yukali meet in a Zen garden and recount an oriental 

legend, speaking in French, English and Japanese. In this story, each 

member of the village makes a small cord. The small cords are intertwined 

to make a larger one and, after a symbolic fertility enactment involving 

members from both the Yin and Yang sides of the village, there is a tug of 

war. However, unlike in poker in which, as Crawford had explained to 

47



Wong in “The Green Dragon,” “you have two kinds of people; you have the 

very lucky and we call them the winners, and you have the very, very 

unlucky people and we call them the losers” (Ex Machina), there are, as 

Yukali states, no losers and no winners. Pierre explains, in French, that if the 

yin side wins it will be a year of fertility, gentleness and wisdom and Yukali 

adds, in English, that if the yang side wins it will be a year of sun, strength 

and brightness. Like the small cords, Yukali and Pierre’s stories and 

languages, as well as those of the communities they represent, are united to 

create yin and yang harmony. 

The production ends as it began, in the sand-covered parking lot with the 

same text, “I have never been to China” etc. in three languages. This time, 

however, the lines are recited not by a disembodied voice but by the 

characters who have added their own stories and languages to that of the 

multi-layered space and place that was Chinatown. 

Solange Lévesque underlines the importance of La Trilogie in 

establishing Lepage’s, and Quebec’s, reputation on the global stage: 

Cette première grande œuvre collective de Robert Lepage et de 

Repère ne devait pas tomber dans l’oubli ou devenir un souvenir 

fétiche. La nouvelle production permettra aux jeunes générations 

de découvrir le spectacle qui a contribué à faire connaître la 

dramaturgie québécoise sur les cinq continents […]. (2003) 

Moreover, as this article has endeavoured to illustrate, Lepage’s concept 

of global theatre is measured in more than simply air miles. Just as “fini par 

se comprendre” for Jeanne and Lee did not mean the subjugation of one 

language and culture to the (or to an) Other, Lepage’s vision of theatre does 

not involve the levelling, dilution or subjugation of language and culture 

frequently associated with translation and globalization. By sabotaging or 

bypassing the standard source-target translation model, by allowing local 

and individual languages and stories to “speak for themselves,” Lepage 

subverts globalization models that aim to find the most popular, or most 

dominant, common denominator and hence has earned global success. 

Simon notes: 

Il y a sans aucun doute un lien à faire entre la matière transnationale 

des pièces de Lepage et leur réussite internationale. Le jeu de 

références culturelles inscrit dans les pièces leur donne une 

mobilité certaine. Tous les publics peuvent se reconnaître dans les 

dialogues qui s’y ouvre entre lelocal etl’international. (1994, 161) 

There is no suggestion here that Lepage has found George Steiner’s 

Ur-Sprache. However, by staging the value of the local, be it culture, 

language, customs or stories, he creates global, transnational, transcultural 

theatre in which there are “no losers and there are no winners.” 

48

Notes 


1. See Koustas, J. “Robert Lepage Interfaces with the World-On the Toronto 

Stage,” in Donohoe and Koustas, “Théatre sans Frontières.” 

2. While the other parts remained essentially the same, the White Dragon was 

considerably modified in the 2003 version. Of particular note it the cutting of the 

scene where Pierre finds himself on a mountaintop. Other scenes, such as the one 

discussed above in which Crawford is featured, were added. The discussion is 

based on the Montreal production staged during the Festival de théâtre des 

Amérique, May 2003. 

References 

Bélair, Michel. “Lepage en stock.” Le Devoir 15 Juin 2002, C1-2. 

Bemrose, J.A. “A Sorcerer of the Stage.” Macleans’s, 23 May 1998, p. 53. 

Bennett, Paul. “À la recherche de l’Orient profond.” Le Soleil 14 novembre 1985. 

Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. 

London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 

Boulanger, Luc. “La Trilogie des dragons, 16 ans plus tard : je me souviens.” Voir 

15-21 mai 2003. 

Bovet, Jeanne. “Une impression du décalage : le plurilinguisme dans la production du 

Théâtre du Repère.” Master’s thesis. Québec: Université Laval, 1991. 

Bradfer, Fabienne. “Au plus profond de nous avec La Trilogie des dragons.” Le Soir 10 

mars 1989. 

Brown, Stewart. “Dragons’ Trilogy: thrilling theatrical adventure.” The Spectator 24 

May 1988. C8. 

Bury, Jean-Paul. “La critique parisienne accueille favorablement La Trilogie des 

dragons.” Le Devoir 24 avril 1989, p. 11. 

Camerlain, Lorraine. “O.K., on change.” Cahiers du théâtre Jeu 45(1) : 83-97 (1987). 

Campbell, James. “The Dragons’ Trilogy.” The Times Literary Supplement 15 

November 1991, p. 20. 

Chaboillez, Josée. “Redécouvrir Lepage.” Guide Culturel Radio-Canada. 

Conologue, Ray. “Dragons’ Trilogy from Quebec, exciting, innovative theatre.” The 

Globe and Mail 3 June 1986, D9. 

Crew, Robert. “Imagistic theatre at its best.” The Toronto Star 19 May 1988, B4. 

Donohoe, Joseph and Jane Koustas, eds. Théâtre sans frontières: Essays on the 

Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage. Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2000. 

Dvorak, Marta. “L’altérité et les modes de non-traduction : un regard sur Robert 

Lepage.” Études canadiennes/Canadian Studies 41 (1996) : 57-70. 

Ex Machina Archives. The Dragons’ Trilogy Publicity File. 

Fricker, Karen. “La Trilogie des dragons.” Variety 23-29 June 2003. 

Godfrey, Stephen. “Catch this version … it’s magic.” The Globe and Mail 24 March 

1990, D4. 

Giguère, Monique. “Robert Lepage : la face cachée d’un dragon du théâtre.” Le Soleil 

14 decembre 2003, B3. 

Grescoe, Taras. Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec. Toronto: 

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2001. 

Guiliano, Mike. “Westward.” American Theatre September 1986, p. 40. 

Harbourfront Centre. World Leaders: A Festival of Creative Genius. Toronto, 2001. 

Harvie, Jennifer. “Transnationalism, Orientalism and Cultural Tourism: La Trilogie 

des dragons and The Seven Streams of the River Ota.” Théâtre sans frontières: 

Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage. Ed. Joseph Donohoe and Jane 

Koustas. Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2000. P. 109-27. 

Hébert, Chantal and Irène Perelli-Contos. La face caché du théâtre de l’image. 

Quebec : Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001. 

Lachance, Dominique. “On nous raconte une histoire inoubliable et enthousiasmante.” 

Le journal de Montréal 27 mai 2003. 

49



Latouche, Daniel. “Des personnages qui s’imposent aussi bien à Londres qu’à 

Montréal.” Le Devoir 5 septembre 1987. 

Lessard, Jean. “Les dragons nouveaux.” Théâtre Québec 29 avril 2003. 

. 

Lévesque, Solange. “Heureux retour des dragons.” Le Devoir 27 mai 2003. 

Manguel, Alberto. “Theatre of the Miraculous.” Saturday Night January 1989. 33-42. 

Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Festival and UCLA. Program: The Dragons’ Trilogy. 

September 1990, p. 8. 

McAlpine, Alison. “Robert Lepage in Conversation with Alison McAlpine at the Le 

Café du Monde, Quebec City, 17 February 1995.” Contact with the Gods: 

Directors Talk Theatre. Ed. Maria Delgado and Paul Heritage. New York: 

Manchester UP, 1996. 130-57. 

Pavis, Patrice. Le théâtre au croisement des cultures. Paris : José Corti, 1990. 

Perelli-Contos, Irène and Chantal Hébert. “La tempête Robert Lepage.” Nuit Blanche 

55 (1984) : 62-66. 

Perrier, Jean-Louis. “Effervence théâtrale sur les rives du Saint-Laurent.” Le Monde 3 

juin 2003. 32. 

Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage 

Publications, 1992. 

Simon, Sherry. “Robert Lepage and the Languages of Spectacle.” Théâtre sans 

frontières: The Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage. Ed. Joseph Donohoe and 

Jane Koustas. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. 215-231. 

———. Le trafic des langues : traduction et culture dans la littérature québécoise. 

Montréal : Boréal, 1994. 

Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001. 

St Hilaire, Jean. “Acte de transmission.” Le Soleil 22 mai 2003. 

———. “Bâtie pour bien vieillir mais sans la magie de la version de 1987.” Le Soleil 24 

mai 2003. 

Thébaud, Marion. “Robert Lepage dans les airs.” Le Figaro 18 novembre 1999. 

Thomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1999. 

Varsava, Jerry. “Globalization and Culture: More than Your Money’s Worth.” The 

University of Toronto Quarterly 71(2): 703-06 (2002). 

Whitely, John. “A Passion for Unpolished Gems.” The Daily Telegraph 6 March 1999. 

A5. 

Whiting, Jason. “The Dragon Comes Home.” The Globe and Mail 21 May 2003. R3. 

50

Lynette Hunter 

Equality and Difference: 

Storytelling in Nunavut, 2000 

Abstract 

For centuries, the Inuit of Nunavut have used stories for discussing and 

effecting social change, yet Hansard records indicate virtually no storytelling 

takes place during government sessions. This admittedly partial study, based 

on interviews largely with women from Panniqtuuq and on some associated 

texts, asks why this should be so. The analysis works from the approaches of 

situated knowledge and textuality, finding in the interviews engaged 

understanding of the rhetoric of tacit and traditional knowledge. It argues 

that these perspectives shed light on the shortcomings of liberal humanist 

debate and suggest new strategies for democratic humanism in Nunavut and 

elsewhere. 

Résumé 

Au fil des siècles, les Inuit du Nunavut se sont servi des contes pour discuter 

du changement social et pour le mener à bien. Et pourtant, le compte rendu 

officiel des débats (hansard) révèle que pratiquement personne ne se met à 

raconter des histoires lors des séances de la Chambre. La présente étude, 

quoique partiale, il faut l’admettre, et fondée sur des entrevues menées pour 

la plupart auprès des femmes provenant de Panniqtuuq et sur quelques textes 

s’y rapportant, remet en question cette façon de faire. L’analyse, qui se fonde 

sur les méthodes du savoir localisé et de la textualité, décèle dans ces 

entrevues une compréhension engagée de la rhétorique du savoir tant tacite 

que traditionnel. Elle soutient que ces perspectives mettent au jour les 

défaillances du discours libéral humaniste et nous propose de nouvelles 

stratégies visant à promouvoir l’humanisme démocratique au Nunavut et 

ailleurs. 

The central question to be addressed here is concerned with the democratic 

rhetoric that is emerging in the communities from which the newly 

constituted government of Nunavut in the eastern arctic of Canada has 

emerged. In the spring of 1999, after years of negotiation, the territory of 

Nunavut came into being with Iqaluit as its capital city on Baffin Island. 

Listening to one group of Inuit elders of the eastern Arctic during the 

summer of 2000, it was clear that stories and storytelling were fundamental 

to social understanding and social change (Kulchyski 1999). Yet although 

this was firmly conveyed by many individuals who were interviewed for 

this essay, if one looks at the Hansard reports from the first eighteen months 

of meetings of the Nunavut government, there are hardly any stories. Why? 


30, 2004



The current exploration is based on a series of live interviews with 

several storytellers primarily in or from Panniqtuuq, a traditional 

community on the southern edge of the northeastern arm of Baffin Island, 

and on reported interviews with a number of elders from Panniqtuuq and 

other communities. The study adds to growing Western understanding of 

storytelling rhetoric, and looks at the position of the teller and the listener, 

the kinds of stories told by the women in this community, their analysis of 

the differences between the oral and the written and the attitude to and 

potential for using stories for social and political change. 

Reasons for this Inquiry 

The experiences of communities new to Western democracy underline the 

fact that most Western nation-states are based on liberal humanism, a 

humanism that privileges certain people in many ways, not the least in the 

field of rhetoric and communication in the public sphere. As a result of 

practical issues such as education and social training, strategies of debate, 

syllogistic argument and rationalist epistemology have come to be a sign of 

a privileged rhetoric that excludes many modes of communication central 

to these new communities (Pateman 1979, 1995; Hunter 2001). That 

exclusion highlights another issue: that a large proportion of people in 

communities and countries enfranchised in the early twentieth century have 

been disadvantaged in similar ways. Engaging with the ideas of some elders 

in 2000, just after Nunavut had acquired its status as a territory, brings into 

sharp relief some of the implications of the rhetoric of liberal government. 

This essay is part of a series in which I explore elements that may open out a 

democratic humanism encouraging different modes of communication in 

the public sphere, and a greater variety ofways ofknowing and persuading. 

In a democratic humanism the point is that not everyone will agree; 

interests will diverge far more widely than in liberal humanist institutions 

run by people from relatively similar backgrounds and with relatively 

similar preoccupations. Democratic humanism therefore raises issues 

about the kinds of persuasion appropriate to make decisions and take action. 

To a considerable extent these issues overlap with those of deliberative 

democracy as defined by Seyla Benhabib (1996) from Jurgen Habermas 

and those being discussed in the name of a multi-layered citizenship by 

Canadian scholars such as Smaro Kamboureli (1996) and Diana Brydon 

(2005). The wider participation in democracy that lies at the heart of 

democratic humanism makes it necessary for more people to learn 

appropriate strategies for contributing to political organization and action. 

But it also requires institutions that have worked in roughly the same way 

for the entire extent of the “modern” period in the Western world (in other 

words from the seventeenth century until now in countries of course 

“southern” to Nunavut), to learn how to engage with strategies outside the 

historically conventional. As Habermas and Benhabib point out, it is 

impractical to suggest that new modes of democracy will arise independent 

52



of the tactics of social contract liberalism; hence, deliberative democracy 

and, I would argue, democratic humanism and multilayered citizenship, 

will need to devise strategies that productively change current practices. If 

democratic humanism, which is the implicit objective of giving people the 

vote in the twentieth century, is to replace liberal humanism, an 

understanding of the broad changes that will have to take place gives 

material definition to the word “postmodern,” although one could wish for a 

less contested word. 

I have argued elsewhere that rhetorical strategies such as narrative (Code 

1995, 155; Young 1997, 60–74), dialogue (Cohen 1990, 89), expression 

(Lovibond 1983) and articulation 1 have been posited by recent political 

theorists as possible alternatives to the agonistic structures of debate and 

argumentation that currently dominate national politics. But much of the 

political discussion about these strategies is divided between those who 

claim that a particular rhetorical strategy will in itself be appropriate — 

people just have to learn it and they will be able to participate in a way that 

will resist co-optation to liberal corporate standards (Walker 1998, 66) — 

and those who claim that these alternative strategies are inadequate to the 

work that needs to be done (Benhabib 1996). However, a rhetorician would 

immediately reply that no strategy can be guaranteed in itself. The whole 

point of rhetoric is that it allows one to take context into account. Hence, in 

some instances narrative will be authoritative (for example, “master 

narratives” or “grand narratives” [Lyotard 1979]) and in others it will be 

engaging. Just so, in some instances debate will be reductive and in others it 

will open negotiation. The rhetorical strategies of liberal humanism are not 

in themselves the problem, but it just happens, at this particular moment in 

history, that the rhetorical strategy of debate is part of the dominant power 

structure and can literally “take liberties” with its persuasive power. 

However, it should be noted that recent studies in political rhetoric have 

rarely paid attention to the potential for public intervention through 

storytelling, whether it be extended narrative, tale, anecdote or aphorism. 

Part of this paper is an exploration of the pragmatics of storytelling rhetoric, 

in the particular context of Panniqtuuq, Nunavut, with regard to social 

change. 

Much of the work for the validation of alternative rhetorics within 

Western/southern institutional structures has taken place in social studies of 

science and technology and in feminist theory. Drawing in particular from 

Wittgenstein’s theories of language and from Bakhtin and Lukács for an 

understanding of alternative political engagement through communication, 

many of these thinkers positioned themselves within the 

sophisticated discussions that emerged in the late 1980s and the 1990s 

around the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988; Harding 

1991). In a parallel move, postcolonial theorists (Hardt and Negri 2000; 

Mohanty 2003; Spivak 1999) have been examining the impact of 

globalization on liberal democracy; as Diana Brydon (2005) has noted, 

53



Canadian writers such as Caroline Andrew (2005) have developed the 

concept of specific conditions, struggles and actors rather than 

pre-established orders or institutional ideologies. 

Situated knowledge, which emphasizes the partial and specific nature of 

our experience, and situated textuality (Hunter 1999), which 

communicates this kind of knowing, has elaborated from naïve versions of 

authenticity, through relativist accounts of laboratory work (Latour and 

Woolgar 1979), to a material philosophical approach that attempts to deal 

with partial knowledge in various ways (for example, “strong objectivity,” 

[Harding 1991]). It is worth pointing out that it is only tangential to the 

concept of “situated = local or contextual” in which the word is used in 

fields from literacy to robotics. The slightly older version of “situated” used 

here, and perhaps another word such as “partial” would be more helpful to 

the area as a whole, and is concerned with a rigorous epistemology and 

rhetoric that is intertwined not only with politics and ethics but also 

morality. In none of these large philosophical areas does it underwrite a 

generalist perspective. Recent developments have moved to set aside the 

twinned concept of the universal/relative to focus on the way that situated 

knowledge can provide common grounds for decision and action, at the 

same time that the situated can enable diverse and diverging approaches to 

understand and value the differences among people. 

To understand the working of situated knowledge it can be helpful to 

think about the structures of tacit knowledge (Janik 1987), which have 

much in common with those of traditional knowledge as it has been 

articulated within Aboriginal communities around the world (for example, 

Council of Yukon First Nations 2000). Indeed, in work on embodied 

knowing, the term “situated learning” has been developed to describe the 

pedagogy of tacit knowledge (Lave and Wenger 1991). Tacit knowledge, 

like traditional knowledge, is not articulated fully in rationalist language in 

the way that Western educational structures normally function. This is one 

reason why studies of science often miss their mark when they focus on the 

language of science. As important as that is, science is also engaged with 

practices that usually go unverbalized. Because they are unverbalized they 

are often ignored or misunderstood and undervalued. Scientific knowledge 

is not only partial because it cannot be total (the usual argument that leads to 

relativism), but partial because we are not even aware of many of the 

components of its knowledge. It is similar with traditional knowledge, 

much of which is unverbalized, including, as this essay explores, the 

rhetorical knowledge about stories, telling and listening, as well as the 

rhetoric of the stories themselves. 

I would like to suggest that Inuk storytelling could be used within the 

larger political structures of Nunavut. It is present throughout the culture 

and society, although apparently less practised than it used to be despite a 

recent resurgence in interest among younger Inuit. If it were to become part 

54

of the discourse of politics it might offer a bridge between the diversity of 

the local and the generalizations of national ideology. Nunavut has a 

number of specific local elements in place: the fact that Members of the 

Territorial Assembly (MTAs) come from each of the communities, that the 

government visits different communities en masse from time to time, that 

there is a perception that the MTAs are recognized on a personal level. The 

first Rankin Inlet meeting on 17 February 2000 indicates that these 

presuppositions were in place during the first year of government at least 

(Hansard 2000, 389–408). In this context there may still be room for 

effective storytelling and for the inclusion of “traditional knowledge” in 

social change. 

My own research was initially focused on women’s storytelling and how 

it contributed to social change, and the partiality of this work is sustained 

largely by that intention. However, I did not find the gendered framework of 

my initial approach in the accounts by the elders, although I did learn about 

other perceptions on gender that were vitally important to understanding 

the situatedness of the stories to which I was listening. Similarly, I did not 

find my approach to stories and storytelling directly in the guidance I was 

given, but refracted into unexpected paths through the particularities of the 

situations of the people speaking. What is interesting about situated 

knowledge is that the burden of knowledge does not lie with the teller, as in 

the classic formula of “if p then q,” but in its textuality. Situated knowledge 

involves the speaker/writer with their audience/reader in the process of 

engaging with what is said or has been written. That textual engagement 

may result in the teller and the listener forming different concepts of what 

the “knowledge” in question is. The information may be the same, but the 

knowledge can be different. Indeed, what marks out this kind of rhetorical 

inquiry from ethnology or anthropology is that the listener, in this case me, 

never understands the teller’s knowledge, only knows that it is different 

from my own. 

Rhetoric and Storytelling in Nunavut 



This essay offers a partial perspective on the rhetoric of storytelling and its 

social uses, from information given by some elders in Panniqtuuq, Iqaluit, 

Iglulik and Mittimalik and with comments by younger people from 

Panniqtuuq now living in Iqaluit and elsewhere. I visited Panniqtuuq and 

Iqaluit in 1998 and returned in 2000 to the territory of Nunavut. On my 

return visit, in Panniqtuuq I interviewed 2 the elders Elisapee Ishulutuk (EI), 

Martha Kanayuk (MK) and Evie Aniniliak (EA), through the translator 

Lizzie Karpik. 3 In Iqaluit I interviewed among others Meeka Kilabuk, a 

political activist who at the time ran a program for people with varying 

abilities, and Meeka Mike, who then worked in a hunting and fishing tourist 

business. 4 This essay also draws on interviews with Saullu Nakasuk (SN) 

(Panniqtuuq), Hervé Paniaq (HP) (Iglulik), Elisapee Ootoova (EO) 

(Mittimalik) and Pauloosie Angmaalik (PA) (Panniqtuuq), recorded in 

55



1996 from sessions at Arctic College and published as Interviewing Inuit 

Elders: Introduction (Interviewing). 

Storytellers in Panniqtuuq learn to tell stories by listening, by 

observation, and other processes of tacit knowledge and situated learning. 

In effect, most craft work in cultures around the world is learned tacitly: for 

example, metalwork, cooking, sewing, and among Inuk crafts also hunting, 

building and, it appears, storytelling. But tacit knowledge poses the 

difficult question: why is it tacit and unspoken? Is it because it cannot be 

explained? or simply because no one has spoken about it yet? Is it silent 

because it is a trade secret? or just because its knowledge is taken for granted 

as true or obvious or conventional? Or is it tacit for reasons that people in a 

Western/southern culture that values verbal articulation over others do not 

recognize? 

In effect, tacit knowledge may be all of these things. From the interviews 

it became clearer that the acquisition of knowledge about storytelling is 

tacit partly because it is being learned by an individual in a situated manner. 

Evie Aniniliak commented, “We were never taught how to do stories”; they 

learned by hearing others do them (6) 5 and making them their own. 6 

Elisapee Ootoova offers another perspective on this kind of learning with 

regard to sewing: 

We were not told directly to learn how to sew … I think we started 

working with scraps. I am sure our mothers didn’t have the time 

just to teach us as they were constantly busy. I am sure we practised 

sewing, even though our work probably wasn’t noticed at first, and 

we were really keen on finishing it. And when you thought you had 

done the perfect job and showed it off, you were told that you had 

made the seam too high. (19) 

She goes on to note that this lack of positive support is not necessarily the 

best way to learn. But for some knowledge it may be that trying it for oneself 

is one of the main ways to train, although such training requires a close and 

attentive group of people around one. It may be significant that Evie could 

remember that camps (smaller groups on the land often camping in 

traditional camping places, at some distance from larger communities such 

as Panniqtuuq) had particular people who were storytellers—her 

grandmother in her case (2)—but that she did not recognize someone with 

this special job in Panniqtuuq itself. 

Elisapee Ishulutuk backed up this sense of camps having particular and 

local tellers when she noted that all storytellers have different ways of 

telling “[b]ecause they lived in different camps and they had different ways 

of lifestyle” (3). Nowadays, she commented, there are fewer stories told 

because people are “faraway” (1), and it’s only when they can get together 

that they do stories “all the time.” Martha Kanayuk remarked that she tells 

stories mainly when she gets together with other elders, although she uses 

56



stories with children a lot (2). This sense of storytelling often being the heart 

of a social occasion was reiterated by Evie when she said that no one has to 

“make an effort” (4) to tell stories, but that people just do it all the time when 

they are visiting. 

Like Martha, Evie Aniniliak often tells stories to children and 

grandchildren (2), but she was concerned that children in school have 

stopped listening because they are always in groups that are too large to 

encourage attentiveness. From the start, storytelling is intricately bound to 

listening. Elisapee Ishulutuk remembered that as children they would listen 

with respect; they were always told to listen and obey. Nowadays, “[t]heir 

life is so distracted” (5) that she has to remind them to listen before they 

“do” something. This kind of comment probably has resonance with many 

Euro-American readers who live around children, but “listening” seems 

here to be intended as a more specific skill rather than as a blanket word for 

obedience. 7 Elisapee Ootoova states, “I was an expert listener” (20) as she 

recalls listening to conversations when she should not have been. In effect, 

the action was a way of defining herself: 

I was the type of person that didn’t heed what I was told. We were 

often reminded that we weren’t supposed to listen to 

conversations, but I was an expert listener. I’d pretend I wasn’t 

listening to anything and here I was listening. (20) 

Hervé Paniaq attributed his knowledge to his “naivity” or disingenuousness: 

[W]e would be told not to listen to people talking … While they 

were talking, I would play with my seal-bone dogteam on the floor. 

At the same time I would be listening to the people telling stories. 

When they realized that I was listening, I would be told, “Go play 

outside.” I knew I would be told that whenever I felt like listening 

… It was only because I was so naive that I gained some 

information. I mainly listened and Ilearned abit from there. (47–8) 

The stress on listening attentively is also part of learning how to tell 

stories (see Cruikshank 1990, chap. 7). Martha Kanayuk suggests that 

listening is a learned activity; she says that she “understood more over the 

years, after [she] had heard so many stories that [she] had learned a lot from 

them. That they are real. It took years to understand them” (2). As a child she 

would listen to stories and believe them, never disagree: “A long time ago 

we used to believe what the elders said” (2) (see Annie Ned, Cruikshank 

1990, 318). Within the immediate, relatively intimate context of a camp, the 

supportive social interactions needed for this kind of reinforcement would 

be present. This kind of unquestioning belief in which children often get 

caught up is different from the belief that results from knowledge that is 

informed by experience, what we sometimes call wisdom. Yet it is possible 

that the presence of the former is one strategy for putting in place the 

conditions for the latter. 

57



More than this, what is being described is a particular rhetorical stance at 

work. The listening is part of the telling, and the retelling and interpretation 

become new stories. Listening becomes a public act, a display of personal 

responsibility and difference within a specific context of common ground. 

Hence the current telling of stories mainly to children whose parameters 

can be defined for them more easily than, say, modern teenagers who have 

alternative tellings on television or video that disrupt those common 

grounds. Hence the telling of stories when visiting people who are like 

oneself, because common ground is recognized. Part of the recognized 

common ground that encourages storytelling is the expectation that 

storytelling will happen. As Evie replied when asked if she would tell 

stories to Qallunaats [southerners, white people], “We don’t. … They 

usually have questions for you” (6). In other words, stories are not an 

appropriate way of answering questions. But if common ground is the main 

reason the listener listens in the first place, as Elisapee Ishulutuk notes, 

differences are the main point; “it’s really interesting when they are having 

stories [from different camps] … Hearing stories like that, it becomes very 

interesting” (3). 

The oral, and orature, within this community is more overtly public and 

social than the present day Euro-American rhetoric of reading and writing: 

for example, we no longer read aloud as a matter of habit as readers would 

have done five or six hundred years ago. If listening is public, so is telling, 

and there is a primary need to know about the speaker. Their very physical 

presence is important (EA7). Alistener will want to know about the teller’s 

upbringing and parentage, their camp, their community. The elders I 

interviewed told about their background in the initial stages of the 

interviews, or in one case at a public meeting that occurred before the 

interview. Such locating devices are important because the teller takes 

responsibility for their text to the extent that if someone acts on their words, 

the teller must have spoken from experience, or else what the listener then 

does with the story may be based on things that haven’t happened and may 

lead them into danger. If they are faced with danger or dilemma or disaster 

as a result of a story based on experience, then at least the teller has been 

responsible about the telling. 

The element of “speaking from experience” is central. In interview, the 

speakers would politely decline to answer a question if they felt they had not 

got the experience, saying, for example, “I can’t really say much about that 

by myself” (MK6), or “She says she has not got much information on that” 

(EI7), or simply “I don’t know” (EI6). 8 The centrality of experience has also 

been noted by others. For example, the opening to Interviewing quotes 

Saullu Nakasuk saying, “I’m only telling you about what I’ve experienced. 

I’m not going to tell you about anything I haven’t experienced” (5); or 

Pauloosie Angmaalik: 

58



I have already stated that I can say that I don’t know anything about 

it if I have only heard about it just once. If at a later time someone 

were to tell about it like it really is, and though I did not 

intentionally lie, I would be like someone who had lied. (6) 

Experience shapes the parameters of partiality so it is not arbitrary. Nor is 

such knowledge relative, because experience helps the listener to identify 

specific common ground and difference. In universal/relative frameworks, 

difference is something to “get over,” to finally understand and find the 

piece of the jigsaw that makes knowledge universal rather than relative. But 

the opening to Interviewing also states that in Inuk knowledge there is no 

“generalized” knowledge or authority (9). In effect, the comments describe 

the possibility for a situated knowledge in which one recognizes the 

presence of difference that reminds one of the partiality of all knowledge. 

Yet the comments also make the significant addition often lacking in 

accounts of situated knowledge in the sciences, that Inuk traditional 

knowledge is not fixed, because “[a] balance of experience and innovation 

is central to the production and transmission of knowledge” (6). This 

flexibility and openness to change and modification seems to me a strategy 

made necessary primarily by attentive listening and its process of 

re-situating. 

Acts of Telling and Listening 

It is not only experience that is individual but also and necessarily the style 

in which the stories are told and the form in which they are told. Each of the 

three elders I interviewed in Panniqtuuq has a markedly different style. 

Elisapee Ishulutuk sits with upper body bent forward from the waist, 

throwing her energy out toward the listener. Her face remains stable with 

eyes piercing toward the listener, except for radical changes into eee [yes] 

with eyebrows lifted and a grin, or akha [no] with the mouth turned 

downward in a grimace. 9 The hands remain clasped on her knees: she said 

that when someone “starts using his arms or part of their body,” she makes 

“a comment: ‘Are you turning into a Qallunaat?!’ because they use their 

arms all the time” (4). In contrast Martha Kanayuk sits slightly tense with 

her arm flung along the back edge of the chesterfield. Although punctuated 

with laughter, her voice moves like a river with her eyes turned inward as if 

she is seeing the stories she tells. The intensity of that vision seems at times 

to overtake her, once to the point where she faltered into “not being able to 

say any more about that.” Again quite differently, Evie Aniniliak sits 

quietly in focus, hands clasped lightly in her lap, with a diffident air of 

bewilderment about her as she firmly delineates life in the present, in the 

past, in tension and in hopes. Unlike the recounting of shaman 

performances, these tellers have subtle performative stances that they have 

presumably developed through many years of practice. And I was aware 

that the performative effects were probably affected by my own intrusive 

presence, as would be appropriate for a context-bound rhetoric. Elisapee 

Ishulutuk said at one point that some people like telling stories “slowly, 

59



because they enjoy doing that together” (4), and it was notable that while 

most of the interview consisted of her answering questions at shotgun 

speed, her parting gift was a story told very slowly. 

I have made no detailed study of the rhetorical devices of verbal or 

physical communication mainly because I was working with a translator, 

and the complexities of the situation were multiplied. But also, despite 

questioning, very little was said about style, which is not surprising for a 

knowledge acquired tacitly. In what follows I would like to elaborate 

instead on the forms of storytelling that were discussed in detail, for much 

was said about the different reasons why stories were told, and the different 

kinds of stories that resulted. 10 The word “story” covered a range of 

different verbal genres from myth to tale to anecdote, and, as this essay 

explores in part four, aphorism and word, the one-word story becoming a 

central device. The term is used here in the conventional literary sense of a 

verbal artefact with narrative elements that are articulated through many 

quite different techniques. 

All the elders stated that stories would be used to give strong direction but 

not to command because stories tell people about “what expectations are” 

(EA 2). In rhetorical terms they are demonstrative rather than epideictic 

(about praise or blame) or judicial (about right and wrong). They are there to 

guide the listener into appropriate behaviour, which means that the listener 

must take the story and apply it in their own life; they cannot be told “what to 

do” because the teller can’t make decisions about the specifics in the 

listener’s life. At the same time, the guidance is firm. Elisapee Ishulutuk 

says: 

They use stories … to tell other people, “This is the way you should 

be doing it.” Sometimes you have to tell the family … “No, you 

don’t do that, because this is the reason.” You know? They always 

have reasons behind and they have stories with it. (2) 

So stories are “reasons.” Martha emphasized this sense, saying: 

You tell them why you want them to listen and to obey. You have to 

be quite open with them to do that. But often we have to remind 

them, through stories, “This is why we are telling you” and have a 

story with it. (2) 

She continued with a practical example: 

Often the women stay with their mother[s] to teach them how to 

make clothing, how to support their family, making food, how to 

have a family. … This is … what the elders would explain, “This is 

why we are doing [stories]. Because you will have a family later, 

and you will know what to do. We’ll show you how to do it. You 

will observe, and when you are observing you have to listen from 

your observations.” (3) 

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Note the confluence of listening and observing as the main ways of 

learning. If observation is the most important element in learning through 

tacit knowledge and the central element involved in learning to tell stories, 

listening becomes the parallel skill needed for learning through 

storytelling. The knowledge, the reasons and explanations conveyed by 

stories, do not command or order. Their effect depends on the listener’s 

skills of observation. Obedience is not “blind obedience,” although stories 

could be used authoritatively, as the comment “If she listened, then she 

wasn’t abused” (EO 25) indicates. 

The kinds of stories that explain or guide rather than command are 

various. Evie Aniniliak noted, “The stories I use are, some, traditional, but I 

often add something else to make them more attractive” (2). For many other 

tellers, stories are contemporary, about today. From listening, it was 

apparent to me that there were different kinds of stories these tellers were 

willing to tell me and a more general public: those told from memory about 

“a long time ago,” those with practical information about life today and also 

stories of animals and myths or beliefs. As Evie explains, you have to have 

the memory but also the “telling form” (1). In response to questioning it 

seems that the telling form could be from day-to-day life in the present or the 

past, or “made up” and fictional. 

All the elders seem to agree that stories among adults are often about 

practical information: boats and clothing (EI 3), care of the sick (EO 22, SK 

72ff), food (EA5), dogs (PA115ff). Some of these were more or less explicit 

while others were indirect. For example, Saullu described the reason for not 

waiting too long to find a husband: because a woman’s pelvic bones would 

become more rigid and a baby would have more difficulty being delivered. 

This preceded a technical description of how to use an asimautta by putting 

it “on the female’s lower back and [kneeling] on it applying pressure until 

the bone separated” (80). One could read the juxtaposition of these two 

stories in several ways, including as a warning. Evie described how she 

would tell stories about the right kind of food to eat to her children and 

grandchildren, and discussed the impact of a local “QuickStop” 11 on the 

patterns of eating among younger people in particular (5). But the story was 

not so much about the way the QuickStop food might not be good for you 

but about the fact that you had to pay for it. This story turned into one about 

maintaining hunting skills since most people in the community still depend 

for food on hunting. 

Astory told by Elisapee Ishulutuk began as one about fashion and turned 

into one about how to keep clean clothes even without soap; on another 

level it was about social dignity: 

Along time ago, they never used to have soap, like bar soaps, [and] 

they wore this seal skin clothing all the time. They’d have baby seal 

skin, white clothing, so she remembers all through that time she’d 

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been wearing the same clothing and it would get really really dirty, 

like her kamiks, and she remember trying to take dirt out because it 

didn’t even look white any more. 

When they took some dirt out, she’d take some piece out of 

clothing, she’d make it into a ball and take a hair of her head and 

make it into a ball and start making [strokes down the clothing]. It 

was so dirty that they had to scrape it up with an ulu and stuff. 

When we didn’t have any more soap, we’d use eggs for soap. The 

whole egg. Whenever we had to come and we’d use soap and we 

didn’t have any more, … we’d use eggs and start washing the seal 

skin, because we didn’t want it becoming really really dirty so we 

had to use eggs. (8) 

Although ostensibly about cleaning clothes, the story also works to raise a 

number of different issues, not the least to instruct a southerner, me, in 

resourcefulness. 

At times, apparently direct stories may become even more elusive. 

Martha Kanayuk remembered considerable detail of how her early 

employment at the nursing station in Panniqtuuq in the 1940s trained her to 

help others when she was in the camps. She told several stories about her 

experiences, including those as a person responsible for preparing the dead 

for burial, which had nothing directly to do with her medical expertise but 

was because on the death of a child early in her life she had laid the body out, 

and from that time had been asked to do so for others. But the two areas of 

responsibility came close to each other, and as she proceeded with her 

memories it was as if the stories of the ill became overwhelmed with the fact 

of death; the past became the source of an inexorable presence. 

Conveying practical information through stories can be more effective 

than simply stating or describing factual material, because contexts are 

usually incorporated into the telling. In response to a question, Evie also 

confirmed that stories would be used when it is difficult to say exactly what 

we mean (2). Hervé Paniaq told a story to his interviewers about the 

“undisclosed,” about what happens when there is something that has been 

done and then hidden that affects the whole community, perhaps by 

bringing bad luck on it (HP 58). This story involved a shaman identifying 

the person who had kept an action secret and persuading them to disclose 

what they had done, after which the community was restored. Hovering on 

the edge of a realistic story, the tale had elements in common with the more 

mythical stories of figures such as Sedna, whose hair must be combed to 

release the sea animals and relieve famine (Petrone 1988, 42; Alexina 

Kublu qtd. in Kulchyski 1999, 153–61). 

Delicately poised between the practical and mythical was a story told by 

Elisapee Ishulutuk about a woman who would not marry the husbands her 

parents brought to her: this is a common opening to several Inuk stories. 

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Ishulutuk was speaking to a group of students in Panniqtuuq on a summer 

course. 12 She had generously invited questions about her life, and had 

answered many on marriage customs and who picked her husband for her, 

and whether she liked him or not. In the course of these questions she made 

it clear that she had not wanted to marry the man her parents chose for her. 

Why? “He had a short neck.” But gradually she explained how she came to 

care for him, especially after her parents died, when he became her good 

friend. Elisapee’s story of the woman who would not marry took on 

elements from her own life story, which coloured the telling and changed 

the listening process. In the story, the woman finally goes out to sit among 

the rocks and as husband after husband is rejected, she slowly begins to turn 

into a rock. And do you know why she turned into a rock? Because Nunavut 

is covered in rocks, and this way she had lots of friends. 13 

There are also many instances in which stories are told about events that 

are difficult to repeat or discuss, not necessarily because the teller doesn’t 

understand, but because of anxiety about whether the listener will be able to 

do so. Hervé Paniaq told of an ancestor who had had to eat the flesh of other 

humans in order to stay alive. Elisapee Ootoova then took over and 

elaborated: 

We can state that we will never eat a fellow human being, but we do 

not know what our future holds. If it were our only chance for 

survival, we just might end up doing that too. She [Paniaq’s 

ancestor] went through an experience which she had to go through. 

Amazingly, she was discovered and she pulled through it and had a 

chance to bear children again. If she didn’t do what she had to do, 

there’s no way we would be around today. We can see life meant a 

lot to this person. A lot of us today want to kill ourselves, hang 

ourselves because we can’t deal with life’s problems anymore. 

Imagine what she went through. … If she had just given up on life, 

we wouldn’t be around today. (57) 

Paniaq’s story was part of the context for a larger discussion of the 

reasons for conversion to Christianity, yet Ootoova’s interpretative 

re-telling moved the story into one about not judging people’s actions 

without appreciating the demands their life is putting upon them. Many 

stories are of this philosophical type, allowing for discussion of ideas and 

feelings difficult to articulate (see Kitimeot 1999). 

But the largest group of stories requiring contextual material is probably 

that of “a long time ago.” There are many stories about traditional lifestyles 

and traditional knowledge, and these would simply not be as effective 

without the surrounding material. For example, Pauloosie Angmaalik was 

asked by an interviewer, “If you were out hunting and you were attacked by 

a bear, what would you do?” His immediate answer was, “When hunting 

wasn’t regulated, animals tended to come around if you were a hunter, 

probably based on how willing you were to catch game” (121), but now you 

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have to chase them away. He then expanded on this observation with a story 

about a bear that had come to his camp and which he had seen pulling at the 

starter of an outboard motor: “My belief that polar bears have the capability 

to think like humans became stronger after I saw for myself how the bear 

pulled and released the starter repeatedly” (121). After this he and his 

friends chased the bear away by firing shots toward it, not to kill but to scare. 

The interview developed into a discussion about respecting animals; the 

basis of this respect is the commonality between them and humankind. But 

the story also underlines a number of different points including the fact that 

prior to Western equipment such as motor boats and guns, animals and 

humans had a different relationship. One has to get a lot closer to an animal 

to kill it if one is carrying a knife rather than a gun. 

If the point of telling a story is not to command or prove, then, to a greater 

or lesser extent depending on the audience, the point is to offer guidance. 

Because there is no generalized knowledge, no “authority” except the 

contexts of the speaker and listener, the interpretations are specific to each 

listener, based on both common ground and difference. This particular way 

of listening is related directly to the rhetorical concept of “stance.” 

Differentiated here from the ethos of the speaker alone, stance recognizes 

the listener’s joint responsibility with the teller for interpretation and 

emphasizes the importance of learning how to listen over many years, 

although it also allows for the possibility that the listener may not take up 

this responsibility. 14 Through rhetorical studies and literary criticism in 

Euro-American academic institutions, this activity has been recognized as 

central to the reading and writing of poetry, yet only peripherally in the 

textuality of prose. The concept has only enjoyed wide discussion in recent 

times in the context of theories trying to work out how to engage a broader 

public into taking up access to cultural power. The rest of this essay is 

concerned with exploring how the stories might interconnect not only with 

cultural but also with social and political power. 

Contexts: Gender, Media and Education 

As noted above, the initial focus for my research was a gendered concept of 

how stories engaged with social change. I was committed to exploring a 

rhetoric of storytelling by women, and to searching for what women’s 

voices had to say within different public spaces. Methodologically, this 

entailed listening to men’s voices, and I was also interested in how these 

tellers responded to any differences between their stories and those of the 

men around them. The discussions about gender provided detailed 

information about the situated contexts of storytelling. Just so, the 

discussions of the differences between written and oral media, primarily in 

the context of biblical stories, and the descriptions of different experiences 

with southern education systems offered material that located the 

storytelling in specific conditions and on particular ground. 

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Whenever I raised the topic of gender I came directly in contact with the 

element of “immediate experience.” For example, when I asked Martha 

Kanayuk if men told stories more than women, she said abruptly, “I don’t 

know about that” (3), and went on to talk about what she did know: that men 

and women often tell stories together. Yet she added that when women are 

together the stories are more fun, “like you are open to stories more” (3) than 

when men are there. She said she spoke more in groups of only women, and 

felt that there was more variety in the stories on these occasions, noting that 

there were also times that would be private to a women’s group. Kanayuk 

added that her husband must have told stories to her son when they went 

hunting, otherwise how could her son have learned how to hunt? 

Elisapee Ishulutuk reiterated some of these comments, noting that 

because men went hunting alone they were less often together in the group 

setting conducive to telling stories (3). Probably because they had more 

opportunity, women told more stories around things they were doing such 

as making clothing and tents, preparing sealskins, cooking, but Elisapee 

missed not having the campfire and sitting around telling stories (4). 

However she insisted that men do tell stories, even between “one man and 

one woman” (3), which are often about clothing, boats, and “a long time 

ago” (3). Each elder raised subtle points about the way that men and women 

may have broadly differing responsibilities, such as hunting and sewing 

respectively, but that they frequently did the work of the “other” gender, 

depending on circumstances. If a girl ended up going out with her father to 

hunt because there was no one to look after her at home, then she acquired 

hunting skills usually learned by boys. 

Evie Aniniliak said less on this issue but did comment that women tend to 

use stories more, and that it is “very effective” (4); she did not know why, 

“but it happens.” Evie’s comment stemmed from a remark I had made that I 

thought Mary Thomas, the only woman MTAin the Nunavut government in 

2000, told more stories in the televised sessions than the other MTAs. Evie 

agreed and went on to suggest that television as a medium was a mixed 

blessing: negative because children imitate inappropriate behaviour (3), 

but also interesting because some television does what stories do (6) and 

makes expectations clear. But the fundamentally worrying aspect of 

television was that it kept the children from playing outside, implicitly from 

playing with each other (3). 

This social placing of a medium was also apparent in the elders’ 

comments on writing, which opened out a sophisticated commentary on 

rhetorical stance. Most of the elders with whose words I am engaging could 

write from a very early age. People could remember that letters were 

exchanged by dog-team carriers in the 1930s and ’40s (interview in the 

Elders’ Room at the Angmarlik Centre, Hunter 2000), after all, there were 

no telephones. Saullu Nakasuk recalls teaching herself to read Inuktituk 

syllabics by working out the graphic form of people’s names, which she 

65



knew aurally, from the addresses on the letters they received. She also 

recalled that her grandmother could read the Roman alphabet (Nunavut 

Arctic College et al. 1999, 66–67). 

Writing is not alien to the cultural life of Panniqtuuq. It has been 

substantially present since the days of the whalers in the nineteenth century, 

and the fortunes of literacy until the 1930s may well have followed 

commercial contact. The written today exists alongside the oral and they 

have their different work and appropriateness. The complexity of the two 

media may be approached by thinking of the place of the Bible, a written 

text, in the cultural and social life of Nunavut. The elders giving interviews 

were part of the generation converted to Christianity during the 1930s, 

when many of them were in their teens and Christian missionaries were 

teaching them to read and write. One extensive example comes from the 

interview with Elisapee Ootoova in Interviewing, and her account of 

reading the Bible. 

Early in the interview Ootoova says that although she read the Bible it 

was not until she became an adult that she understood Christianity. “Only 

today …” (31) did she think she was beginning to understand. At first, 

Christianity was just a few “requirements” (32) about, for example, not 

working or hunting on Sundays, but there was nothing about not judging 

others, about learning to like them. She let go of the old rules, fulfilled the 

“requirements,” but it took a long time to learn the “new rules,” to “love one 

another” (32). She could see now that this was partly an inflicted problem 

because of the differences between the Roman Catholic and Protestant 

churches, which were both proselytizing in the North. The conflict between 

differently converted communities destroyed the old Inuit rule to “help 

each other” (32). But at the time shethought hers was “the perfect religion.” 

As they learned more about Christianity, their process of learning meant 

they “reminded each other” of Christian precepts, referred to “verses 

written in the Bible when they approached each other” (37). And they 

started adapting to the commandments in the Bible either openly or 

secretly: “The way I see it, people started becoming nicer people” (37). 

Even the shamans were grateful because: 

They did not have to seek answers any more. They didn’t have to 

wait for the possible revenge someone might be plotting against 

them. They could just discuss problems with the person they were 

angry at and they found it a lot less stressful. (56) 

But this process took time; “It seemed as if the perfect people were more 

imperfect that the so-called imperfect people” (37). Just “following the 

rules” is inappropriate interpretation in storytelling, and Ootoova took that 

advice in terms of not only the “old rules” of traditional knowledge but also 

the “new rules” of the Bible. 

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Interestingly, this is in direct contrast with another interviewee, Meeka 

Mike, a 34-year-old in 2000, from Panniqtuuq and living in Iqaluit. She read 

the Bible as highly directive and hence different from the traditional stories, 

and spoke at length of this: 

The Bible, for me, says “This is bad. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” 

It’s very incriminating and it’s so general, directive, that it gives … 

no room for interpretation. But also it gives fear, for the young 

minds, who … don’t have the experience yet. … That’s the 

difference between the Bible and the storytelling. They have the 

same purpose, same cause, just different method. … The 

storytellings can be just as judgmental but at least it gives that 

person “Let me think about it. I can become capable of doing it my 

way, even if it takes me longer to learn.” (10) 

Part of Meeka Mike’s judgment arises from the perceived differences 

between the written form of the Bible and the oral form of storytelling, and 

the judgement she makes is similar to Western/southern distinctions 

between the two that have informed critical debate for many years. Yet 

among the elders I found complex responses to the two media that stressed 

rather different points. Elisapee Ishulutuk felt that stories should be written 

down because this would help out people learning the written language 

(2-3). Stories could be both oral and written. But Evie Aniniliak worried 

that if written in Inuktitut no one would read the stories (7). She also worried 

that reading was a different kind of activity to listening, implicitly not as 

social in a culture where reading is usually a private activity, even though 

she understood the importance of writing stories down to give “the 

information” (7). 

Another interviewee from Panniqtuuq, now living in Iqaluit, was the 

social activist Meeka Kilabuk. She agreed with the anxiety about writing 

everything down, but said that if you write things down you release your 

mind for other things (2). Evie had a contrasting attitude: that because the 

elders had memory, they “had knowledge” (1), and because they kept it 

without writing down, they had it always ready for use with other people. 

Subtly differing, Meeka Mike said that you don’t actually need to tell the 

stories when you are older; if you have had them told to you when young, 

then what they have taught is “ingrained”; “[i]t’s in their heart[s]” (4). It is 

difficult to say whether the differences of approach are an effect of Meeka 

Kilabuk and Meeka Mike having had a Western-styled education. The 

former attended the Churchill residential school and the latter was brought 

up in a local, government-funded school. This background would probably 

develop an appreciation of aspects of the written not of so much concern to 

people brought up before Western schooling. But it may be that the younger 

interviewees simply speak their opinions in a different language. 

To understand some of these differences in attitude it might help if I 

recount Meeka Mike’s suggestion that people from her family involved in 

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social change, as she saw it, were from three or possibly four “eras.” The 

first era is that of people forcibly removed to residential schools in the 50s 

and 60s, who were told that their culture was “bad.” The people of this era 

“were really affected bad mentally, emotionally” (11). Her second era 

siblings in the later 1960s and 70s were “put into school with [their] parents’ 

approval or consultation” (11), yet “a lot of them, I think, found it difficult, 

even with their own personal identity. … So, their way of getting back was 

to negotiate and help out with the land claims and government” (11). The 

third era of the 1980s, her own, she thought of as “more open. We got to 

know more of both sides, that it’s kind of, in a way, equal” (11). Her 

daughter, the possible fourth era of the 21 st century, was “just living and 

seeing. They’re not too preoccupied with where they want tobelong” (11). 

Meeka Kilabuk, who turned out to be an aunt of Meeka Mike, falls within 

the activist characterization of the second era, people who understand how 

to construct access to political power. Meeka Mike used her own work—at 

that time she was a businesswoman—to inform her definition of the third 

era, and her comments below on the way MTAs engage with their 

communities indicate a confidence in her own access. These categories are 

only from one person, of a certain age, and one family, yet they indicate 

profound differences in attitude to political power, differences that 

probably affect the way that the interviewees think about the use of stories 

for social change. It is significant that from within her familial framework, 

Meeka Mike did not perceive the elders, whose education took place in the 

1930s to 1940s, as greatly involved in current political change, although 

they must have been central to the long process of negotiation over the land 

claims and the formation of the government. 

However, the elders have detailed knowledge of the activity of being an 

audience and the social implications of both listening and reading, and of 

the moral and ethical impact of both media. Their reflective awareness of 

the way that their skills in reading the Bible had developed led them to 

describe appropriate reading in the same way as appropriate listening: that 

you cannot be told by either the written or oral text “what to do,” and with 

both media you have to take the story told into your own life and engage 

with it in your own context. In my experience, this understanding is unusual 

in comparison to the limited understanding about reading and writing in 

particular held by many people with a standard Western education, because 

we have been trained to think of them as primarily private activities, and we 

get very little if any formal training in oral telling and listening. 

The more significant rhetorical difference between the oral and the 

written may not, in the context of Inuk stories, be the reading or listening so 

much as the telling. The importance of understanding the position and 

background of the teller of the oral story had been reinforced by the 

reactions to my queries about the possible effects of gender on stories. 

Hence, the absence of the physical presence of the writer when reading 

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raises pertinent questions of experience and trust, underlined by Meeka 

Mike’s concern with the Bible’s apparent claim on authority and truth. 

When an elder with extensive experience recounted her shift from 

automatic obedience to the listening strategies that required her to make the 

stories her own, the Bible’s stories came to be told from immediate spiritual 

experience that constructed a context of responsibility and respect. 16 

To read the Bible as if it claims truth constitutes an experience of 

difference between the reader and writer as one in which, because the teller 

cannot be present, the reader has to accept what they say without knowing if 

they can trust the teller. “Difference” in this kind of reading becomes 

generalizing: one can only understand the Bible by doing what the teller 

says, becoming what they want, accepting their version of the truth. 17 In 

contrast, to read the Bible as a source of traditional knowledge, or reading as 

listening, clarifies a crucial element of the rhetoric of situated textuality 

because it constitutes an experience of difference in which the reader 

acknowledges that they cannot know the teller but accepts responsibility for 

being part of the constitution of difference. Furthermore, because they are 

involved in making the differences that cannot be fully understood or 

known, they can value those differences to the extent of recognizing their 

part in them. Difference is not there because we all differ relatively from 

some kind of universal truth but instead because we recognize that we are 

necessarily partial. We will never fully understand other people, or in this 

case, the Bible, and this is not a negative factor. Rather, we can enjoy and use 

our limitations better to communicate with others. 

The Rhetoric of Stories within Issues of Social Change 

These background issues of gender, education and the media were 

important for my research because they provided some of the specific and 

particular material needed for an understanding of the situated rhetoric of 

the stories. I was keen to explore the hypothesis that storytelling could open 

doors to the concerns of enfranchised but otherwise marginalized citizens. 

All the interviews I conducted converged on this idea, yet here I found a 

widening diversity of views especially between the elders and the younger 

generations. Although some of this diversity may have resulted from 

differences in the way the generations expressed themselves, the changes at 

which those differences hinted were both hopeful and problematic. I offer 

the following analysis with all respect, as part of my own listening and 

learning. I stand to be guided in other directions. 

In terms of any action for social change, the elders made a distinction 

between what they do as a community of elders, what the hamlet or the 

community of Panniqtuuq does and what the Nunavut government does. 

For example, Elisapee Ishulutuk felt that the elders were not as informed as 

they might be of things happening in the hamlet, so there was less 

opportunity and less initiative to get involved with social change in the 

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community. She described how some convenient and pleasant housing had 

been built, and she was “surprised” (6) that she was offered one of the 

houses to live in. She was grateful for the housing but not informed. As a 

result of the lack of information she said she often felt useless and did not 

know where to go or whom to contact. At community meetings she had 

made suggestions, but was told [and implicitly overruled with], “[I]t’s 

taught in that meeting how important it [the current action] is to this 

community” (6). In other words, there is little engaged discussion but more 

persuasive effort for previous decisions. Most important, she said, “By 

myself, I don’t think I will make much difference. If I had more people 

involved, more elders in there, I think, would have more sayings [i.e., 

tellings]” (6). 

Although Elisapee Ishulutuk had said that the elders told stories about 

everything to each other, even garbage disposal (1), she was not sure, when 

asked, if storytelling would help in the hamlet meetings, although she 

implied that it might if there were other elders there (7). I asked if she knew 

why there was not much storytelling during the televised Nunavut 

government sessions, and she answered that the MTAs were “working 

really hard on what the Nunavut government should be” (2). In other words, 

storytelling takes too long. At the same time she said that sometimes she 

would shout at the television, “Why don’t you do our stories?” (2). This 

response recognized that Western/southern rhetorical practices in 

government are not conducive either to the situated textuality of stories or to 

the length of time that such communication makes necessary. At the same 

time it also recognized that the length of stories may be offset by their more 

effective impact, and that they knit together the present with the past to 

generate resolutions that are practical in the long term because they involve 

the history of traditions that are woven into society. 

When Evie Aniniliak was asked the same question she said that she 

thought in some cases it would help to tell stories because the government 

was supposed to be in accordance with the “Inuit lifestyle,” so in some cases 

stories would be more effective (4). She also noted that while the 

government was “trying,” she did not see its work reaching the 

communities at the present (3). She reiterated that when talking with other 

elders stories were often used, but that they did not bring this kind of telling 

to the committees that change things in the community. The reason they do 

not is that when they “voice themselves,” younger people are disrespectful 

and their words are not effective (3). When they “try and voice” it is not 

listened to. On the other hand she did not think this was to do with the form 

of the telling: even if they did not use stories, the young would be 

disrespectful and tell them that it was “a long time ago.” 

In my opinion, one of the primary reasons this occurs is that 

Western/southern styles of communication in government are skewed 

toward strategies that offer information and focus on rights and wrongs. 

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The debate structure of most levels of government is embarrassed by story 

and while it enjoys anecdote, it rarely acts upon it. So-called ad hominem 

arguments are dismissed because they are read either as trivial attempts to 

universalize or as reflections on the relative state of the individual rather 

than offering a basis for people to take them into their own lives and think 

about the implications. This latter process would be considered altogether 

too personal for members of parliament who, in Western liberal democratic 

governments, are almost all “representatives.” Given that it could be argued 

that an MTA is not a representative but an advocate in the sense used by Nira 

Yuval-Davis (1997, chap. 6), alternative rhetorics for social and political 

communication may be more appropriate in the Nunavut government. 18 

Part of the disinclination of the elders to involve themselves in local 

social change by the Elders to whom I spoke, stems from the experience of 

being ignored or disrespected. At the same time they recognize that the 

stories that carry traditional knowledge in which they are rich are 

considered inappropriate for contemporary politics, even though they can 

see the need for them. One of the central elements is time: the elders 

understood that the Nunavut government was under pressure and that time 

is scarce. And the one thing stories take is time. When asked to tell a story, 

one of the elders interviewed in Iqaluit, Hervé Paniaq, replied, “If we start 

storytelling now, the day is going to be too short” (53), but he went on to tell 

a story presumably because it was the most appropriate way of telling what 

he needed to say. 

Meeka Kilabuk commented that there was no point telling stories as such 

in government because you need to get things done. Also, pertinently, 

different communities need different approaches: what works in one place 

may not be appropriate for another. Ms. Kilabuk has very wide experience 

in organizing and northern politics, having been the only female founder of 

the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada in 1971. At the time of interview she was in 

charge of the Nunavut Council for People with Disabilities. Her sensitivity 

to the different needs of the various communities stems from a commitment 

to working with what she called “good socialism.” She suggested that if you 

work for the communities, not for yourself, you fuse the personal with the 

political, and you necessarily see and value the differences that are there. 

Nevertheless, despite the articulate analysis, Ms. Kilabuk’s discussion of 

the issues moved step-by-step to demonstration and guidance. I was being 

told a story and I have to confess that I did not recognize this at the time. The 

discussion was slowly turned to the way Inuit communicate, and she noted 

that if you have something specific to say, people like you to get to the point, 

while stories “take you round the bush.” The oral culture also has an effect 

on this kind of discourse: people used to the oral medium have good 

memories and can listen well; they “pay attention,” while Qallunaat do not 

understand this: they need things repeated. 

71



She then proceeded to tell the story, presumably deducing correctly that I 

would not be able to begin to “understand” by way of a more direct 

approach. Meeka Kilabuk wants to write a book about the beluga whale and 

is on the South-East Baffin committee on animal rights and fur issues. The 

committee, which combines science with traditional knowledge, had a 

meeting to which the fisheries department came with one page of scientific 

information and the Inuit came back with many pages on different kinds of 

hunting. Hunting is not “understood” in the south, and the Inuk members 

were trying to explain it to prove their credibility when they made 

statements based on it. In other words they were providing a story in order to 

demonstrate the appropriate context to people who did not understand, just 

as Meeka Kilabuk was providing me with a story to help me understand 

which stories may or may not be appropriate in government. 

I would say that the demonstration taught me these things: that we cannot 

be confident that people will know about the appropriate context; that a 

surprising number of people do not even know that it is appropriateness 

rather than fact-finding that is important for any given context; that when 

many communities come together in the extraordinary entity that is 

Nunavut, they feel common cause; yet, as the elders indicated, their 

strength comes also from their ability to value difference, and difference is 

effectively negotiated through time and interactive engagement, which 

speed and directness may jeopardize. All these elements were part of the 

storytelling to which I listened, and all contributed to the critical view 

offered by Kilabuk, that although storytelling wouldn’t work in the current 

government structure, it is a vital communication strategy for Nunavut 

today. 

The youngest interviewee, Meeka Mike, also stated that you don’t tell 

stories when the matter is something serious like government. It is not that 

the stories are not serious, but they are serious “in a light way.” Just as 

Meeka Kilabuk began by analyzing the absence or presence of story in a 

discursive style common to Western politics, Meeka Mike’s vocabulary for 

describing the value of stories was revealing of a wider, psychologized, 

context. As previously noted, she argues that the stories are “ingrained” in 

your heart; when it comes to serious things, you practise what you have 

learned from the stories but do not say them out loud (4). The advice or the 

moral of the story becomes experience that is part of your body (5). Once in 

your head, “when it comes to real life,” you could think about the story and 

apply it but would not necessarily say it or tell it yourself. 

Yet she, with growing although still small numbers of others, is trying to 

understand and preserve the storytelling traditions. She found herself 

telling her daughter many stories, some traditional, some made up. And just 

like the elders’ stories, these could be legends, actual truths or happenings 

(4). Some were “to be advised, but also [some were] lessons learned from 

those stories” (4). Meeka Mike told me several examples. One story is 

72



traditional, about the sea-pigeon, which uses its own “poo” to keep itself 

warm in the winter (4): a story about the adaptations needed to survive. 

Another story was about a little bird, a husband and the nest: the little bird 

crash-lands “and the husband starts crying, and hurting to the point all the 

kids are crying … The funny part is that it crash-lands! But if you 

crash-land, you’ll get a lot of yelling and screaming and have an effect on 

the younger ones” (1). A third story she had made up herself. It was about 

her daughter and how there was a ladder ready for her, “[s]tep by step [she 

told her daughter], but you like to go this way,” to rush and to go around (2). 

There are also stories to “make you think on how sometimes things can 

come back around. … It can help you plan ahead or, mostly to be nice to 

other people” (3). 

At the same time, stories will have a different impact depending on the 

upbringing of the tellers and listeners (9); you cannot generalize. The 

important thing is that “the stories give the person or child a chance to think 

about what’s in the story,” so they become investigative and creative (9). 

The listener has to figure it out for him or herself (9), and the teller has to let 

the listener pick up whatever they can from the story. The story has to make 

available something that the listener can turn into their own experience and 

“take ownership” of (10). This process is the same for adults as it is for 

children, and Meeka Mike spoke of the healing power of stories to bring 

together separated generations, especially the generations that were sent to 

residential schools from the 1950s to 1970s (10–11). In her perception the 

stories are told when people are “well, and in tune, and not destructive” 

(14). 

When I asked about the possible gendered division of storytelling and 

social change, Meeka Mike reiterated the perceptions of the elders: men do 

tell stories, “even the same stories,” but with a different approach and a 

different application, for example, to hunting (7). As a businesswoman 

taking tourists hunting and fishing, Ms. Mike said she spends a lot of time 

with men and learns so much even from one little story because “the words 

are so specific and have very good meaning … [so] you bring out all kinds of 

subjects out of it” (12). She pointed out that while many children nowadays 

spend a lot of time with their mothers and do probably get more stories from 

them (7), it depends on the parents. She, for example, spent a lot of time with 

her father, who taught her hunting and told her stories (13). 

She firmly argued that you cannot separate the social changes effected by 

men and women because those changes will involve everybody. But 

women do get together over sewing, cleaning skins, helping each other out. 

When they talk among themselves you can “note how a way creates a trend 

and the way it goes to the political level” (8), but not through lobbying. If 

there is a unity or consensus the politician comes to understand it because 

political leaders are in the community and in a small community you know 

who is trustworthy or not, who is knowledgeable (8). If they are, they get 

73



elected. In the new Nunavut government, MTAs have to spend more time 

away from the community but they are least from the community. Ms. Mike 

suggested that the personal invocations I had frequently found in Hansard, 

especially in the comments that emerge in “Recognition of Visitors in the 

Gallery” such as “I would like to thank so and so’s sister …,” subtly indicate 

that you have first-hand experience. Therefore it is still important to 

indicate as an MTA who you are, what your context is and that you have 

experience. If this parallels a feature of the storyteller, more difficult for me 

is how the “listener,” the individual in a much larger public, responds. After 

all, government decisions are not stories. They do not leave things up to 

you. 

One-word Stories 

That subtle recognition of “experience” was analogous to a number of 

comments made by both Meeka Kilabuk and Meeka Mike. When the latter 

was speaking of learning from hunter’s stories, she told of one story from 

North Baffin, with a particular word for a kind of “coldness” specific to 

Iglulik. The word had gone out of use, so we can only guess at its precise 

meaning, but it indicated a situated context that made sense of the story (14). 

Meeka Kilabuk pursued her story of the beluga whales to describe how the 

fisheries’ vocabulary of “stock,” “pod” and “harvest” gave the “wrong 

words” for the Inuit thinking about hunting whales. For her it was important 

to use Inuktitut because “it conveys a different way of life, different 

meanings.” The drafting of the report was partly done in Edmonton where 

their advisor was, and words became difficult simply because of 

geographical dislocation. As an example of the specificity of words, she 

concluded with the following story about ajurnarmat: 

[S]ay your husband is coming but bad weather stops him: and you 

are disappointed because your whole heart was set for that day, are 

you going to cry? make everyone miserable? My mother says 

“that’s how the cookie crumbles,” it can’t be helped. And this 

helped with comfort: don’t even be disappointed, spare yourself: 

ajurnarmat. 

I was struck by how often my translator Lizzie Karpik would stop to ask 

an elder the meaning of a word that had been used. This also happens 

throughout the published Iqaluit interviews in Interviewing. Every so often 

the interviewers, translator and elder would stop to discuss different words, 

words that were indistinguishable to the questioner but distinct to the elder. 

For example, Elisapee Ootoova was asked about the distinction between 

siqqitiqtuq (the right path) and siqqitirniq (conversion), and whether the 

former was related to siqqatiqtuq (wetting with water). She was insistent on 

the specific meanings: 

EO: if we’re on land, we’re on land. If we go on the shore into the 

water, I would say siqqippugut. When they leave an old way of life 

that way, it’s siqqitiqtuq, going on the right path. 

74



Q: Was that different from saaqiaqtuq? 

EO: It’s not the same word. (56) 

Or there was Paniaq’s story about “that which remains undisclosed,” which 

is anngiaqaqtuviniq (58). Or Ootoova’s description of “healing … to get rid 

of their pain … letting gooftheir wrong doings,” which isaniattunik (59). 

Meeka Mike, when asked directly about the potential power of stories to 

offer context in political discussions, said, “We’re using words now, Inuit 

words, in certain strategies that the government publish[es] to be used in the 

next five years, instead of stories. And that, right away, gives what kind of 

direction this is going to be” (14). Her example was Toomeet, the Inuktitut 

word for “gathering” that is also the name of the new parliamentary 

building. She said that people could now relate to the place of government 

because it was a recognisable word. I suggested that this made words into 

“one-word stories,” and she agreed, saying that there was a word, “scalpin,” 

that described a kind of person who could be understood through a story she 

had forgotten; she knew what behaviour the word referred to, but did not 

remember the story. At that point her father entered the house, and she asked 

him about the story, and translated his words as follows. 

Boat, the fish, the char and the scalpin. The scalpin was a man who 

married a fish and they got told, “You won’t be able to get up the 

river, so don’t marry her. You won’t be able to follow, even if she 

becomes your wife. So, don’t marry her.” So, when the time came 

to go up the river for the winter, the scalpin couldn’t go up, couldn’t 

make it. 

And the scalpin’s excuse was that he keeps slipping from the, you 

know, the saliva-like stuff that comes out of the fish, that leaves it 

on the rock or it scrapes off on the rock? But the terms used were, “I 

can’t get up, because of the mucus of that female. So I can’t make it 

up the rock.” 

It’s a long story, he says. It’s a good one, a funny one. (14–15) 

The scalpin is a type of fish caught by the Inuit along the shoreline, and is 

rather slimy with a spiny head. The mucus it slips on may not be hers but his 

own. There are many ways of listening to this story, as I have found out from 

the number of people who have offered re-tellings in the course of 

producing this essay. The point is that if someone is referred to as “scalpin,” 

the word involves them in the story the listener tells to themselves, and from 

which they arrive at quite particular knowledge about that person. The 

knowledge may not be what the teller of the original story intended nor 

accurate with regard to the person called “scalpin,” but it informs the world 

of the listener and provides them with a basis for action. 

The process demonstrates the way a rhetorical device can work within 

the situated textuality of traditional knowledge. Traditional knowledge is 

75



recognized by communities as knowledge that people can learn in a situated 

manner. It may or may not be generated by individuals who have 

“intention,” but it is time, and the way time weaves texts into tradition, that 

defines its ability to provide a textuality that engages the listener in 

identifying how they are involved in the constitution of recognized 

significance and difference, of situated knowledge. 

Conclusion 

The research I intended to do was concerned with the way women in 

Nunavut used stories to effect social change. What I learned about was a 

more specific understanding of the perspective of several women largely 

from one community, Panniqtuuq, on the work of stories and their relation 

to social and political change. I was, and am, committed to describing the 

various textualities that can communicate situated knowledge. What I 

learned was an enormous amount about the engaged rhetoric of learning 

tacit knowledge, which offered insights into the rhetorical structures of 

traditional knowledge. Situated knowledge throws forward the condition of 

all knowledge (whether or not it is acknowledged), that it is partial and 

always in the process of change, and constructs social relations on these 

terms. The stories told by the Inuit recounted here deal with a wide spectrum 

of knowledge, from information to wisdom to belief. In the first part of this 

paper I explored the ways in which stories depend on a rhetorical stance that 

makes evident the particularities for all of these areas, and paid special 

attention to the experience of the teller and the way the listener makes the 

story their own. In the latter part of this paper I looked at the way stories 

were once used for social change, and questioned why they are not more a 

part of the new political discourse of Nunavut, particularly at government 

level. 

There are few if any stories told in Hansard, probably because they are 

not a conventional political discourse; there may be a perception that stories 

would expose the parliament to ridicule. The average MTAmay be from the 

generations sent away for schooling and may not have the ongoing 

experience of storytelling as a way of knowing. More important, even if 

there are elements in the MTAs’ speeches of an awareness of how to 

construct the teller, who is the listener? And most fundamental, there is the 

urgency of time in establishing a functioning government that militates 

against the time needed for telling stories. The possibility of incorporating a 

rhetoric of story into public communication is not a matter of empowering 

people excluded from government. The current work of politicians in 

Nunavut speaks to inclusive participation. What it could effect, though, is 

the raising of awareness of issues resistant to the speed and the oppositional 

structure of debate. It could make possible a more democratic humanism as 

the basis for social change, so that people could participate on the terms of 

traditional knowledge as well as of liberal rhetoric. 

76



At the centre of most of these interviews, despite an awareness of the 

current inappropriateness of storytelling for Western/southern-style 

government, is the belief that stories engage an audience, involve them in 

communal exchange and responsibility that is at the heart of social change 

woven into engaged ethics. If Nunavut politics and the social change it 

effects are to avoid becoming directive and authoritative, and to avoid the 

enclosed or oppositional structures of normative “southern” politics that 

proceed on self-evident bases, it could think about rhetorical strategies to 

put into place a teller–listener relationship. As already noted there are Inuk 

lifestyle elements in government. Several MTAs spoke with approval of the 

activities of drum dancing and lighting of the qilliq incorporated into the 

first Rankin Inlet session, so there may be room for more. Furthermore, 

MTAs are not party-based but community-based, hence not automatically 

oppositional as are the debate-led structures of many Western nation-states. 

The sessions are televised and perhaps an imaginative use of televisionresponse 

potential could put into place at least one “listener’s” strategy. 

Possibly, the government could encourage participation by elders in a 

parallel structure: there is no “senate,” but all government benefits from 

experience. If the territory is to remember not only the urgency but also the 

“other time,” the longer term needed to sustain a modern Inuk lifestyle past 

the present moment, it could make good use of that experience and of the 

vibrant cultural practice of storytelling. 

Teller and listener have to work initially from common ground. Without 

some common ground the listener would not bother to listen and certainly 

could not make a story appropriate to their own life. Nor could they assess 

the experience of the teller, or value the knowledge they were learning. In 

rhetorical terms, though, working from common ground can lead to 

enclosed mindsets; it can be used to reinforce the stereotypical and 

conventional representation. Furthermore, even when common ground is 

disagreed upon, it may simply lead to an oppositional response, an agonistic 

fight that always leaves either the teller or the listener at a disadvantage or 

wounded. What this exploration of storytelling demonstrated to me was 

that something else was going on: the teller and listener effectively 

constitute an event where there is a subtle negotiation between the context 

of each. They find common ground, but the textuality also points out 

differences; indeed, it constructs those differences and situates them in 

different places. Yet because the differences have been constructed in the 

course of negotiating, each learns why they are there, how they come about, 

where they stand in relation to the other’s difference; indeed, each makes 

the difference from the other. It is an engaged rhetorical stance that is neither 

authoritative nor relativist. The storytelling is embedded in a long-term 

rhetoric that sustains a community with change through the construction 

and valuing of differences. 

77



Notes 

1. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards 

a Radical Democratic Politics, trans W. Moore and P. Cammack (London: 

Verso, 1985) 113. Mouffe and Laclau use the word “articulation” in a manner 

different to my own because they locate its work within “discourse,” and seem 

unconcerned with any activity that occurs outside of hegemony. However, on 

pages 135–36, they seem to allow for both “antagonism” and “articulation” to 

occur without hegemony. 

2. All interviews were obtained through Nunavut Research Institute Licence 

0101900N-A. The page numbers refer to the pages in the transcriptions of the 

tapes I made. These are available for viewing on application to the interviewee 

concerned. Part of the research was made possible by a grant from the Canadian 

Studies Faculty Research Program (UK) and the Canadian Studies Centre at the 

University of Leeds. 

3. These interviews were established through introductions by Peter Kulchyski who 

was running the Trent University summer school in Panniqtuuq (in its fourth 

year). The interviews were subject to the regulations of the research licence, and 

each interview was paid for. The interviewees spoke Inuktitut and translator 

Lizzie Karpik conducted simultaneous translation between that language and 

English. Karpik was also paid the suggested rate, and was responsible for 

translating the finished transcripts and this article back to the interviewees for 

their critique and comments. The interviews were conducted in the homes of the 

interviewees at times of their choosing. I explained that I was a researcher from 

the University of Leeds in England, and that I was interested in hearing their 

views on if and why they told stories, and whether stories might be effective for 

social change. The one exception to this process was the collective meeting at the 

Angmarlik Centre in Panniqtuuq, to which eight elders in the community came. 

All were paid the suggested rate, and my questioning and the translation followed 

the main pattern. 

4. These interviews were conducted in English without the presence of a translator 

and were paid for at the advised rate. The interviewees were sent copies of the 

transcripts and of this article for their critique and comments. 

5. Because the interviewees were translated simultaneously, the transcripts 

sometimes read in the first person and sometimes in the third depending on 

whether the translator performed direct translations (first person) or reported 

translations (third person, such as “She says … ” ). Quotations remain faithful to 

the transcripts. 

6. See the Cambridge University Press series, Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive 

& Computational Perspectives, especially books published in the last five years, 

for other perspectives. 

7. Although “obedience” is part of the word, see Interviewing, “If she listened, then 

she wasn’t abused” (25). 

8. This experience is recounted independently by several non-Inuit listeners to 

storytelling, including D. Eber, When the Whalers Were Up North: Inuit 

Memories for the Eastern Arctic (Boston: David R. Godine, 1989) 170–71. 

9. Peter Kulchyski identified these as two of the key “Six Gesture” in a lecture of 

that name given to the Panniqtuuq summer course in 2000. 

10. To some extent I have been guided by the four categories opened out by Louise 

Profeit-Leblanc (2002), here and later in the essay. 

78



11. A Quickstop is a general store, usually with a fast food counter providing 

conventional/southern fast food. 

12. The summer course was organized by Peter Kulchyski of Trent University. It was 

in its fifth year in 2000, and is currently run by Professor Kulchyski as part of his 

current work for the University of Manitoba. Students in the course live alongside 

the community of Panniqtuuq for six weeks, taking courses and working with 

various members of the community. They also go on a ten-day visit to one of the 

camps to learn about living with the land. 

13. See Jim Cheney, “The Moral Epistemology of Indigenous Stories,” Canadian 

Journal of Environmental Education 7:2, 181–88, for comments on rocks and 

humans. 

14. The delineation runs parallel with a comment from Louise Profeit-Leblanc 

(2002) on the concept of stories being “responsibly true.” Jim Cheney reports a 

conversation with Profeit-Leblanc during which she uses the term “‘t i anc oh’ 

(usually glossed as ‘what they say, it’s true’) and defined is as meaning ‘correctly 

true,’ ‘responsibly true’ (a ‘responsible truth’), ‘true to what you believe in,’ 

‘what is good for you and the community’ and ‘rings true for everybody’s 

well-being,’ in “Sacred Land,” in Jickling 1996. 

15. The one formal occasion on which I did so was at the Angmaarlik Centre, and, 

appropriate to my own gender position, in a mixed group of men and women. I 

have also included a few of the many oral histories by men that I have read in the 

discussion above. 

16. C. Geddes, in a 1996 panel discussion by Yukon First Nations people on the topic 

“What is a good way to teach children and young adults to respect the land?” In 

Jickling 1996, 32–48. 

17. For a fuller discussion on the differences in ethical power between the oral and the 

written see E. Levinas (1961) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. 

A. Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969), for example, 213. 

18. See J. Mansbridge, “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in S. Benhabib 

(ed.) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) for pragmatic suggestions on how 

these have been implemented in other locations. 

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Pateman, C. (1995) Democracy, Freedom and Special Rights, Swansea: University of 

Wales. 

———. (1979) The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory, 

Cambridge: Polity. 

———. ‘“God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper’: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal 

Right” in Shanley and Pateman. 1991. 

Pauktuutit (1991) Arnait: the views of Inuit Women on Contemporary Issues. Ottawa: 

Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association. 

Petrone, P. (ed) (1988) Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English, Toronto: University 

of Toronto Press. 

Profeit-Leblanc, L. (2002) “Four Faces of Story,” Canadian Journal of Environmental 

Education 7:2, 47–53. 

Spivak, G. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the 

Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

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Walker, M. (1998) Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, London: 

Routledge. 

Yukon First Nations, Council of (2000) Traditional Knowledge Research Guidelines: 

A Guide for Researchers in the Yukon. Whitehorse: Council of Yukon First 

Nations. 

Young, I. (1997) Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and 

Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage. 

81

Michelle Daveluy 

Language Policies and Responsibilities in the 

Canadian North 

Abstract 

In Canada, languages are managed nationally as much as locally. As many as 

three levels of administration can be involved since provincial or territorial 

legislations, and municipal regulations, co-exist with countrywide language 

laws. Rulings apply within specific jurisdictions. This paper presents how the 

Canadian Inuit language situation is framed within these multiple layers of 

intervention. Specific attention is devoted to two northern areas mainly 

populated by Inuit—Nunavut and Nunavik—where trilingualism is currently 

promoted. In both cases, the objective is to grant official status to the 

languages of the Inuit, English, and French. However, language policies with 

which the Inuit are also associated at the international level promote 

bilingualism rather than trilingualism in the circumpolar North. In this 

instance, the languages of the Inuit and English are selected. As a 

consequence, language promotion efforts are split between trilingualism and 

bilingualism, but also between proposed bilingualisms (English and French 

at the national level versus the languages of the Inuit and English from an 

international pan-Inuit perspective). I argue that in the process of granting 

official status to the language of the Inuit, respective responsibilities in 

sustaining languages in Canada must remain clearly established. 

Résumé 

Au Canada, les langues sont gérées à la fois sur le plan national et sur le plan 

régional. Jusqu’à trois paliers d’administration peuvent y être mêlés, puisque 

les lois provinciales ou territoriales ainsi que des règlements municipaux 

existent en parallèle avec les lois linguistiques à l’échelle du pays. Les 

décisions s’appliquent à l’intérieur de juridictions précises. La présente 

communication décrit la façon dont la situation dans laquelle se trouve la 

langue inuit au Canada est structurée par cette intervention à multiples 

paliers. On se concentre principalement sur deux régions nordiques qui sont 

habitées pour la plupart par des Inuit — Nunavut et Nunavik — soit là où le 

trilinguisme est promu à l’heure actuelle. Dans les deux cas, l’objectif est 

d’accorder le statut officiel aux langues des Inuit, des anglophones et des 

francophones. Cependant, les politiques en matière de langue auxquelles les 

Inuit sont également associés sur le plan international visent la promotion du 

bilinguisme plutôt que celle du trilinguisme dans le Nord circumpolaire. 

Dans ce cas, les langues des Inuit et de l’anglais sont sélectionnées. Par 

conséquent, les efforts visant à promouvoir des langues sont divisés non 

seulement entre le trilinguisme et le bilinguisme, mais aussi entre les 


30, 2004



bilinguismes proposés (l’anglais et le français au niveau national contre les 

langues des Inuit et de l’anglais dans une perspective pan-inuit 

internationale). Je soutiens que, alors que l’on accorde le statut officiel à la 

langue des Inuit, on doit aussi maintenir les responsabilités respectives dans 

la gestion des langues au Canada. 

In negotiations with native groups, ample evidence supports the generally 

agreed upon assessment that language issues were for a long time in Canada 

subordinated to land and jurisdictions claims (Burnaby 1992, 309; Trudel 

1992; Dorais 2003). To a certain extent, the Inuit appear as a counter 

example to this scenario (Daveluy 2004a). This is particularly the case in 

northern Quebec, where Nunavik emerged as an administrative entity in 

1975 under the James Bay and Northen Quebec Agreement (JBNQA). 

Among factors that have contributed to the maintenance of the language of 

the Inuit, the JBNQA was instrumental through the provision of control of 

education to Aboriginal groups (Daveluy 2004b). Still, the Nunavut 

language policy and the one currently proposed for Nunavik indicate the 

Canadian government favours a single model for the management of 

languages used in the North. Inuktitut (the language of the Inuit), English 

and French are already considered official languages in Nunavut, and the 

exact same arrangment is proposed for Nunavik. I interpret the fact that very 

limited attention has been devoted so far to the respective contexts in which 

this official trilingualism is proposed as a confirmation that languages 

remain a low priority in negotiations between the Inuit and the Canadian 

government. Implementing trilingualism will require adjustments 

according to circumstances simply because Nunavut is a territory while 

Nunavik remains a region within a province. 

Some supra-national agencies such as Lingua Pax promote trilingualism 

as well (Daveluy 2002a, 2002b). Perhaps the Canadian approach is 

influenced by trends currently highly relevant in Europe. However, the 

efficiency of the adopted model remains to be assessed specifically for the 

Canadian North (Daveluy 2002c, 2003b). It will become clear later in this 

paper that official trilingualism does not necessarily correspond to 

Canadian Inuit stands regarding languages in the areas they inhabit. 

In an attempt to provide a northern perspective regarding language 

management, I will first describe some relevant aspects of the language 

strategy the Inuit have developed at the international level. Then I will focus 

on the situation in Canada, starting with Nunavik, which historically 

precedes the establishment of Nunavut. 

Working Language(s) of the North 

For the Inuit, Inuit nunangat (or Inuit nunaat), is their land (Dorais 1990, 

189). Inuit nunangat extends over different countries in the circumpolar 

world and is not a political, legal or administrative entity. It refers to areas 

84

Language Policies and Responsibilities in the Canadian North 

Produced by Makivik Cartographic Service. 

Canadian Inuit 

Greenland Inuit 

Alaskan Inuit 

Russian Inuit 

Other Arctic 

where the Inuit dwelled prior to the arrival of Europeans in the vast region 

they inhabit. 

The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) is the international 

organization of the Inuit living in the arctic regions of Greenland, Canada, 

Alaska and Chukotka, in Russia. ICC represents approximately 150,000 

individuals. 1 It obtained the status of a non-governmental agency in 1983 

(Saladin d’Anglure 1992, 524). Saladin D’Anglure writes: 

C’était pour elle [ICC] le résultat d’un choix politique qui 

correspondait d’une part à l’ampleur des problèmes rencontrés par 

les Inuit face à des super-puissances comme l’URSS et les 

États-Unis mais face aussi à des démocraties libérales comme le 

Canada et le Danemark qui connaissaient une évolution majeure 

dans leurs options politiques: rapatriement de la Constitution 

canadienne de Londres et nouvelle prise en considération des 

questions autochtones, pour ce qui est du Canada; intégration dans 

le Marché commun et autonomie accordée au Groenland, pour ce 

qui est du Danemark. (530) 

The Inuit ICC represents are unevenly distributed on a large territory. If 

some live in stratified urban settings, such as Iqaluit and Kuujjuaq in 

Canada, or Nuuk in Greenland, many have settled in isolated communities. 

Accordingly, language variation exists in the ways of speaking one’s 

language in this part of the world. The notion of linguistic continuum is 

85



often used to explain this phenomenon: greater differentiation is to be 

expected at the ends of a spectrum than among contiguous subgroups. In 

this regard, it is worth keeping in mind that few linguistic theories are 

conceived specifically for populations occupying extensive portions of 

land. Accounting for a language dynamic in an entity of the scope of the 

circumpolar region requires including both dispersed and condensed 

segments of the population. 

Off-shore exploration in the Beaufort area in the 1970s prompted the 

development of a circumpolar united front: 

Une grande aventure linguistique, culturelle et politique 

commençait pour les Inuit des régions circumpolaires qui avaient 

accepté de se rassembler sous le terme Inuit (terme qui signifie les 

“hommes,” en usage dans le Nord-Alaska et l’Arctique canadien) 

pour les besoins de l’unité ethnique, alors que dans le sud-Alaska 

les habitants se définissaient comme Yupiit, et au Groenland 

comme Kalaallit, tous partageant cependant une même grande 

culture. (Saladin d’Anglure 1992, 532) 

In a pattern already noted in the Canadian context, challenges were very 

rapidly framed in political terms pertaining to land rights, regional 

autonomy and self-development (531). 

Under the circumstances, the ICC’s position on language is unambiguous. 

As reported by Dorais (1990, 257), it acknowledges linguistic 

differences while setting a shared objective: “… the native languages of the 

Inuit are technically one language and … as such, … should become the 

working language of the North” (ICC 1983). The functional aspect of the 

approach is clear. The language of the Inuit is associated with the job 

market, in an economic rather than cultural perspective. We will see later on 

that the Canadian Inuit have fully adopted this view, in particular in 

Nunavut. 

Through ICC, Inuit are associated with the Universal Declaration of 

Linguistic Rights (UDLR). Drafted in 1996, the UDLR aims at organizing 

linguistic diversity so as to foster effective participation of language 

communities in their own growth. The UDLR focuses on equality of 

linguistic rights. Carl Olsen, an Inuk linguist from Nuuk, the capital of 

Greenland, signed the Declaration on behalf of ICC in his capacity as 

executive council member. 2 

The UDLR takes language communities and groups, rather than states, 

as its point of departure. This clearly establishes the UDLR as distinct from 

previous conventions adopted internationally. (For example, the 1992 

European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages frames languages 

within territories rather than communities. 3 ) In this perspective, the UDLR 

is relevant for peoples and languages overlapping countries and their 

86


frontiers. For example, the speakers of Catalan, living in Spain and France, 

fit the definition of a language community as defined in article 1.1: 

This Declaration considers as a language community any human 

society established historically in a particular territorial space, 

whether this space be recognized or not, which identifies itself as a 

people and has developed a common language as a natural means 

of communication and cultural cohesion among its members. 

With the development of a pan-Arctic identity transcending borders, the 

Inuit also fit this definition, even if they are distributed over a large territory 

rather than concentrated on a relatively small portion of land as the Catalans 

are. 

Another feature in the UDLR that suits the circumpolar Inuit language 

dynamic well is the deliberate move away from often-used language labels. 

Avoided terms include official, non-official, national, regional, local, 

minority, majority, modern, and archaic. None of these terms adequately 

describe the Inuit situation in its globality. The rationale for abstaining to 

use these words is provided in article 5: 

This Declaration is based on the principle that the rights of all 

language communities are equal and independent of the legal or 

political status of their languages as official, regional or minority 

languages. Terms such as regional or minority languages are not 

used in this Declaration because, though in certain cases the 

recognition of regional or minority languages can facilitate the 

exercise of certain rights, these and other modifiers are frequently 

used to restrict the rights of language communities. 

Finally, the link established between sovereignty, self-governance and 

language maintenance, in the preamble of the UDLR, is highly pertinent to 

the Inuit. In Greenland, the Inuit have been involved in the Home Rule 

system since the end of the 1970s while, as will be discussed in section 2, the 

issue of self-governance is continuously gaining momentum in Canada. 

In summary, the main features of the circumpolar language strategy to be 

discussed here include: 1) framing language in a collective perspective, as 

proposed in the UDLR; 2) minimizing differences by presenting the various 

ways the Inuit speak as a single linguistic system, as suggested by the ICC; 

3) limiting lobbying activities to a given domain of language use, for 

example, work; and 4) adopting an innovative stance, illustrated both by the 

avoided language related vocabulary and the overt link between language 

maintenance and sovereignty in the UDLR. Focusing on the Canadian 

Inuit, the limited applicability of the strategy will become apparent. 

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One-fits–all in the Canadian North 

According to statistics issued in 2003, there are around 45,000 Inuit in 

Canada. Most of them live in the northern portion of the country: over 

20,000 in Nunavut and a little less than 10,000 in Nunavik. In both these 

areas the Inuit represent more than 80% of the population. 4 

The Canadian Inuit have signed four comprehensive land claim 

agreements: 1) the 1975 JBNQA; 2) the 1984 Inuvialuit Final Agreement; 

3) the 1993 Nunavut Final Agreement; and 4) the 2004 Labrador Final 

Agreement. The JBNQA did not address the issue of self-government 

directly. We will see this situation is in the process of being changed. The 

implementation of Nunavut in 1999 corresponds to the beginning of a new 

round of negotiations in Nunavik. 

Redesigning Nunavik 

There are no language-specific clauses in the JBNQA. It is rather through 

the implementation of health services and schooling that Cree and Inuktitut 

have been supported in the region. 

… [I]n exchange for the extinction of their territorial rights in 

Northern Quebec, they [the Inuit] would receive a sum of 125 

million dollars. They would also form a regional government, with 

municipal powers. From 1978 on, the educational system was to be 

run by the Inuit themselves. The Federal and Provincial schools 

were to be replaced by institutions where Inuktitut would be taught 

as the first language and English as a foreign tongue. French would 

be introduced only in the communities wishing to do so. (Dorais 

1979, 74) 

Indeed, the Inuit and Cree school boards have been responsible for 

education in Nunavik and James Bay respectively since 1978. 5 In each 

settlement in Nunavik, there is at least one school. From kindergarten to 

grade 3, children are instructed in Inuktitut. In grade 4, students choose 

between the French or English streams, their native tongue becoming a 

subject of instruction among a number of subject matters covered in the 

curriculum. In terms of health, there is a clinic in each community. Specially 

trained interpreters are available on site. Time has shown that through local 

control of service delivery, language has been reclaimed as a central part of 

community life. 

Clauses corresponding exactly to the health and education provisions of 

the James Bay Agreement also appear in the Chartre de la langue française 

du Québec, which made the province unilingual (Quebec Government 

1977, 3-4). 6 Since both laws were implemented simultaneously in 1977, 

this is an instance of negotiated linguistic peace (Daveluy 2004a, 2003b), 

with positive outcomes for the Inuit (and the Cree). The fact that the 

provincial legislation and the JBNQA complement each other has 

88


contributed to the sustaining of the languages of the Inuit (and the Cree) in 

northern Quebec. 

However, there was initially confusion in Nunavik regarding provincial 

French unilingualism. 

Even if the Indians and Inuit ruled by the James Bay agreement 

were not concerned by this law, in August and September 1977, 

after Bill 101 [Chartre de la langue française du Québec] was 

formally promulgated, The Northern Quebec Inuit Association 

organized manifestations of protest in many villages. Inuit feared 

that the law would deprive them of the right to speak English. 

(Dorais 1979,75) 

Remnants of this confusion were still common in the 1990s. Few having 

read the two texts of law in question, even academics were sometimes 

inadvertently contributing to a misunderstanding of the impact of the 

Chartre de la langue française du Québec in Nunavik. 7 In fact, Inuit (and 

Cree) beneficaries of the JBNQA were exempted from French unilingualism: 

Que dit la loi 101? Elle permet l’enseignement en langues 

amérindiennes et en français. Seuls les Cris et les Inuit, régis par la 

Convention de la Baie James, ont droit à l’école anglaise (de 

même, probablement, que les enfants amérindiens dont un des 

parents a fréquenté une institution anglophone du Québec). 

(Dorais 1978, 134) 

In reality, it was for the Inuit living away from Nunavik that support was 

not clearly established. Even today this is the case. In point of fact, this 

applies for all Canadian Inuit no matter where they are from. Hence the 

active lobbying of the Inuit Committee on National Issues for the 

entrenchment of Inuit language rights in the Canadian Constitution (Dorais 

1990, 257). In any case, the options made available to Inuit were causing 

concerns: 

The new Provincial policy will probably do some good to the 

language of the Inuit: it shall be taught in all Northern Quebec 

schools. Its status, however, will be strictly local. Both levels of 

government discourage the emergence of a pan-Inuit or 

pan-Aboriginal nationalism. Northern Quebec people are forced 

to become either English Canadian or French Québécois Inuit. 

(Dorais 1979, 76) 

Even today, no language law pertaining specifically to Nunavik exists. 

However, a new round of negotiations started in northern Quebec in 1994, 

that is, soon after the signing of the Nunavut Final Agreement. Five years 

later, in 1999, Makivik Corporation (the body representing Inuit from 

Nunavik since the JBNQA) and the Quebec and federal governments had 

signed the Nunavik political agreement. As a result, a commission was 

89



created to map the road toward a government for Nunavik. After the 

Nunavik Commission issued its report in 2001, Makivik and the two levels 

of government engaged in negotiating a framework agreement for the 

establishment of a legislative assembly in Nunavik. These negotiations are 

yet proceeding. 

In its 2001 report, the Nunavik Commission recommended trilingualism 

in northern Quebec (recommendation 9, p. 31). Under this proposal, 

Inuktitut, French and English would become official languages in Nunavik. 

In documents circulated in Nunavik, Makivik has been referring to the 

quasi official status of these three languages for some time already (Patrick 

2003). 8 Some then view the Nunavik Commission’s recommendation of 

trilingualism as a normalizing process of a de facto situation. In that sense, it 

is worth noting that institutional trilingualism has existed in Nunavik since 

1978, considering the Kativik School Board is legally bound to offer 

education in Inuktitut, French and English. 9 Trilingualism is certainly 

presented by negotiators from the federal government as a non-issue 

(personal communication). 

The absence of a debate on the desirability of the Nunavik Commission 

proposal is discomforting in light of the assessment of the Nunavik 

education system conducted by the Nunavik Educational Task Force 

(1992). As reported by Vick-Westgate (2002), after a decade of schooling 

controlled by the Kativik School Board, students, parents, teachers, 

administrators, politicians an so on were critical of the programs available 

in Nunavik. 

While the [Nunavik Educational Task Force] report affirmed the 

School Board’s policy that a solid base in students’mother tongue 

helped second language learning and stated that “effective 

bilingual education is not only possible, it is normal,” it 

determined that the language issue has been such a huge one for 

KSB that it has just about swamped every other pedagogical 

concern. (Vick-Westgate 2002, 214) 

Even if the Kativik School Board has legal obligations to offer programs 

in three languages, limited human and economic resources restrict possible 

achievements. In terms of feasibility, the aim is bilingual rather than 

trilingual education. I have discussed elsewhere how formal education in 

Nunavik has fostered the maintenance of the language of the Inuit, as well 

as societal and individual multilingualism (Daveluy 2004b). What I wanted 

to bring attention to here is the discrepancy between trilingualism and 

bilingualism at the systemic level. Promoting trilingualism, including 

setting it in legal terms, does little as far as its implementation goes if means 

are not provided to sustain it. 

In this section on Nunavik, I wanted to underline: 1) the non-existence of 

laws, to this date, specifically addressing languages used in the northern 

90


part of the province of Quebec; 2) the absence of debate on official 

trilingualism as proposed by the Nunavik Commission; and 3) the limits on 

institutional trilingualism in the school system in northern Quebec. Now 

turning to Nunavut will help situate both cases within the Canadian 

approach to language management. 

Official Status in Nunavut 

The Nunavut Official Languages Act was inherited from the former, larger, 

Northwest Territories. Eight official languages appear in this text of law: 

Chipewayan, Cree, Dogrib, English, French, Gwich’in, Inuktitut and 

Slavey. In 2002, the Nunavut Languages Commissioner recommended 

removing the Cree and Dene languages from the Official Languages Act 

and suggested Inuktitut, English and French as Nunavut official 

languages. 10 

In proposing official trilingualism, the Nunavut Languages 

Commissioner is tackling the long established tradition of unequivalent 

status among official languages in the North. Indeed, a clear distinction is 

made between English and French and all other languages, including 

official ones. For example, Dene languages, Cree and Inuktitut were in the 

past labelled “official Aboriginal languages” (Dorais 1990, 256). If this 

label is not used anymore, the consequences remain since various 

provisions in the law as it currently stands apply to English and French but 

not to Inuktitut. The proposed amendments would provide equal status to 

the three official languages of Nunavut. 

Inuit Tapirisat of Canada 11 , a key player in the implementation of 

Nunavut and the body nationally representing the Inuit, had originally 

proposed a different arrangement regarding languages: “Inuit Tapirisat of 

Canada’s proposal for an Inuit province called Nunavut … states that 

Inuktitut should become—together with English—one of the two official 

languages of this new entity (Dorais 1990, 256). This view corresponds 

with the ICC perspective presented in the first section of this paper. 

In line with the international Inuit language lobby, the Nunavut 

government also promotes Inuktitut as the language of work and 

administration, as stated in Pinasuaqtavut: that which we’ve set out to do. 12 

This document, also referred to as the Bathurst Mandate, is the plan of 

action the first Nunavut government established soon after its election. The 

Nunavut government elected in 2004 reiterated its commitment to 

Pinasuaqtavut. Accordingly, objectives set for 2020 remain, and the 

Nunavut government aims at implementing a “ … fully functional bilingual 

society, in Inuktitut and English, respectful and committed to the needs and 

rights of French speakers, with agrowing ability toparticipate inFrench.” 

91



www.langcom.nu.ca/english/languages/inuktitut/dialectmap-web.pdf 

Burnaby’s discussion on how French initially became official in the 

Northwest Territories sheds light on the status of this language in Nunavut 

and its proposed treatment in Pinasuaqtavut. 

… after the Constitution Act of 1982, the federal government 

anticipated a court challenge under the Charter that would have 

forced it to make French an official language of both territories 

[Yukon and NWT]. Strong protests arose locally resulting in 

separate agreements between the federal government and the 

Yukon and Northwest Territories. In the Northwest Territories in 

1984, French was included with English as an official language, 

but so were seven Aboriginal languages (Inuktitut, Cree, and five 

Dene languages). The Yukon avoided making any language 

official, but agreed to make services available in English, French, 

and the Aboriginal languages of the territory (most of them Dene 

languages). (Burnaby 1999, 311) 

92


In retrospect, it appears that the inclusion of French in northern language 

policies and laws was preventive and mainly a federal government concern. 

Anorthern perspective pays equal attention to the preservation of languages 

spoken exclusively by the Inuit. In this regard, the Nunavut government is 

under pressure to protect different ways of speaking Inuktitut. Thus, in the 

Nunavut Official Languages Act, the term “Inuktitut” encompasses a 

number of dialects used by Inuit. Inuinnaqtun, the way of speaking in the 

western part of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, specifically appears 

in parenthesis. (See map on page 92.) 

A number of linguistic features distinguish Inuinnaqtun from Inuktitut 

(Dorais 1990, 1996). Different writing systems are also used: the Roman 

alphabet and syllabics respectively. Adopting a standard writing system for 

the languages of the Inuit has been an issue of relevance at the international 

level. The ICC advocates the use of the Roman alphabet as a way to foster 

communication among all Inuit. 13 Allocating resources to address the 

specific challenges the Inuinnaqtun speakers face seems an appropriate 

priority for a local government. In this regard, the Nunavut Languages 

Commissioner is proposing a separate language law, the Inuktitut 

Protection Act. 

On one hand, recognizing diversity within Inuit ways of speaking entails 

moving away from the rhetoric of sameness that language advocacy has 

been internationally and nationally relying on. On the other, regardless of 

demographics, Nunavut remains a public territory, administered by a 

non-ethnic, elected government. In that context, Inuit language(s) and 

culture(s) can generate policies and laws to a limited extent only. 

Burnaby addresses this matter from a comparative perspective: 

Fettes (1998) … indicates how the Northwest Territories has taken 

a symbolic, top-down approach, much like the effect of the Official 

Languages Act of Canada, with considerable expenditure on 

administration and services in Aboriginal languages that are little 

used or appreciated by speakers of Aboriginal languages in the 

NWT, and a minimum of control or consultation with individual 

communities. … Therefore the model of the Official Languages 

Act is a poor one for promoting their interest or meeting their 

needs. By contrast the Yukon has taken a more consultative 

approach, developing permissive rather than restrictive policies, 

and encouraging community language development in the home 

and community rather than just in the school or government 

services. It supports local initiatives rather than dictating umbrella 

policy. (1999, 311) 

Admittedly, language planning in Nunavut is bound to existing national 

laws, and must operate within the model established in the Official 

Languages Act of Canada. Yet, adaptation to local conditions is 

93



inescapable. Such is the case with the suggestion to grant Iqaluit, the capital 

of Nunavut and community where most French speakers live, trilingual city 

status, as recommended by the Nunavut Languages Commissioner. A 

number of municipalities in southern Canada (in Ontario and Quebec, 

specifically) have such regulations either in place or under discussion. This 

approach, promoting zones and domains of intensive use to ensure 

language sustainability (Drapeau and Corbeil 1992), was instrumental in 

northern Quebec (Daveluy 2004a). This was possible because of the 

municipality status granted to Nunavik. The fact of the matter is that 

Nunavut illustrates exactly Whiteley’s (2003, 713) point that language 

rights discourse mainly targets large-scale, literate language minorities. In 

Nunavut, the French minority is collectively strengthened by its status at the 

national level while at the individual level there is expertise to lead French 

language files through the legal maze. The same holds for English native 

speakers who are maintaining linguistic privileges far extending their 

demographic weight in Nunavut. 

In summary, language planning in Nunavut seems to be twofold. On the 

one hand, the Nunavut government has taken the lead on the position 

initially put forward by Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and is promoting 

Inuktitut-English bilingualism while, on the other hand, trilingualism 

would be implemented locally. 

In this section, I have shown 1) that laws addressing language matters are 

still in the making in Nunavut; 2) how self-government does not necessarily 

warrant automatic consideration of language issues in a timely fashion; 3) 

the co-existing of both trilingualism and bilingualism policies inNunavut. 

Comparative Summary 

In terms of language, it seems Nunavut stands in a comparable state to 

Nunavik in some respects while differences remain. It is appropriate to 

further assess if the model in place in the territory is mechanically 

transferred to Nunavik in the current proposal forofficial trilingualism. 14 

In both instances, language policies are proposed with little attention 

devoted to implementation or feasibility. It is assumed that detailed plans 

will follow in due course, which is typical of the Canadian approach to 

language issues in the administration of Aboriginal affairs. One senses the 

hope that it might not even be necessary to address language specifically 

when every other domain, such as education, economic development, 

health, and so on, is taken care of. In this regard, the latest evaluation of 

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), mandated to monitor the implementation 

of the land claim agreement, is noteworthy. In May 2004, NTI openly 

criticized the Nunavut government for not doing enough as far as language 

is concerned (Edmonton Journal 1 May 2004, A5). Shortly after, the 

Nunavut Minister of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth announced his 

94


intention to strike a working group, with NTI, to conduct a feasibility study 

of previously made recommendations regarding language. The group 

sought input from municipal governments and the private sector before 

tabling its final report in the spring of 2005. The goal stated by the minister 

is typical of the Canadian approach to language management: “…balancing 

the protection of our languages with other urgent issues, including health, 

education and housing” (Nunatsiaq News 4 June 2004). 

Nunavut and Nunavik also share trends in the co-existence of competing 

plans regarding trilingualism and bilingualism. On the one hand, in both 

areas the promotion of trilingualism is at odds with the pan-Arctic Inuit 

language strategy. To simply drop trilingualism on that basis without 

further analyzing the situation entails ignoring diversity among the 

circumpolar Inuit. Indeed, promoting trilingualism in Greenland, for 

example, is not particularly appealing, while in Canada it may prove 

efficient and profitable. From the Canadian government perspective, it 

even seems unavoidable. 

Diversity among Canadian Inuit is also relevant, and, acknowledging 

differences between Nunavut and Nunavik, productive in language 

management. For years now, French has been integrated into the linguistic 

repertoire of younger generations in northern Quebec, which is not 

necessarily the case in Nunavut. It is unrealistic to expect individuals who 

have been through formal education in French to drop the advantage 

trilingualism represents for them. After all, they are the only actual 

trilingual Northerners so far. They will definitely have a say in the linguistic 

future of their country. 

This exposure to French positions the Inuit from Nunavik favourably 

toward Canadian bilingualism. They are competitve candidates for jobs 

requiring bilingual competencies (either in English and French, or in 

Inuktitut and English or French). As things stand, similar options are less 

likely to develop in Nunavut since competencies in Inuktitut and English 

are targeted. 

In his analysis of Australian language policies, Lo Bianco (2001, 17) 

compares the orientation of various policies in their consideration of 

language as a resource, a right or a problem. In Nunavik, trilingualism 

currently fits under the first category as a resource while in Nunavut it 

remains an issue of right since the relevance of trilingualism there is to bring 

to Inuktitut the prestige of other official languages in Canada. In both cases 

trilingualism is problematic in the challenges it creates, in particular in 

terms of the means needed for its adequate implementation. 

95



Conclusion 

The mere description of language policies makes them explicit and I would 

stand satisfied if this was the extent of my contribution to the understanding 

of what is at stake linguistically in the North. It should be noted I was not 

aiming for an exhaustive representation of all views on northern languages 

and some important ones have no doubt been left out. Yet, Lo Bianco claims 

“… the very possibility of making explicit, and comprehensive, national 

language planning is unusual in English-speaking nations” (2001, 26). 

Considering Canada is definitely on the path of recognizing its own 

diversity, I dare to think that the assessment provided will prove relevant to 

those who do not shy away from debating language issues. 

There are strings attached to official trilingualism in northern Canada. 

Avoiding court challenges may have been the motivation provided in the 

beginning to justify the inclusion of more, rather than fewer, languages in 

northern policies, but a definite outcome of this scheme was, and still is, the 

devolving of national responsibilities to the territorial and regional 

administrations of Nunavut and Nunavik. Such seems to be the trade-off for 

the languages of the Inuit to be recognized as equivalent to other official 

languages. Northern governments are expected to implement language 

laws designed to address issues that are not necessarily the most relevant 

ones in the linguistic context under their authority. Furthermore, national 

bilingualism predates by far the existence of these governments. Back then, 

the input of northern populations in national language planning was 

minimal, if at all taken into account. It seems an inappropriate extension of 

responsibility on any given region in a similar situation. Interestingly 

enough, no provincial government is under similar pressure in Canada. In 

the south, the complement of provincial and national legislations appears 

sufficient for the system to maintain itself. 

So, acknowledging respective responsibilities in sustaining language 

policies is a key element in the Canadian langscape. Unless financial means 

and human resources are locally allocated by the federal government to the 

management of national bilingualism, regional and/or territorial 

governments face an extremely difficult task. This is not a matter of 

jurisdictions as much as setting up northern populations for failure rather 

than success in the area of language maintenance. Alternative approaches 

to language sustainability exist, provided they are allowed to develop. 

Indeed, an Inuit perspective on language issues might very well be at odds 

with linguistic empowerment à la Québécoise, or the Canadian way. 

Worldwide, the local application of international conventions is 

spreading, as Lo Bianco (2001, 42) confirms for Aboriginal populations in 

Australia. Even if, at first sight, the cases listed in the UDLR seem to 

exclude the Canadian northern situation, a closer look proves otherwise. 

96

Language groups as described in article 1.5 certainly suit the ethnolinguistic 

relationships in Nunavut and Nunavik: 

This Declaration considers as a language group any group of 

persons sharing the same language which is established in the 

territorial space of another language community but which does 

not possess historical antecedents equivalent to those of that 

community. 

Considering the French and English segments of the populations in 

Nunavut and Nunavik as language groups as opposed to official minorities 

might represent the northern language dynamic more accurately. 

Remaining Canadian official languages, English and French would still 

draw protection from national legislation. The cases of the English minority 

in the province of Quebec and French minorities in the other unilingual 

provinces show that accommodation in this regard has been possible so far. 

What remains to be seen is if this is the type of involvement the Northerners 

wish for themselves in Canadian language planning. 

Notes 


1. For more information about the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, see 

www.inuit.org. 

2. The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights can be read at 

www.linguistic-declaration.org/index-gb.htm. 

3. For additional information on the European Charter for Regional or Minority 

Languages, see http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/148.htm. 

4. For details by region and/or communities, see Inuit of Canada (2003) published 

by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (www.tapirisat.ca). 

5. The JBNQA education clauses appear in Vick-Westgate (2002: 256-259). 

6. More specifically, clauses 87, 88, 95-97. 

7. I witnessed this in conferences bringing Inuit and academics together. It was 

particularly striking in discussions focusing on language endangerment, a topic 

which generates emotional debates, not always nor necessarily, anchored in 

contemporary language use. A recent example is McComber (2003: 233) who 

claims that law 101 originally applied to Inuit and was modified to exempt them 

and other Aboriginal groups only after strong reactions occurred in the North. To 

my knowledge, law 101 was certainly modified after it was implemented, but to 

add other Aboriginal groups, like the Naskapi, which were not originally 

exempted from French unilingualism. 

8. It should be noted though that ads published by Makivik in newspapers in the 

South, e.g. Le Devoir, are often in Inuktitut and English only. 

9. In 2004, of the 2,962 students in Nunavik, 1,153 (38.8%) were registered in the 

French sector, 1,041 (35.0%) in the English one, and 768 ( 25.8%) were studying 

in Inuktitut. More information on the Kativik School Board can be found at 

www.kativik.qc.ca. 

10. The Nunavut Official Languages Act and the proposed amendements appear on 

the website of the Nunavut Languages Commissionner (www.langcom.nu.ca). 

11. Now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (www.tapirisat.ca). 

12. See www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/English/departments/bathurst/. 

97



13. Saladin d’Anglure (1992 : 530) provides details on the writing as an international 

matter: … dans les années 1970 on vit … la création de l’Alaska Native Language 

Center, la révision de l’orthographe groenlandaise et l’adoption d’un double 

système standard, alphabétique et syllabique au Canada. 

14. In this regard, a typo in the Nunavik Commission report is telling (Daveluy 

2003c). In French, the recommendation refers to Nunavut rather than Nunavik. 

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99

Jesse Archibald-Barber 

Cognitive Quickenings: Contemporary Readings of 

Orality and Literacy in English-Canadian Colonial 

Practices and Modern Critical Theories 

Abstract 

This article first gives an overview of the debates about oral and literate 

cultures and how nineteenth-century colonial practices and modern 

structuralist theory affected the perception of Native peoples. It then 

examines how post-structuralist theories challenged the traditional hierarchy 

of speech and writing. It also studies the difficulties and shortfalls of these late 

twentieth-century critiques, and looks at First Nations’ responses and the 

revaluations of indigenous and Western traditions. The paper concludes by 

looking at contemporary Canadian theories that shift the analysis of speech 

and writing to reading and speculative tracking, opening new ground for 

understanding different cultural traditions in the twenty-first century. 

Résumé 

Le présent article offre un survol du débat entourant les cultures orales et 

instruites et de la façon dont des pratiques coloniales du dix-neuvième siècle, 

de pair avec la théorie structuraliste moderne, ont influé sur notre perception 

des peuples autochtones. Il se penche ensuite sur la façon dont les théories 

post-structuralistes ont remis en question l’hiérarchie de la parole et de 

l’écriture. Il examine également les difficultés et les lacunes de telles critiques 

de la fin du vingtième siècle, et examine les réponses des premières nations et 

les réévaluations des traditions indigènes et occidentales. La communication 

se termine par un examen des théories canadiennes contemporaines qui 

déplacent l’analyse de la parole et de l’écriture vers la lecture et le pistage 

spéculatifs, et de par là défrichent de nouveaux territoires menant vers une 

compréhension des diverses traditions culturelles du vingt-et-unième siècle. 

Writing and print technologies have had a profound impact on the way 

human beings perceive the world. However, the specific relations between 

technology, language, and consciousness are much in dispute, leading to 

several cognitive theories in which ideas of what constitute oral and written 

traditions are so beset with contradictions that paradox has become a central 

rhetorical feature of critical discourse. Further consideration of these issues 

is important, as the fundamental concepts of orality and literacy in the 

Western tradition have had far-ranging implications, especially during 

English expansion and colonization. As assumptions developed on a 

cultural level lie at the basis of individual prejudice, many questions arise 


30, 2004



regarding how traditional hierarchies of speech and writing legitimated 

European colonial practices. In particular, considering the prevailing 

theories on writing’s role in cultural evolution and cognitive advances, how 

were cultures viewed that did not have writing in the Western sense, 

especially with so much authority invested in the Scripture? Moreover, how 

did this perceived lack of indigenous writing systems affect the legal status 

of Native peoples in terms of identity and property rights? Finally, how 

have these ethnocentric assumptions manifested themselves in English- 

Canadian theories? 

Historical and Theoretical Overview 

The Western metaphysical tradition seems constantly in flux, despite or 

maybe because of all attempts to assert a universal value. Distinctions are 

made only to be undermined by the limits and contradictions of their own 

terms. Opposing theories, and single theories within themselves, move 

simultaneously along contrary paths, attempting to resolve their 

incommensurability within progressive frameworks of dialectical 

synthesis, weaving and unravelling with each new consideration. By the 

mid-twentieth century, there were numerous systems that attempted to 

explain human consciousness and social power in terms of language and 

technology. Many of these theories work in opposition to each other, but 

have nonetheless been painstakingly incorporated into totalizing systems. 

In Canada, Walter Ong’s (1982) work consolidates the main theories of the 

Toronto School, which reinforced the branch of modern structuralist theory 

that connects technological changes to linguistic-cognitive advances. Ong 

argues that the advent of writing and print technologies takes language to a 

higher level of abstraction, enabling individuals to have a greater 

understanding of reality. However, within the same theory, Ong also 

establishes that oral/primitive cultures are closer to the life-world, and 

therefore have a more immediate understanding of nature than 

literate/civilized cultures. So which culture has a privileged relation to true 

Being? The thesis privileges writing and its antithesis privileges speech. 

Both are present in the same hierarchy, and one is superior simply by 

subordinating the other, depending on the ideological direction of the 

synthesis. The contradictory result in modern structuralist theory is a 

totalizing system that undermines its own determination of the self-present 

individual voice as the source of meaning by claiming that writing produces 

a cognitive advance in human beings over those who donot have writing. 

Of course, these debates do not begin or end with the Toronto School. 

They go back as early as Plato and even the Mayans. Regarding the Western 

tradition, as established in the Phaedrus, although Plato saw the benefits of 

writing for abstract thought, he also saw writing as a danger to memory, 

arguing that it degrades the self-present cognitive abilities of human beings. 

As James Gee explains, “For Plato, one knew only what one could 

reflectively defend in face-to-face dialogue with someone else” (1990, 32). 

102

Cognitive Quickenings: Contemporary Readings of Orality and Literacy in 

English-Canadian Colonial Practices and Modern Critical Theories 

On the other hand, the main argument against Plato, as Roy Harris explains, 

is that “when the bonds of communicational contact are not merely between 

one living individual and another but—through writing—between present, 

past and future generations, the result is a superior form of social entity” 

(2000, 4). This view of writing, which not only runs counter to Plato but also 

appears throughout the Western tradition and forms the basis for Ong’s 

cognitive theories, was formally institutionalized in 1895 by Edward 

Burnett Taylor, Oxford’s first professor of anthropology, who wrote: “The 

invention of writing was the great movement by which mankind rose from 

barbarism to civilization” (qtd. in Harris 2000, 4). Furthermore, with this 

anthropological perspective on writing, many theorists also looked at 

sociological divisions of class and education to theorize the differences in 

cultural and cognitive capacities between literate and illiterate peoples. As 

Basil Bernstein contends: 

The class system has affected the distribution of knowledge. 

Historically, and now, only a tiny percentage of the population has 

been socialized into knowledge at the level of the meta-languages 

of control and innovation […] and been given access to the 

principles of intellectual change, whereas the rest have been 

denied such access. (1971, 175) 

However, despite all of these theories on writing and cultural refinement, 

Gee points out studies that throw them into question. He states: 

After English literates had been out of school a few years, they did 

better than non-literates only on verbal explanation tasks (‘talking 

about’ tasks); they did no better on problem solving (on 

categorization and abstract reasoning tasks). […] Literacy in and 

of itself led to no grandiose cognitive abilities. (1990, 38) 

Harris also challenges any theory of class distinction that relates literacy 

to civilization or high culture, pointing out that the majority of people did 

not need to be literate to make their societies function: 

Is it reasonable […] to speak of a literate society if we know that the 

production of such texts remained in the hands of a small, 

privileged class of professionals? This question reflects back upon 

the notion that there is some kind of equation between writing and 

civilization. And in turn raises the question of whether it is only the 

literate members of a society who are civilized. (2000, 12) 

Moreover, regarding the evolutionary view established by Taylor, Harris 

suggests that at the very least it ignores the fact that Greece, which is seen as 

the historical basis for Western civilization, was not literate when it had 

established itself as a culture. Hence, by Western theory’s own logic, 

civilization is not originally dependent on writing. Further critiques of these 

views on speech and writing will be made below, but, clearly, if none of the 

theories on culture or class work, then just as the hierarchy of speech and 

writing has been arbitrarily determined as the basis of Western civilization, 

103



so the dichotomies that have since equated literacy with civilization and 

orality with the primitive are not adequate. 

By the latter half of the twentieth century, post-structuralist and 

deconstructive theorists such as Jacques Derrida attempted to critique the 

assumptions of these contentious issues by collapsing the hierarchy of 

speech and writing at its philosophic root. Derrida points out that 

maintaining a hierarchical relation between speech and writing leads into a 

metaphysical problematic prominent in the Western tradition. Such a 

binary system cannot sustain its own contradictions and ends up developing 

into a theory that privileges its own opposition. Indeed, Derrida’s critique of 

all such totalizing hierarchies based on binary oppositions reveals their 

ambivalent nature and therefore questionable determination as the basis of 

meaning. For instance, a theory that privileges writing must arbitrarily 

subordinate speech in order to maintain its authority. However, as we have 

seen, contrary to the common sense notion that writing is superior to speech 

is the equally common sense notion that speech is superior to writing. To 

further elaborate on this paradox, Derrida points out that despite the 

established views on writing’s importance, historically from Plato through 

Rousseau to Saussure, Western metaphysics continually “raises speech 

above writing” (1976, 103). Speech is not viewed as a primitive precursor to 

literacy but, rather, writing is debased as “a servile instrument of speech” 

(110). Coming full circle, speech is placed over writing because the 

speaking subject is seen as more fully present as the source of authority and 

responsibility for meaning. Hence, the question remains whether oral 

cultures really do have a less evolved sense ofBeing than literate cultures. 

To solve these debates, Derrida critiques the double gestures of Western 

theory that privilege writing on one hand and speech on the other by arguing 

that they function according to the same principles of differentiating signs 

from one another. To prove his point, he expands the definition of “writing” 

to retroactively cover “the entire field of linguistic signs” (44). He poses the 

existence of an “archi-writing,” which functions as the primary basis of all 

sign systems whether writing, speech, gesture, fashion, architecture, 

thought, or even experience itself. Furthermore, Derrida contends that the 

ultimate meaning of a “text” can never be fully determined, as the representation 

of an experience in any type of sign system creates a “split in itself” 

between the signifying subject and the reality that is being conveyed. In the 

very act of representation, “the point of origin becomes ungraspable” (36). 

Hence, all sign systems share the feature that defers both presence and 

meaning from the original experience, even as it is being experienced, and 

therefore neither speech nor writing can claim a privileged relation to 

absolute authority. Indeed, if anything, meaning is restricted and occluded 

by the limitations of any particular sign system. For Derrida, meaning is not 

something produced by an autonomous, self-present individual; instead it 

arises from the structure of language itself as a “free play” of “differences,” 

“traces” and “repetitions.” 

104



However, although Derrida’s critique reveals that modern theory is 

based on a false dichotomy of speech and writing, in many ways 

post-structuralism also falls victim to the paradoxes of structuralist terms. 

As Jack Goody (2000) points out, Derrida unavoidably preserves the 

“logocentrism” that “he can challenge but not escape” (111). Goody rejects 

Derrida’s claim that there is no difference between speech and writing as 

“unacceptable for analytical purposes since it is to fail to distinguish 

between graphic absence and phonemic presence […] It is to make no 

difference between the various signifieds of a specific signifier, and hence 

to take up an extreme logocentric standpoint” (114). Moreover, regarding 

the post-colonial application of Derrida’s critique, Julia Emberley (1993) 

argues that he “fails to acknowledge the symbolic debt his radical 

philosophy owes to indigenous cultures” (146). In order to critique the false 

assumptions of Western metaphysics, post-structuralist theory co-opts the 

protest conditions of post-colonial societies without fully recognizing 

non-Western forms of writing. It recuperates the value of indigenous oral 

traditions by demonstrating that the differentiating features of writing are 

also present in speech, without fully rectifying the false perception of 

indigenous peoples as cultures without writing. However, Emberley also 

maintains the importance that Derrida’s work has had in recognizing “the 

legitimacy of the oral mode as part of a heterogeneous conception of 

‘writing,’in order to combat the Eurocentric attitude that the written word is 

the universal register of meaning as truth” (1993, 144). Nonetheless, the 

general critique of Derrida is important and continues to become more 

complex because his theories, and even Harris’ and Goody’s critiques of 

them, all still assume that there ever were purely oral societies. 

The concepts of orality and literacy used in both constructing and 

critiquing the evolutionary model are themselves problematic, prompting 

twenty-first-century theorists to develop new discourses that move out of 

the traditional paradigms of speech and writing, and realign the cognitive 

basis of communication to the indigenous reader. J. Edward Chamberlin 

(2001) argues that the distinction between oral and written traditions is a 

categorical error that initiates and sustains a grave misconception, as no 

culture can be said to ever have been solely oral or literate. Rather, the 

differences between oral and written traditions lie not in a dichotomy but in 

a “non-sequential” “spectrum” (72). Furthermore, Chamberlin’s notion of 

“reading” as the speculative interpretation of sign systems argues that the 

fundamental cognitive advance that makes writing seem superior to speech 

is a phenomenon not unique or more advanced in one culture or technology; 

it is a human ability shared by all cultures. Indeed, upon closer inspection, 

the central cognitive structures developed in Western science also turn out 

to be vital to the cognitive systems of what are traditionally and 

prejudicially considered primitive cultures. 

105



The Evolutionary Model in Canadian Colonialism and Critical 

Theory 

To elaborate further on the evolutionary model of speech and writing, 

Elizabeth Hill Boone (1994) points out that by historically placing orality 

before literacy, “writing specialists have constructed the history of writing 

to result in modern alphabetic systems” (5), creating the “tendency to think 

of writing as visible speech and an evolutionary goal” (3). However, Boone 

cites W. Mignolo’s argument that “the history of writing is not an 

evolutionary process driving toward the alphabet, but rather a series of 

coevolutionary processes in which different writing systems followed their 

own transformations” (13). Nonetheless, despite this critique of 

nineteenth- and twentieth-century evolutionary models, whether literally 

in terms of biology or metaphorically in terms of cultural changes, the 

projection of historical and cultural differences through a framework of 

progressive stages has formed an “unconscious bias” (6) that runs 

throughout structuralist theory and still permeates contemporary views. 

To reiterate the development of evolutionary models in broad terms, 

teleological views of human nature gained momentum during the 

Enlightenment, and the determination of writing as a cultural refinement of 

civilization subsequently became deployed with the idea of history as an 

evolutionary development. In Canada during the nineteenth century, 

German Romantic theories were introduced into Scottish and English 

philosophies, and with the combination of Hegelian metaphysics and the 

misreading of Darwinism, colonial theories also drew from the Spencerian 

idea of civilization as a progressive development toward social perfection, 

where spiritual dialectic is unified with biological evolution, and history is 

seen as a series of ascending stages (see McKillop 1979). Indeed, regarding 

nineteenth-century Canadian writers, D.M.R Bentley (1990) points out that 

the “critically important context for understanding their work is the 

so-called ‘four stages theory’ of social development” (77). 

There is no shortage of nineteenth-century theories of evolutionary 

stages, and many vary in number and characteristics, but Bentley uses 

Ronald L. Meek’s study of A.R.J. Turgot in France and Adam Smith in 

Scotland. Stages are generally defined “by the mode of subsistence of its 

constituent members: (1) a savage stage based on hunting; (2) a barbaric (or 

pastoral) stage based on herding; (3) an agricultural stage based on farming; 

and (4) a commercial stage based on trading” (Bentley 1990, 77). The 

refinement of civilization begins at the agricultural stage and completes 

itself in the commercial stage. The last stage, although at the evolutionary 

vanguard in global economics, can also become more corrupt through vice 

and decadence. In Western theory, then, primitive peoples, although 

uncivilized, are also seen as uncorrupted by modernism in being closer to 

the immediate presence and knowledge of the life-world. Furthermore, 

according to Ong (1982), higher reasoning does not emerge until the advent 

106



of writing, which corresponds to the necessary dependence of the 

agricultural and commercial stages on each other in the process of 

urbanization (86). Steven Roger Fischer argues that this process in the 

development of writing was also present in Mesoamerica. Although he 

speculates that early-Mesoamerican writing must have come from China, 

he describes how basic iconography “eventually assumed logographic 

status as more demands were placed on the system because of increased 

urbanization. Members of the social elite, it is further argued, needed to 

express themselves publicly”—a need that “engendered complete writing” 

(Fischer 2001, 216). 

Bentley traces these self-contradictory ideologies to theories on the 

origins of North and South American Natives that connect them to Old 

Testament genealogies (1990, 81). When European explorers discovered 

the existence of peoples whom they believed lacked writing and a 

developed civilization, they were confronted with a paradox in their own 

scriptural theology: how could the word of God be considered absolute if it 

had not reached the Natives of the New World? As Mary Lu MacDonald 

(1990) points out, a central debate in the colonial period was whether 

Natives were “ordinary human beings who lacked only education and 

Christian conversion to become fully civilized,” or “survivors of an early 

stage in human development, incapable of improvement and true belief, 

and destined to disappear from the earth” (93). As bizarre as it seems to 

North Americans today, colonial Europeans seriously considered the 

possibility that the Natives were primitive versions of themselves who had 

become lost on the continental drifts and ocean currents, and although they 

lacked civilization in the Western sense, they nonetheless retained the 

“residual presence” of the original civilization described in the Bible. As 

familial as this may sound, however, Bentley points out that the New World 

theory of origin is one that combines a theory of “degeneration” and 

“four-stages theory” with an “imperial ethos” (1990, 84). According to 

degeneration theory, a culture is not capable of progressing as its distance 

from its civilized origin widens; furthermore, the level of degeneration can 

be determined by the culture’s lack of writing and permanent structures. For 

example, in the early-Canadian long poem Quebec Hill (1797), J. Mackay 

writes: 

No musty record can the curious trace, 

Engross’d by annals of the savage race: 

Involv’d in darkness their achievements lay 

Till fam’d Columbus sought a western way. 

(Mackay [1797] 1993, 37–40) 

Expanding Linda Monkman’s analysis, Bentley argues that the ideology 

behind the poem assumes the Natives’ “lack of written history and durable 

architecture” as “things not to be expected from such distant and degenerate 

descendants of Noah” (1990, 81). Hence, colonization could be justified 

because, “provided Christianity came with it, exposure to Britain’s 

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agricultural and commercial civilization could only improve the benighted 

and degenerate savages of Canada” (84). 

In contemporary theory, this kind of “evolutionary historicism” that 

reduces indigenous cultures to an earlier stage of human development is 

what Chamberlin calls a “nineteenth century fallacy” that is based on the 

analogy that “the cognitive development of the child from speech to writing 

mirrors the cultural development of the society from primitive to 

civilized”—in extreme critical terms, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” 

(Chamberlin 2001, 74). However, although a critical awareness of these 

issues had been established by the twentieth century, in almost every way 

Canadian structuralism crystallized the notion of writing as an evolutionary 

goal. As Ong (1982) asserts, “Without writing, human consciousness 

cannot achieve its fuller potentials […] orality needs to produce and is 

destined to produce writing” (15). Such a persuasive argument strengthens 

evermore the prejudice that literate cultures are cognitively superior to oral 

cultures. Chamberlin’s contemporary theories react heavily to his Canadian 

predecessors regarding this notorious hierarchy between speech and 

writing, as he argues that the Toronto School “did much damage in arguing 

that writing—alphabetic writing in particular—marked an evolutionary 

advance which set us apart.” It “entrenches not only racist ideologies”; it 

also perpetuates the false distinction between oral and written cultures 

(Chamberlin 2001, 71). Indeed, although post-structuralism has critiqued 

this false dichotomy, it nonetheless remains a “deeply committed” belief in 

contemporary social sciences: “Despite all cautions many scholars seem 

unable to avoid identifying cognitive change with cognitive superiority, or 

at least with evolutionary advance” (74). Chamberlin concludes: 

It is both the grimmest terrorism and the highest tribute to the 

power of language to see it as the key to cognitive and cultural 

change; and insofar as they were inspired by a mission to civilize 

the savages, colonial policies were committed to this kind of social 

engineering. (76) 

Writing and the Law of the Land 

In structuralist theory, the cognitive power of language itself is amplified in 

writing, and further amplified specifically in alphabetic script. As Ong 

states, following Havelock, “The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the 

sense that it was easy for everyone to learn” (Ong 1982, 90). Moreover, Ong 

argues it is the further abstraction of moveable print type that caused the 

radical breakthrough in consciousness and the cognitive advancement of 

Western epistemology. However, while the democratic effects and the 

intellectual freedom and social power that writing can provide are not 

denied, David Olsen cites Levi-Strauss’ observation that the history of 

writing “seems to favour rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of 

mankind” (Olsen 1994, 9). As Olson elaborates, enlightenment has often 

meant assimilation to the colonizers’ ways as a means of religious and 

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cultural conversion. Like a gun, writing is ambivalent in the use of its 

power, and can mean “domination” as much as “liberation” (10). 

While not arguing that the effects of writing technologies were the 

driving force behind colonization, the standard of writing was nonetheless 

used in part as a justification for cultural assimilation of any indigenous 

peoples the Europeans sought to colonize. No doubt, European nations and 

their colonial societies were in the middle of several revolutions of 

class-consciousness within their own master–slave traditions, while in the 

New World the theological paradox of uncivilized Natives complicated 

colonization and property settlement. To be sure, the cultural status of 

writing in early English-Canadian long poems in the decades leading up to 

the modern consolidation of evolutionary ideologies reflects only a small 

segment of colonial peoples, namely middle-to-upper-class English 

writers; nonetheless in them we can see the narrow basis for colonial 

practices and attitudes. Religious, political and legal differences between 

settlers and Natives are amplified, polarized, and put into an oppositional 

hierarchy based on assumptions about the differences between oral and 

literate cultures. In addition to J. Mackay’s Quebec Hill, Cornwall Bayley’s 

Canada (1808) assumes that since for the Natives “no classic wreaths await 

/ To swell the annals of an ancient state” (35–36), they lack the status of an 

established society. Rather, when colonial settlers arrived, they viewed the 

land as empty: 

There nought was heard throughout the lengthen’d shore 

Save the dull Bear’s reiterated roar; 

[…] 

Rang’d undisputed tyrants of the place, 

Save when mankind, the forest’s ancient Lords, 

Pitch’d their light tents and told their savage hordes; 

Of sex regardless—rushing from afar, 

With brethren clans to wage eternal war! 

(Bayley [1808] 1993, 37, 47–48, 64–68) 

As Bentley argues, Bayley’s poem clearly “suggests the presence of a 

stereotype—the ‘savage’ who divides his time almost exclusively between 

killing animals and people” (1990, 76). Bayley, however, does deign to 

grant the Natives the privilege of having “the mouldings of a soul”: 

A soul, which Education might have given 

To earth an honor—and an heir to Heaven! 

Nay more! Perchance there was a time (ere first 

On Europe’s plains the dawn of science burst) 

When the forefathers of these vagrant hordes 

Knew every charm that civil life affords; 

Now may they rove, expell’d by wayward fate, 

By mutual warfare or tyrannic hate; 

(Bayley [1808] 1993, 89, 93–100) 

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In these few lines can be seen a host of colonial prejudices about the 

superiority of European writing and its relation to education, science and 

civilization, as well as the degeneration of Native peoples from a distant 

civilization into nomadic savages. Indeed, Bayley even asserts that with the 

“mutual love” of the “Sabbath bells” brought by the colonists, the Natives 

will eventually be regenerated, and the “darted tomahawk, no longer 

known” (131, 126, 133). 

Ultimately, for Bayley, history itself did not begin in Canada until the 

arrival of European colonization, “’Midst savage tribes to fix a polish’d 

home;” (422). Likewise, Oliver Goldsmith in The Rising Village (1825) 

describes Canada as a land of “woods and wilds” prior to colonization: 

Behold the savage tribes in wildest strain, 

Approach with death and terror in their train; 

No longer stillness now her power retains; 

But hideous yells announce the murderous band, 

Whose bloody footsteps desolate the land; 

(Goldsmith [1825] 1993, 81–86) 

Bentley argues that “in treating the Indians stereotypically and collectively 

as savages, degenerates and transient hunters, the poets of Georgian Canada 

denied them status as individual people and as a multiplicity of peoples” 

(Bentley 1990, 87). Indeed, while Bayley sees the Natives as eventually 

being assimilated and redeemed by Christian societies, Goldsmith consoles 

the colonial settlers with the entire disappearance of the race: 

The wandering Indian turns another way, 

And brutes avoid the first approach of day. 

[…] 

And now, behold! [the] bold aggressors fly, 

To seek their prey beneath some other sky; 

(Goldsmith [1825] 1993, 99–100, 107–108) 

Again, the colonial assumptions are clear: Natives are depicted without 

writing or a recorded history that would establish them on their lands. They 

are instead “exiled” “from the reality of here and now into the ‘far distant 

wilds’ of abstraction and silence” (Bentley 1990, 87). 

Not only are these early poems extremely prejudiced in their views of 

Natives as a disappearing or degenerating race, but they also completely 

overlook early European dependence on indigenous cultures, as well as the 

history of Native resistance and activism. AsKaren E. Lochead comments: 

It must be remembered […] that Indigenous Peoples were not and 

are not simply passive subjects of colonial attitudes and policies. 

Active resistance against European political, economic and social 

encroachments has been as much a part of colonial history as has 

Indigenous subjugation. (Lochead 2001, 17) 

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Nonetheless, the ideological use of writing as a gauge of a society’s 

civilized status, and the legal justification of appropriating Native land 

because of a lack of what Western culture considers history, continued into 

the twentieth century and affected contemporary Native land claims. One 

of many examples of Western bias in the Canadian legal system is manifest 

in the land-claim case Delgamuukw v. the Queen, when the oral-law 

traditions of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en were excluded as insufficient 

evidence of historical presence on the land. As Chamberlin points out: 

Where Aboriginal people are concerned, courts seem to want 

proof that they have not only a continuous history but a civilized 

history as well. Unfortunately, one of the insignia of civilized 

status, at least for courts of European descent, is literature. 

Specifically, written literature. (Chamberlin 1999, 70) 

Indeed, in his verdict, Chief Justice Allen McEachern wrote: 

When I come to consider events long past, I am driven to conclude, 

on all the evidence, that much of the plaintiffs’historical evidence 

is not literally true […] I must assess the totality of the evidence in 

accordance with legal, not cultural principles. (Culhane 1998, 

257) 

On a fundamental conceptual level, then, McEachern’s rejection of the 

oral-law traditions is an assertion of the unconscious bias that oral histories 

are not as reliable as Western written histories in discerning and 

maintaining the truth and justice of the land we live on. According to the 

considerable pressure that the judge was under, oral histories could not be 

trusted because they are not history as the law understands history. 

Moreover, although the Supreme Court of Appeals did overturn Judge 

McEachern’s original decision by admitting that the court had to accept the 

oral histories in the absence of written evidence and ruling that “Aboriginal 

title is a right to the land itself” (Lochead 2001, 26), none of the land claims 

cases have enacted the property rights recounted by oral histories. 

Concluding the critique of nineteenth-century colonial poets, Bentley 

argues that “the explanation for these denials of status and identity lies, no 

doubt, in the ethos of imperialism: “It is psychologically difficult to 

colonize and settle lands inhabited by equals, by people with names, by 

cultures that have their own integrity” (Bentley 1990, 88). In the legacy of 

colonialism, then, can we see today the concrete implications of the 

Western metaphysical tradition’s hierarchy of speech and writing: in order 

to sustain the contradictions within its own structuralist attempt to 

accommodate indigenous metaphysical systems, the governing body 

continues to privilege writing in order to maintain its sovereignty. 

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First Nations Criticism and non-Western Writing Traditions 

The colonial subordination of indigenous cultures because of their lack of 

recorded history in the Western sense suppressed not only their historical 

identities but most significantly the Aboriginal voice, forming the basis of 

the mythological sense of Canada as having an empty past. As Earl Birney’s 

ironic echo of the early Canadian poets’ treatment of Canada as a lonely 

land makes clear: “it’s only our lack of ghosts we’re haunted” (Birney 1967, 

16). This quip of course ignores Native historical presence on the land and 

underscores the treatment of First Nations people as what Emma LaRocque 

calls “voiceless” (1990, xv). LaRocque further argues that “the issue is not 

that Native peoples were ever wordless but that, in Canada, their words 

were literally and politically negated” (195). Even more serious is what Lee 

Maracle calls “languageless generations,” as the strictures of residential 

schools “forbade them to speak their own language and impeded their 

mastery of English, creating an entire population, with few exceptions, who 

were unfamiliar with language in general” (qtd. in Young-Ing 1993, 180). 

With the loss of one sign system and the insufficiency of the other, cultures 

could no longer freely move in their own generational traditions, or in the 

enforced English tradition, whose structures of representation and 

cognitive powers of freedom were instead used for oppression. 

These colonial practices of course assumed that the English tradition was 

more important than the oral traditions of indigenous societies, overlooking 

the fact that they did indeed have different forms of encoding social 

meaning that were vital to their cultural identities. What then are the 

differences between Western and non-Western oral and written traditions? 

Much of the debate involves both the distinction between myth and history 

and assumptions about the different thought structures that each requires. 

To understand the problem first in their own tradition, Western theorists 

began to look at oral traditions within European societies by analyzing the 

distinctive linguistic elements of metrical forms of poetry. As Milman 

Parry observes, “The use of a given epithet was determined not by its 

precise meaning so much as by the metrical needs of the passage” (qtd. in 

Ong 1982, 21). Applying this epistemological method to the whole “noetic” 

community of a “purely oral culture,” Ong argues that the oral mind had to 

think in “clusters” of “formulaic units,” and was therefore limited to if not 

incapable of the concentrated scientific thought that the abstract distance of 

writing provides. History could not be developed in any real analytical 

sense but instead had to be sustained in mythic formulations, resulting in a 

cognitive limitation that allows only a simple, even if more immediate, 

understanding of nature. 

Nonetheless, while the study of European oral traditions is definitely 

important, in addition to the problematic assumptions of Ong’s theories 

about myth and history, it is also problematic to directly apply Western 

critical terms to indigenous traditions. Indeed, Penny Petrone argues not 

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only that was the Native Canadian oral tradition “misunderstood” because 

it “did not conform to the conventions of Western literary criticism,” but 

that even when these critiques were made “scholars still treated it as 

Western literature” (Petrone 1990, 3). All sign systems may function 

according to the same principles of differentiation, but traditions must still 

be studied by their own stylistic, structural and conceptual terms. For 

example, in Wallace Chafe’s study of Seneca speaking styles, rather than 

applying the structuralist theories of orality, he recognizes a complex 

system of “intonation units” (Chafe 1993, 74) and a continuum of stylistic 

properties that include conversation, preaching and chanting. Chafe finds 

that it is not the metrical line that governs the organization and production of 

oral meaning, but that “stylistic properties iconically reflect the speaker’s 

location of the authority for what is being said” (73). Moreover, regarding 

the distinction between mythic formulations and historical accuracy, the 

elements of Seneca speaking styles create an effect of “great fluency, even 

though the precise wording of [a speech] differs each time it is performed” 

(80). Indeed, it is this fluid aspect of oral traditions that theorists such as Ong 

argue makes them incapable of rising above myth into history. However, 

Petrone contends that “terms such as myths and legends, folklore and fables 

are European and have specific literary meanings. Myth, for instance, in the 

mindset of a non-native reader, is considered fiction. But the traditional 

narratives that whites have categorized as myth are not regarded by natives 

as untrue. All Indian traditions are valid guides to reality” (Petrone 1990, 

12). Indeed, at the level of meaning, Chafe (1993) argues that the Seneca 

“language is polysynthetic and thus tends to pack more information into a 

word than English does” (74). In terms of history, Petrone concludes, “Oral 

traditions have not been static. Their strength lies in their ability to survive 

through the power of tribal memory and to renew themselves by 

incorporating new elements” (Petrone 1990, 17). 

In addition to these differences, among many, between Western and 

indigenous oral traditions there are also many complex differences between 

their written traditions. Despite Western theory’s unconscious evolutionary 

bias that regards indigenous cultures as people without writing, Steven 

Roger Fischer (2001) observes that “the cumulative evidence appears to 

suggest the existence of several sophisticated local writing traditions 

centuries before the Mayan civilization” (211). The problem, as Boone 

(1994) explains, is the “tendency” in Western theory “to think of writing as 

visible speech”: in the Americas, “visible speech was not often the goal” 

(3). Indeed, as Fischer argues, “No Mesoamerican tradition ever attained to 

orthographic standardization. All complete writing in the region—that is, 

writing excluding pictography—more commonly favoured mixed 

logographic writing, whereby glyphs stood for known objects, ideas or 

sounds” (Fischer 2001, 213). In addition to the proliferation of writing 

systems prior to colonization, Fischer also discusses the ease with which 

many North American Natives invented scripts and sign systems for their 

own languages during colonization: “The Alaskan script created by Inuit 

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Uyako (1860–1924), with others, was far more sophisticated than the 

‘script’ developed in 1920 by the Chukchi shepherd Tenevil, which 

remained a pictography” (Fischer 2001, 287). Moreover, examining the 

Cherokee script created between 1821 and 1824 by Skwayi, Fischer 

describes how, “using an English spelling book, Skwayi arbitrarily 

appointed letters of the alphabet to these significant units of sound; no 

English letter corresponds to its given Cherokee value” (287). Hence, even 

with the influence of colonial cultures on indigenous languages, there are 

still clear differences from Western systems of writing. “The Cherokee 

script was an independent innovation: Sikwayi’s creation was not 

substantially influenced by the Latin alphabet. The alphabetic principle and 

its sounds were not used at all—only the graphic shapes of some letters were 

cannibalized” (287). Indeed, because of this now undeniable proliferation 

and variety of writing practices in the Americas, Boone calls for “the 

reformation of a definition of writing that allows us to consider both verbal 

and nonverbal systems of graphic communication” (Boone 1994, 4). She 

expands her analysis to sign systems that “convey meaning without 

expressing language” (6). Specifically, she argues for a study of what Gleb 

calls “semasiographic systems of communication that convey ideas 

independently from language and on the same logical level as spoken 

language” (qtd. in Boone 1994, 14). As these principles are derived from 

Mesoamerican sign systems, they point to the existence of forms of writing 

that are overlooked by Western theorists yet which form a web of 

“discourse systems” throughout Western culture that “convey meaning 

regardless of the language one speaks” (16). 

In view of all of these studies, the understanding of writing and its uses by 

non-Western cultures has considerably changed since colonization. Indeed, 

even the use of English itself has come full circle. Regarding the power of 

writing as a basis of liberation and social empowerment, LaRocque sees the 

legacy of the English language as “both a gift and a challenge”: 

Colonization works itself out in unpredictable ways. The fact is 

that English is the new Native language, literally and politically. 

[…] It is English that is serving to raise the political consciousness 

in our community, it is English that is serving to de-colonize and to 

unite Aboriginal peoples. Personally, I see much poetic justice in 

this process. (LaRocque 1990, xxvi) 

By using English writing as a primary counter-discourse, First Nations 

writers are using the forces of totalization against those very forces. 

The Contemporary Critique: Reading Restructures Writing 

The critique of metaphysical concepts is an extremely complicated process 

because it challenges the basic principles that make it possible for an 

individual to function in Western societies. It is difficult not to depend on 

received notions of truth and falsity that are bound up in the concepts of 

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writing and speech, history and myth. Up to and including the modern 

structuralist tradition, Western metaphysics believed that its own 

epistemological framework explained thought in general. However, 

although the structuralist tradition is correct in connecting writing 

technologies with the infrastructures of modern bureaucracies, applying a 

general law that translates into a cognitive advancement is problematic. 

Derrida argues that the totalizing system of self-presence in the Western 

metaphysical tradition is “organized within a philosophical discourse 

which like all philosophy presupposes the simplicity of the origin and the 

continuity of every derivation, every production, every analysis, the 

homogeneity of all orders” (Derrida 1982, 311). Beyond the limits of what 

is thinkable in Western thought, questions become unanswerable because 

they become unaskable, except in terms of beliefs, which are themselves 

constituted by the very metaphysical assumptions from which the circle 

began. The assertion of a governing truth must violently freeze the “free 

play” of sign systems in order maintain itself. Thus, as previously 

discussed, in order to critique the arbitrary determination of structuralist 

hierarchies, instead of continuing to replace the governing concept with 

another of the same essential order, Derrida uses the notion of the “trace” 

because as a governing concept it foregrounds the continuous displacement 

of its own presence, whether speaking or writing. 

To more concretely see the implications of Derrida’s critique of 

structural assumptions, and to take his notion of the “trace” one step further, 

we can continue to investigate the hierarchy of speech and writing through 

its determination of myth, history and civilization, and its extension to what 

are prejudicially considered scientific and primitive modes of thought. 

Much of the proof for the argument of the evolutionary superiority of 

writing is based on Western assertions that in lacking writing primitive 

cultures were incapable of scientific thought and, therefore, cultural 

progress. However, Olsen (1994) cites Levi-Strauss’ initial observation of 

what he considered primitive thought: prehistoric achievements “required 

a genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and watchful interest and a desire 

for knowledge for its own sake” (23). Olsen is careful to point out, though, 

that what he is arguing is not that technologies and methods do not lead to 

new developments, but that the “basic cognitive processes such as 

perception and inference” (23) have not changed. Nonetheless, in the 

structural tradition, several attempts have been made to isolate the key 

feature that distinguishes primitive and civilized modes of thought. Olsen 

finds in Levy-Bruhl’s work “an area in which understanding has evolved” 

(29), with his idea that the “primitive” “mind does not differentiate between 

sign and cause” (Olsen 1994, 28). Primitive thought has a magical relation 

between words and things in that there is “no strict boundary” “between 

representations and reality” (29). However, Olsen also points out that 

Habsmeier sees “little difference” between primitive thought and 

contemporary philosophy and science (32). As Chamberlin explains, 

science must use the same principles to understand its representation of 

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reality and to form, for instance, its “characterization of light as both a wave 

and a particle, or an infinite series that both reaches and never reaches its 

limit” (Chamberlin 2001, 83). Despite this critique of the distinction 

between scientific and primitive thought, there is still the urge to account for 

the history of technological advancements. Olsen attempts to quantify 

writing’s specific effect by arguing that it “makes language into an object of 

consciousness” (Olsen 1994, 34). In this way, Olsen maintains the 

difference between scientific and primitive thought, but not in the 

traditional sense. In order to avoid the hierarchy of superiority, he argues 

that “new reading practices” bring forward cognitive powers that have 

always been present in human behaviour. This power to bring forward 

abilities that are always already present in human beings accounts for 

technological developments and social changes without asserting an 

inherent evolutionary superiority of one culture over another. 

By locating the cognitive event in reading, contemporary theory 

balances the metaphysical play of presence and absence and moves out of 

the structural paradoxes of speech and writing, as well as the continuing 

problems of the post-structural extension of writing. Part of the continuing 

problem, however, is the persistence of the distinction between primitive 

and scientific thought, and of the gravity well of “writing” as a governing 

concept. Chamberlin agrees with Olsen’s and Stock’s conclusions that it 

was “not writing but reading that signalled revolutionary change” 

(Chamberlin 2001, 74). As Chamberlin comments on Olsen: 

The real achievement of reading is in negotiating this move from 

what is there to what is not there, from the sign to what is behind or 

before (in the sense of what causes the sign). And while writing 

provides an occasion for this, it is in reading that the cognitive and 

cultural changes actually happen. (75) 

However, Chamberlin points out that although contemporary theory shifts 

its focus to reading as central to the cognitive advances from primitive to 

scientific thought, therefore critiquing the Western privileging of either 

writing or speech, it still ties the breakthrough in reading to new writing 

technologies that occurred in the late European renaissance, and therefore 

still treats non-Western and non-modern forms of writing as a “preliterate 

craft” (70). Hence, in order to more fully critique the evolutionary bias of 

writing, Chamberlin locates the cognitive event at a point in history 

antecedent to even Western culture with the emergence of “speculative 

tracking” (77). 

Chamberlin argues that the shift in representational understanding of 

signs is not “an exclusive product of modern reading practices” but rather is 

“coincident with the development from simple or systematic to speculative 

tracking” (77). Collapsing both the hierarchy of primitive and scientific 

thought and the metaphysical stranglehold of speech and writing, he 

concretizes the post-structuralist concept of the “trace,” and reveals that 

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“there is in the ancient practices of speculative tracking a deep and complex 

understanding of the nature of representation that exactly mirrors 

contemporary notions of both literacy and what we call modern science. Or 

more precisely they mirror it” (79). Following Louis Liebenberg’s analysis 

of tracking and science, Chamberlin explains that simple/systematic 

tracking does not “go beyond evidence into opinion.” In this sense, it is not 

“reading,” but “the preliminary recognition of script.” Speculative 

tracking, on the other hand, “involves explaining observations in terms of 

hypothetical causes” (78). The elements of “interpretation” and 

“arbitrariness” that are attributed to writing’s power of abstract reasoning 

by the structural tradition in fact create the initial distance that makes the 

recognition of representation itself possible. It is this shift that “represents a 

fundamentally new way of thinking” (78). Thus, in critiquing the structural 

tradition and the post-structural critique itself, Chamberlin is not arguing 

that a cognitive advancement in the recognition of the difference between 

representation and reality did not occur but that the fundamental “cognitive 

advances we associate with literacy were fully evident many millennia ago, 

and still are today in contemporary hunter gatherer societies” (69). 

Conclusion 

What has been brought down with the Western metaphysical opposition of 

speech and writing is a notion of writing as an all-encompassing cultural 

indicator of civilization and means of social discrimination and control that 

contradicts its own primacy of the self-present voice. Clearly, we need a 

global revaluation of the concepts that form all of our assumptions and 

traditions. Indeed, the significance of the post-structuralist concept of 

writing in general opens all sign systems to question. In a postmodern 

world, as the cognitive advances formerly attributed to writing are now seen 

to be isolations and amplifications of the cognitive experience of 

recognizing representations in general, not only can myth be reinterpreted 

as a legitimate kind of history, but also history can be shown to be a kind of 

illegitimate myth itself. Hence, although modern structuralism is 

transitionally important in recuperating the study of oral and written 

traditions and their distinctive features, as argued throughout this paper, the 

system fails to negotiate the metaphysical concepts of speech and writing, 

presence and absence, and the arbitrary subordination of one for the other. 

Not only is the distinction between oral and written cultures problematic, 

but also the Western notion of what makes its written tradition distinct from 

its own oral tradition is not always commensurable with the oral and written 

forms of other cultures. Indeed, the Western analysis is not always 

commensurable with itself. 

Thus, with the waves of radical breakthroughs in the social sciences 

initiated by post-structuralism, contemporary theory has proceeded with 

critiques that have uncovered more and more layers of traditional 

assumptions. Indeed, we must still ask if the new concepts of reading still 

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leave us with a model that is vulnerable to the same paradoxes and 

criticisms as post-structuralist and even structuralist theories. Nonetheless, 

the important consideration in revaluating received notions of oral and 

written traditions, and the evolutionary bias of Western literacy is that, as 

Olson concludes, “literacy is not just a basic set of mental skills isolated 

from everything else. It is the competence to exploit a particular set of 

cultural resources” (1994, 43). With this culturally relative notion of 

literacy, from an indigenous perspective it is the Western tradition that was 

at first “illiterate” upon entering the New World, overlooking the 

indigenous semiotic connection to the land. As Greg Young-Ing asserts: 

The body of knowledge encompassed in the Aboriginal Voice 

contains valuable paradigms, teachings and information that can 

benefit all of the World Family of Nations. Indeed, sectors of the 

scientific and academic establishment have recently come to the 

realization that Aboriginal knowledge is an integral part of the key 

to human survival. (Young-Ing 1993, 180). 

Thus, while maintaining the undeniable importance of oral and written 

traditions, a critique of the Western assumptions behind them is required for 

a better understanding of post-colonial societies and their indigenous 

traditions. Contemporary Western and First Nations critical theories have 

opened the field to new speculations on the possible tellings of our histories. 

For the twenty-first century, it is a matter of how quickly our revaluations 

find their tracks in Canadian society. 

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Bernstein, Basil. Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan 

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Birney, Earle. “Can. Lit.” The Blasted Pine. Ed. F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith. Toronto, 

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119

Kathleen Buddle 

White Words, Read Worlds: Authoring Aboriginality 

through English Language Media 1 

Abstract 

This paper documents several historically significant instances of Native 

communicative agency by situating local forms of activism within the history 

of colonial projects that created some of the needs for and many of the limits 

on Aboriginal media initiatives. It explores the creation, management and 

representation of cultural borders and focuses on the conditions under which 

the symbolic lines marking cultural difference are likely to appear blurred, to 

shift or to dissolve. I examine some of the unique communicative predicaments 

of predominantly English-speaking, urban, Aboriginal subcultures in 

Alberta, Canada, delving into the cultural dynamics characterizing Alberta 

Aboriginal activism from the nineteenth century to the present. The focus is on 

the discursive production, policing, regulation and transformation of 

indigenousness; and on the ways differently interested groups in western 

Canada map, project and inscribe different symbolic meanings of alterity 

using English media publications. 

Résumé 

La présente communication examine quelques exemples d’agence 

communicative autochtone d’importance historique en situant les formes 

locales d’activisme à l’intérieur de l’histoire des projets coloniaux qui ont 

créé quelques-uns des besoins et plusieurs des restrictions relatifs aux 

initiatives des médias autochtones. Elle se penche sur la création, la gestion et 

la représentation des bornes culturelles et se concentre sur les conditions 

dans lesquelles les lignes symboliques démarquant les différences culturelles 

sont susceptibles d’avoir l’air de s’estomper, de se déplacer ou de disparaître. 

J’examinerai quelques-unes des difficultés uniques dans le domaines 

des communications des subcultures autochtones en Alberta, au Canada, 

principalement anglophones et urbaines, tout en explorant plus en 

profondeur la dynamique culturelle qui caractérise l’activisme autochtone en 

Alberta depuis le dix-neuvième siècle jusqu’à nos jours. Je me concentrerai 

sur la production discursive, la surveillance, la réglementation et la 

transformation de l’identité autochtone; et sur les façons dont des groupes 

dans l’Ouest du Canada qui prônent des intérêts divers parviennent à projeter 

et à inscrire les diverses significations d’altérité et à en établir les grandes 

lignes en se servant pour cela des publications des médias anglais. 

Despite that they are most commonly formulated in a now “common” 

English language, Canadian and Aboriginal social constructions of 

otherness project radically different pasts and futures onto the collective 


30, 2004



movements through time of Canada’s so-called “founding” and “found” 

peoples (Furniss 2001; Buddle 2004). Canadian and Aboriginal peoples, 

who seem to be forming ever more complexly aligned identifications, 

engage in cultural work on their “life projects” (cf. Blaser, Feit and McRae 

2004) by drawing on resources that are culled from the practice of everyday 

life. However, those who commit to the specific project of identifying a 

discernable Canadian or Aboriginal nation (or First Nation) also engage in 

more squarely discursive political contests. The shape such struggles take is 

profoundly affected by inequities that limit the ways relationships between 

“insiders” and “outsiders” can be structured. This is significant because the 

constraints influence the collective capacities of whole nations to authorize 

and enact culturalist claims by circumscribing the scope of admissible 

“cultural” materials. 

Because the terms of reference for the contests, which are predicated on a 

normative Euro-Canadianness, are set by the more powerful group, 

Aboriginal “culturalist” constructions are necessarily invested in 

“othering” and are therefore in some measure counter-culturalist in nature. 

Over the course of colonial history, the production of alterity in public 

political space in Canada has been carried out in the terms of diacritically 

opposed “Indian” and “white” referents. As with whites in First Nations’ 

discursive contexts, the fictive “Indians” articulated against Euro- 

Canadian selves provide interested groups with “usable subjects,” as 

Coates (1999) writes—unflattering during times of expansion, romanticized 

to strategic advantage when opportune, and glossed over when an 

uninquiring public demands more palatable offerings. 2 

Take for example the Canadian social constructions of “technology” and 

“progress” that were formulated in and around the building of the Canadian 

national railway. These would figure centrally in a larger discourse on 

“empire.” According to Harold Innis (1972), colonial authorities construed 

informational and transportation technologies as straightforwardly 

positive and powerful forces and articulated them against an oppositional 

“backward” Nativeness. The Canadian Pacific Railway company 

employed Aboriginal peoples to “perform” for train passengers during 

maintenance stops (Francis 1992, 181), 3 thus marking aboriginality as a 

place where time and technology stand still. So popular were these 

voyeuristic excursions into “nature preserves” (from the safety of railcars), 

that the company would inaugurate an annual performance event, 

henceforth known as “Banff Indian Days” (181) thus providing for a time 

outside of normative settler time. 

In discursive contests today, lumber, fishing, oil and hydro industry 

lobbyists pit “jobs” (as code for the principle of unfettered economic 

growth) against the natural and animal rights groups’ preferred trope, “the 

environment.” Adiacritical Nativeness is elicited to opportunistic effect by 

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White Words, Read Worlds: Authoring Aboriginality through English 

Language Media 

each interest group. Proponents of industry press into service a 

“traditional,” usually northern, land-based Nativeness to symbolize 

anti-development. When opportune, environmentalists have been known 

to invoke the “too modern” aboriginality, deploying images of Englishspeaking, 

wage-earning “failed traditionalists” to lend credence to their 

“conservation” projects. 

The idea that cultural insiders determine their self-positioning and 

structure relations with outsiders by creating “stereotypes” (cf. Francis 

1992, 221) or images of unified otherness is not new to anthropological 

analyses of discursive regimes of representation (see for example Geertz 

1973; Clifford 1988). This paper diverges from this well-traveled path, 

moving to more rarely traversed theoretical territory by drawing out some 

of the ways Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian nationalist projects are 

incontrovertibly entangled in the context of newspaper production. 

Pointing to the ways that power and material inequities between Indigenous 

and newcomer populations structure the debate surrounding the legitimacy 

of national identities, the article maps a genealogy of Canadian and 

Aboriginal cultural “work” on notions of heritage and of progress in the 

Alberta press. The article investigates some of the strategies Aboriginal 

mediators have devised to repudiate the metanarrative of modernization— 

an ideology that takes for granted a broad opposition between traditional 

and modern and that the transition from the former to the latter would be a 

one-way process of social change. In general, Native mediators have 

historically equated this ideology of progress or development with the 

colonization of their futures. 

From the time of their earliest involvement in the industry, Aboriginal 

newspaper writers have been largely consumed with destabilizing 

Canadian configurations of Indianness, and with renegotiating the very 

terms of reference on which the struggle over authorial privilege is fought 

(see Buddle 2002b; La Course 1994). By incorporating the English 

language and newspaper work within a broader struggle to ameliorate 

justice for Aboriginal peoples, Aboriginal agitators for reform use 

so-called “modern technologies” to invest tradition—the realm and quality 

of social practice in terms of which claims of Aboriginal “distinction” are 

made—with value. In so doing, Native media activists frustrate the state 

sponsored “othering” projects, which are governed by a set of normative 

valorizations of “progress” that take for granted an unequivocal 

dissimilarity between Aboriginality and contemporaneity, and between 

indigeneity and Canadianness. The particular local forms that the 

indigenization of education, the English language and print media take in 

Alberta, however, powerfully attest to the willingness of Aboriginal 

peoples there to accept both the old and the new, and indigenous and 

selected exogenous (Canadian) elements as constituting their traditions. 

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Aboriginal English and Other “Progressive” Technologies 

In the popular press of the settlement era, stories of the social consolidation 

of Canada are dominated by the theme of the replacement of tradition with 

modernity. Reflections on a European past, the tales of newcomers to the 

“New World” denote moral-political projects through which Euro- 

Canadians tell themselves origin stories so as to be able to confer a direction 

on their own presents and futures. Frequently, the stories will contrast a 

didactic settler directive that is implied in the active creation of “place” 

through expansion, with a version of indigenousness as a benign force that 

moves through unaltered space—one that is sustained only with the abject 

absence of change. The staging of indigenous exhibits at world fairs during 

the 19 th and early 20 th centuries is a cogent example of the way Euro- 

Canadians have consigned narrowly construed life scripts for Aboriginal 

peoples. In these pageantries of progress, the “Indian’s” principal part was 

to maintain the traditions held to mark indigenous difference by performing 

continuity amidst rapid change (see Heaman 1999; Mitchell 1989; Walden 

1997). 

More than merely an abstract role-playing game, however, struggles to 

script Aboriginality point to a veritable war of legitimacy—one with 

serious repercussions. Indeed, the failure to achieve recognized Aboriginal 

status generally translates into the incapacity to achieve a voice in the 

policy-making processes by which actual lives are regulated. The 

battleground is definitely governed by a politics of authorization—by the 

power to valorize identities—where concrete practical implications for real 

people attend the substantiation of credibility claims. 

Euro-Canadian histories of the nation that extol a morality of “progress” 

proceed through particular configurations of “keywords” (cf. Williams 

1976) such as modernization, development and advancement—all 

“forward” directed metaphors that are predicated on certain sets of 

expectations. The project hinges, however, on the juxtaposition of two 

central concepts and their associations, namely, “modern” and 

“technology.” The implication is that to embrace English and other “nontraditional” 

technologies is to concede to the replacement of indigenous 

languages and knowledge by foreign influences. Failing to interrogate their 

coupling is to leave unquestioned an apparently implicit ideological link 

between the adoption of technologies such as the English language, mass 

media and the inevitable eclipse of Aboriginal traditions. 4 

Proving that “progress” continues to serve contemporary notions of 

Canadian nationhood, Eugene Steinhauer, at the time president of the 

Indian Association of Alberta, neatly sums up the immediate practical 

import of the ongoing semiotic campaign in an editorial piece for the 

Edmonton Journal. Speaking to the Canadian government’s promotion of 

its Governance Act, 5 he writes that legislators have historically afforded 

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Indian people the possibility of only two agentive dispositions. The first 

entails performing continuity—living on economically impoverished 

reserves, says Steinhauer, “uncomfortably” without the conveniences or 

technologies of the so-called “modern” world in “painful,” “unhealthy” 

and “dangerous” places. The alternative—enfranchisement6 —organizes 

and enacts a version of modernity, which calls for a relinquishment of all 

claims to distinctiveness and of whatever benefits and liabilities attend 

“Indian status”: 

“You have no future as Indians,” they told us. “Disperse into the 

larger community. Get lost. Forget your Indian heritage. Try to 

become English or French for this is the only way to be Canadian” 

(Edmonton Journal 1981, A5). 

The notion of a Canadian “mosaic” that is promoted in state-sponsored 

diversity projects, and which would include performances of preferred 

sorts of ethnic differences (as are to be found festivalized in folkloristic 

displays), does not readily admit alternative registers of distinction (see 

Bannerji 2000). Rather, Canadian social policy continues to be underpinned 

by a rhetoric of progress that charts Aboriginal successes along the 

Euro-Canadian trajectory of “development,” which makes concessions to 

“heritage preservation” while coupling the concepts of “advancement” 

with cultural effacement. 

This discursive thread that extends back to colonial times is not difficult 

to trace through the archival record, where the newspaper and government 

administrators’ “Indians,” for example, display striking similarities. Both 

interest groups bring a number of discursive devices into play through 

nationalizing narratives that invoke a contrasting Aboriginal otherness (see 

Coward 1999; Cruikshank 1997; Reeves and Frideres 1981; Ryan 1978; 

Peters 2003). Distancing aboriginality is ultimately achieved by locating its 

“authentic” incarnation in a remote time, space and quality—the past, the 

wilderness, and in a dissociative or incommunicative state. “Real” Indians 

are generally, therefore, in some measure failed or flailing Canadians. To be 

a socially competent Canadian does not preclude that Aboriginal subjects 

might perform a version of Indianness that happens to be valorized by 

outsiders—the picturesque or passively seen “Indians” that tourists expect 

to be able to consume at spectacles such as the Calgary Stampede or at 

tourist powwows—but it does necessitate that Aboriginal subjects play at 

or make visible concessions to that set of attributes in which Canadian 

nationhood is so heavily invested. 

To configure one’s identity so as to bring it into accord with the type of 

culturally reproductive work that enacting an ethos of individualism, 

liberalism or capitalism entails, however, places the socially competent (by 

Canadian standards) in an untenable position. By virtue of achieving 

facility in Canadian social fields, Aboriginal actors become ineluctably 

more ambivalently “Indian.” The appraisal would appear to be somewhat 

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more forgiving for those Native people who uphold a dogged difference by 

presenting themselves as unwitting victims of culture loss, thereby meeting 

the criterion for dissimilarity by showing themselves to be mastered by, 

rather than masters of, certain key agents of change—education and 

technology, for example, both of which are presumed to be innately 

transformative. 

By contrast, possessing considerable stores of Aboriginal cultural 

capital generally implies a deficiency in the “proper” degree of dissociation 

from natural blood-based affinities—the “traditional tribal collective” and 

the traditional mode of production for consumption rather than for market. 

Depending on the script, aboriginally-valued proficiencies have 

historically been misread as signalling either a triumphant resistance or the 

tragic failure to emerge from behind the “buckskin curtain” (cf. Cardinal 

1969) to take on assigned roles on the Canadian social stage and to evolve as 

adequately atomized yet appropriately integrated and socialized citizens 

(see Carter 1990). 7 

Not incidentally, the concept of a customary Native technological 

deficiency, which inspires the contemporary Aboriginal policy agendas 

expressed in the publications of western Canadian-based right-wing 

citizens groups such as the Fraser Institute’s Fraser Forum and the 

Canadian Taxpayers Federation Talkin’ Taxes, also enjoys a cogent 

contemporary existential reality in popular touristic representations of 

Aboriginal peoples in Alberta (see also Blundell 1989; Burgess 1993; 

Deutschlander and Miller 2003). For the right-wing lobbyists, when 

Aboriginal peoples reject the central tenets of Canadian capitalism, they 

“stand in the way of development” (see Blaser, Feit and McRae 2004); 

however, for the tourist industry, the inviolability of Aboriginal tradition by 

change (typically read as the lack of technology) provides a clear marketing 

advantage. 8 

Much like Frank Oliver’s Edmonton Bulletin more than a century ago, 

the prescription for Aboriginal progress offered in the Reform Party’s now 

defunct Alberta Report relies on a rationale that confuses moralistic and 

market-based directives. Pressing for an end to the distinctions that 

allegedly defile the principle of “equality,” yet without questioning the 

ways white privilege is encoded in Canadian law, the social policy calls for: 

the elimination of legal distinctions between Aboriginal peoples and 

Canadians, the removal of tax exemptions for reserve-based businesses, the 

erasure of treaty rights by privatizing land ownership and the 

municipalization of reserve populations. Right-wing groups and their 

pundits (see Flanagan 2000) claim that these measures—which specifically 

resemble those advanced in the federal Governance Acts in the 1980s and at 

the turn of the 21 st century—provide Native peoples with greater 

opportunities for employment and for improved earnings, the two principle 

indices Alberta business interest groups have historically selected as 

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measures of “development.” It is worth spelling out that this economic 

approach to development equates advancement with economic growth 

rather than with the improvement of human welfare, a regional social policy 

that extends well back into the region’s colonial history. 

Pressing Prairie Progress 

In the early days of western Canadian settlement, Frank Oliver constructed 

Aboriginality in his newspaper, as did others of his era, to publicize his own 

self-interested agenda for Canadian development. Avowedly Liberal, 

Oliver employed the Edmonton Bulletin to openly criticize the reigning 

Conservative government’s policies, seeking to embarrass the administration 

with bad publicity. Like other colonial papers, however, the 

Edmonton Bulletin promoted the seizure of Indian reserve lands for the 

benefit of white settlers. By 1883, Frank Oliver occupied a seat on the 

Northwest Council. He used his status as a politician and newspaperman to 

promote settlement and the expansion of agriculture in the area. His paper 

served as a convenient forum for publicizing his personal visions for 

regional progress. Situated some distance from the town of Edmonton, the 

Whitefish Lake community, for instance, was not competing with the white 

community for shared resources. 

Stories in the Bulletin about the Whitefish Lake band were generally 

focussed on the theme of the band’s continued agricultural success. 

Papastayo’s band, on the other hand, was in the process of claiming lands 

within the Edmonton township. The 17 January 1881 issue of the Bulletin 

insists that if Papastayo was unwilling to settle immediately with his people 

on a reserve located in present-day southwest Edmonton, the land, and 

indeed anything of exploitable value belonging to these peoples, ought to be 

confiscated and offered to white settlers. The article implies that those who 

desired to “work” the land, in the Euro-Canadian sense of the term, were 

more deserving of its possession: 

If this country was given by the Indians to the Government then it 

would be right for the Government to be thankful for whatever they 

might get; but if the Government has bought the land it is surely 

their right and duty to look after the interests of the settlers, both 

present and future, for whom the land was bought, and out of 

whose earnings it is expected ultimately to be paid for, as well as 

those of the Indians, who will be a bill of expense and a drawback 

to the country for an indefinite period … Now is the time for the 

Government to declare the reserve open and show whether this 

country is to be run in the interests of the settlers or the Indians. (17 

January 1881) 

Oliver reiterated his complaint in an editorial printed in the 2 August 

1884 issue, asserting that the block of land claimed by Papastayo is the 

“choicest part of the district.” He insists that the band is made of 

127



“stragglers” from other reserves, that the chief and councillors are not “pure 

Indians” and that a large portion of the residents subsist by “begging” in 

town. He writes: 

What right this band of Indians (if such they can be called) has to a 

reserve, even in this part of the country, is hard to conceive. … It is 

a matter of the greatest importance to the town that the Indians 

should be induced to remove from their present situation. It would 

be for the benefit of the Indians to remove them further from 

civilization … [and throw their reserve open to settlement] at the 

earliest opportunity thereby enhancing the future prospects and 

value of the town and in reality doing the Indians an everlasting 

service. 

Oliver’s campaign to remove Papastayo’s people from the Edmonton area 

was finally realized in 1901, with the appropriation of the Passpasschase 

(now Papaschase) reserve. His paper reported: 

The lesson of this reserve may very well be applied to the case of 

others similarly situated. The Indians make no practical use of the 

reserves which they hold. Where the land is good and well situated 

for market white men can turn it to much better account than the 

Indians do. A township in a good hunting country and near a 

fishing lake is more valuable to the Indians than a township of 

prime agricultural land near a railway station. It is a loss to the 

country to have such lands lying idle in the hands of the Indians 

when white men want to use them and are willing to pay for them. It 

is a loss to the Indian to compel him to remain in uncongenial 

surroundings to which he cannot adapt himself when he has the 

opportunity to remove to congenial surroundings, and by the sale 

of the land ensure himself a comfortable annuity. (Edmonton 

Bulletin 1901) 

The Edmonton Bulletin generally reserved its most scathing moral 

indictments for the “half-breeds,” whose mixed racial constitution was 

itself interpreted as an affront to Victorian notions of purity. In one editorial 

entitled “Indians?” Métis people are characterized as having integrated the 

worst of both worlds, “having the grasping nature of the whiteman and the 

indolence of the Indian” (15 April 1882). The author opines: 

The Lac Ste. Anne band, also mostly half-breeds, before the treaty 

were doing pretty well … but since then they have quit farming and 

working and gone into the business of starving and dunning the 

Government for grub, occasionally making threats of violence. … 

(15 April 1882) 

The author asserts moreover, that the distribution of free rations was merely 

“putting a premium on laziness,” and that granting the band reserve lands 

close to Edmonton would most certainly prove injurious to the “public 

benefit,” which, he argues, should naturally outweigh Métis concerns. Both 

128



the Papastayo and Ste Anne bands were situated in close proximity to white 

towns. Oliver insisted that both ought to be ceded with or without Native 

consent, in order to provide for the white population, which was sure to 

grow as the towns progressed. 

That written treaty promises were not being honoured and oral promises 

were categorically denied did not seem to figure into the journalists’ 

calculations of fair exchange. In the same region, more than ten years after 

Treaty Six was signed, Whitefish Lake Chief Pakan (James Seenum) 

travelled with Métis trader Peter Erasmus to Regina to meet with Edgar 

Dewdney, the first Indian Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, to 

protest surveying activity and to re-assert his land claim. Although an 

apology was printed in a later issue, the 5 July 1884 issue of the Bulletin 

portrayed Pakan as an inveterate swindler and the conservative government 

as a witless dupe: 

That this Indian chief is a man above the average intelligence is 

well known, and he should have known what he was doing in 

signing that treaty. Why, therefore, should he complain? … The 

only way it can be accounted for is that the knockneed [sic] policy 

pursued by the Government towards the Indians of the southern 

districts is breeding discontent, and this old shark Peccan [sic] is 

cunning enough to know that their demands are likely to be 

complied with, therefore this is his opportunity to present his 

supposed claims and grievances, which, if allowed or entertained 

will result in incalculable injury to the country along the 

Saskatchewan, and will be the signal for a general stampede to 

Regina by every indigent descendant of the once noble red man on 

a similar errand. (5 July 1884) 

Thus, in addition to the hardships imposed by white encroachment, Native 

people were increasingly made to suffer the harsh judgements of settlers, 

who attributed their misfortunes to personal, individual, attitudinal and 

moral problems such as “indolence” and “moral turpitude” rather than to a 

larger configuration of power. Settlers generally neglected to consider 

systemic causes, such as the sudden decline in buffalo herds, fish stock and 

other wild game, and the unsuitability of some regions for farming. Nor did 

they take into account the government’s failure to provide promised 

farming implements and instructors and the imposition instead of policies 

designed to impede Native productivity. In focussing attention on and 

fuelling these didactic debates, settler newspapers contributed significantly 

to the popular perception that such traits as laziness, simple-mindedness 

and arrested social, economic and political development were essential 

qualities of Indianness. 

Among other fictive “Indian” characters, Oliver’s paper brought to life a 

debauched, “fallen warrior Indian,” who ought for “his own good” to be 

physically removed from all contact with whites. Once he attained political 

129



office, Oliver used his position to introduce a piece of legislation that aimed 

to erode the Aboriginal land base in urban areas, forcing Native 

communities to retreat further into the bush. The Oliver Act of 1911 

permitted the removal of Indian peoples from reserves that were next to or 

partly within a white community with a population of 8000 inhabitants or 

more with the permission of the Exchequer Court of Canada (Titley 1986, 

21). 9 

Registering Dissident Modernities 

Aboriginal activists in Canada are currently engaged in ongoing efforts to 

decode and destabilize the “Indians” who have been evaluated according 

these “progress reports” well into the so-called “post-colonial” era. Given 

the nature of their articulation with other counter-colonial projects, it seems 

crucial to approach Aboriginal English and indigenous media not merely in 

terms of their textuality, but rather as forms of social action that are 

embedded in more expansive fields of political and cultural production 

(Myers 1995). As in the past, Native rights activists ultimately seek to alter 

the oppressive power relations that are encoded in the name of race and 

empire and to replace these lingering discursive vestiges of colonial times 

with their own preferred articulations of aboriginality. Far from being in 

any way “pure” or discrete, internally generated self-renderings that have 

been transmitted unaltered from one generation to the next, however, 

Aboriginal social agents continue to resignify indigeneity as new settings 

demand. A significant distinguishing factor in Aboriginal peoples’ use of 

the English language and media technologies is that rather than being 

overcome by forces that are conventionally understood to be mechanisms 

of acculturation, “Indian Way” or “tradition” persistently provides the key 

organizing principle for Native media work. Still, renderings of Indianness 

tend to incorporate rather than reject the selective borrowing of outside 

elements. Thus, as part of a larger strategy for engaging Canadians in 

dialogue, indigeneity as represented in the Aboriginal press reveals the 

extent to which Aboriginal identifications reflect a “permissible” 

aboriginality (cf. Myers 1995) and the degree to which this is bound to 

Canadian criteria and recognition of acceptable difference (see also 

Taussig 1993, 143). 10 

To recapitulate, in right-wing political discourse, the idea of Aboriginal 

difference is implemented to underscore the threat that anti-development 

poses for proper market functioning. Reform Party members insist that 

social welfare efforts to ameliorate the “Indian Problem” upset an 

imaginary “level” playing field, and contribute to Aboriginal peoples’ 

failure to keep pace with “the rest” of Canadians. For the tourist industry, 

Aboriginal difference is put into play profitably to signify spaces of leisure, 

temporal exoticism and nature. These discourses point to the diversity of 

interests in which an oppositional aboriginality might be applied. What the 

discursive tactics necessarily elide, however, is the possibility that 

130



Aboriginal peoples have never ceased to advance but may be in pursuit of 

divergent trajectories of progress or “alternative modernities” (cf. Dirlik 

1996; Gaonkar 1999). 

The above discourses on Aboriginal “authenticity,” despite that they 

reveal more about the formation of Canadian subjectivities than any 

empirical Aboriginal realities, nonetheless inject into public circulation 

ideas about “Indians” in terms of a “placial politics.” The normative 

urbanness and whiteness on which these discourses are predicated marks 

Indianness as “raced” and non-urban space a “peripheral” value. While 

whiteness tends to remain conceptual or abstract, however, aboriginality is 

inescapably embodied. Aboriginality is valued in the above discourses in so 

far as it can be positioned so as to yield preferred readings of Canadianness—readings 

which, once again, have appreciable reverberations for 

actual Native peoples. 

By locating Indianness in properly peripheral space, the narratives 

project onto Native peoples innate qualities such as a natural disinclination 

to live in cities, to speak English or to actively engage outsiders (see also 

Flynn 1995). This racializing of difference ignores the history of colonial 

projects that sought to bar Indian people from cities, to impede 

communication between Indian peoples and between Native and Canadian 

peoples and to prohibit Aboriginal peoples from pursuing an education 

alongside Canadians. Some of the consequences of these attempts to situate 

Indianness as “naturally” foreign to Canadianness result in common 

assumptions about Indian people as being insufficiently distanced from 

their locales and inadequately connected to global realities to competently 

represent themselves in registers outside of Chief Seattle-type speeches, 

singing, dancing and flute playing—the traits Canada’s multicultural 

policies valorize as marking and preserving ethnic difference. These ideas 

are so prominent in the Canadian nationalist discourses and so pervasive in 

Canadian public culture that Native people themselves may fail to question 

their constructedness. 11 

English-speaking Aboriginal peoples who claim to be “traditional” pose 

conundrums for scholars, policy makers and for Aboriginal people for 

whom linguistic determinism—the idea that language determines 

culture—continues to provide compelling conceptual relevance. Where 

language and culture are interchangeable determinants, the apparently 

passive accommodation of foreign technologies, such as English, are held 

to threaten the “survival” of ostensibly bounded, coherent fields of 

transhistorical essence. 

Those adopting a more sociolinguistic orientation might counter with the 

assertion that class, gender and occupation as well as culture have a critical 

impact on the form and content of particular languages. Typically, neither 

culture nor language is biologically determined according to an 

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anthropological sensibility, which would call for the framing of Aboriginal 

Englishes in a unique way. Reporting on the findings from a “Reserve 

English” research project, for example, Regna Darnell writes that far from 

being the less than competent rendition of the language and the mark of 

culture loss it is often assumed to be, Aboriginal English generally requires 

significant cultural translation before it is understandable by the general 

public. She says: 

Lack of comprehension of the distinctiveness, both linguistic in 

the narrow sense, and sociolinguistic in the broader one, of English 

spoken by First Nations peoples is at the root of much of the mutual 

solitudes of Native and white in Canada. (Darnell 1992, 91) 

As a contract researcher for a research project on reserve English based in 

southwestern Ontario, and with a focus on Aboriginal media, I surmised 

that what was popularly assumed for Aboriginal English was often 

projected onto Aboriginal presses, radio and television. My findings, 

however, challenged the idea that Aboriginal peoples were passively 

succumbing to foreign, culturally transforming influences. Yet, I discerned 

nothing intrinsically Euro-Canadian in radio or English, nor did I find there 

to be a necessary transparency to the products produced through them. 

Rather, communications media, much like the English language, as Lyons 

suggests, “… bend to fit the cultural circumstances in which it is received, 

even while it is creating those circumstances” (1990, 425). Aboriginal 

linguistic and media practices, therefore, might be more productively 

apperceived as cultural adaptive strategies (cf. Ridington 1990) rather than 

as indices of straightforward globalization by powerful outside forces (cf. 

Fulford 2004). Far from being transparent signs of “modernization,” the 

meanings attributed to technologies such as the English language and mass 

communications by Aboriginal peoples are historically and locally 

contingent. 

English and Intercultural Communication in Alberta’s 

European Settlement Era 

The historical evolution of Native English and Aboriginal mass 

communications is often closely intertwined. This section examines the 

innovative methods devised by an Anishnabe (Ojibwe) Methodist minister 

to transmit selected and revised or even “indigenized” technologies of 

English, alphabetic and syllabic literacy, agriculture and tactical public 

relations to his charges across Alberta in the mid-19 th century. 12 Here, I 

explore the idea that the tendency to equate the adoption of English, 

agriculture or literacy with acculturation and culture loss mystifies the 

practical reasoning behind some of the initial positive responses by Indian 

individuals to certain carefully selected technologies in the 19 th century. In 

adopting some practices and rejecting others, Plains peoples employed 

syncretization in the sense that Hamid Naficy uses the term, namely, as “a 

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means used by oppressed people to ensure the survival of their beliefs and 

way of life” (1993, 229). That some Cree groups of present-day Alberta 

voluntarily began to farm and send their children to day schools, thus 

retaining the central value, but impregnating the “form” of “living off the 

land” with new meanings, may have had much to do with Henry Bird 

Steinhauer’s unique methods of Methodist proselytization. 

Steinhauer (Shahwahnegezhik), originally from an Ojibwe village near 

Rama, Ontario, attended missionary schools and college in Toronto 

(KaiNai News, 6 August 1976). 13 He had been stationed for a time in 

northern Manitoba where he collaborated with the Rev. James Evans on the 

invention of a syllabic system. 14 

After his ordination into the Methodist ministry in 1855, Steinhauer was 

appointed to a new mission in Lac la Biche (in present-day Alberta). In an 

attempt to counter the growing influence of Roman Catholicism in the area, 

in 1855 Steinhauer opened a day school—the first school for Native 

children in Alberta (Mabindsa 1984, 404). During the day, Cree children 

were exposed to a primarily religious education, but were also instructed in 

Cree syllabic literacy. On weekday evenings, Steinhauer delivered sermons 

to the adults. He also sought conversions from the more nomadic Plains 

groups with whom he camped during the spring months, at which time the 

Crees gathered in large groups to fish and hunt buffalo (406). 

In 1862, George McDougall, the appointed Chairman of the Methodist 

missions in the Hudson’s Bay Territories, wrote to the Rev. Enoch Wood 

from Maskepetoon’s camp in the Battle River country, reporting that: 

By many a camp-fire [sic], and in many a smoky lodge, our faithful 

missionaries [Robert Rundle, Henry B. Steinhauer and Thomas 

Woosley] have taught these natives the message of salvation, and 

who can estimate the fruit of their labor [sic]? Many of the pagans 

understand the syllabic characters, and have procured parts of the 

Book of God; and in this way in many hearts the heavenly leaven is 

spreading. (McDougall 1888, 96) 

Maskepetoon (Broken Arm), according to Dickason, was probably the best 

known of the western converts to Methodism; moreover, “he was one of the 

first on the Plains to learn the syllabic script, which he used with great 

proficiency and which may have aided his activities as a roving diplomat” 

(1997, 298). As early as 1843, he was engaged in correspondence in 

syllabics with the Rev. Rundle, then stationed at Rocky Mountain House 

(Murdoch 1985, 11). 15 

Steinhauer’s efforts to create a sedentary agricultural community in 

Whitefish Lake, which lies in the present day Treaty Six area, met with 

some success (Mabindsa 1984, 408). For at least seven years prior to the 

signing of Treaty Six, Whitefish Lake residents positively responded to 

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Steinhauer’s projects to develop the necessary literacy and agricultural 

skills with which, it was felt, residents could defend their community from 

outside control. In the spring of 1869, owing largely to a petition written by 

community members requesting the full-time services of a teacher, Adam 

Snyder was sent to the settlement (441). Snyder’s first teaching duties were 

conducted in another of Steinhauer’s innovations—the “moveable camp 

meetings.” Despite the minimal interest in Christianity, Steinhauer’s 

mobile school ensured a diffusion of syllabic literacy. That adults were 

simultaneously receiving literacy training at class meetings ensured an 

intergenerational sharing of information and skills. Moreover, long after 

assimilation became the government’s explicit goal and English had 

become the standard language of instruction for Indian schools in the east, 

Steinhauer’s brand of pedagogy continued to promote a mixed Cree and 

English curriculum (Edmonton Bulletin 24 May 1884). 

That Steinhauer’s mission attracted some to settlement is attributable to 

the voluntary aspect of participation in the Methodist social reorganization 

project, as well as Steinhauer’s personal relations with the band members. 

The positive responses to agricultural and literacy practices under 

Steinhauer’s direction diverge widely from later responses to the forced 

education and farming projects that were introduced by government 

institutions after the treaty signing. 16 

Peter Erasmus, a Métis free-trader and later government translator, 

suggests that the members of the Whitefish Lake settlement did not reject 

agricultural training outright as they foresaw the possibility of attaining 

material gain in adopting some cultivating activities: 

[Steinhauer] had been successful in persuading the Indians to 

cultivate some few plots of grain, barley and vegetables. Their 

farming tools were very crude, mostly homemade of wood. … 

Once the Indians learned of the value of the grain and the increased 

relish that vegetables added to the fish and meat diet, there were 

few who did not try to cultivate some land. They pooled their 

power in ponies to pull Steinhauer’s plough. … (1976, 189) 

That the Crees were not opposed to adopting some cultivating practices 

was due in part to what Sliwa refers to as their “opportunity-based 

economy.” Plains Cree, he submits, were prone to utilizing all the resources 

in their local area rather than exploiting one resource, such as the buffalo. 

Cree survival depended on this capacity for innovation and adaptation 

(1995, 4-5). The adoption of some agricultural practices and of syllabic and 

alphabetic literacy did not at first produce a qualitative shift in the focus of 

the Cree economy away from hunting. Farming, in fact, served to enrich 

hunting capacities. Therefore, agriculture and, arguably, schooling and 

Methodism, were not so much imposed on Crees at this historical moment 

as they were selectively appropriated to strategic effect by particular 

interested groups. That farming enhanced Whitefish Lake inhabitants’ 

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hunting capacities was an unintended outcome of the Methodist project, no 

less so that Aboriginal leaders would deploy the pen and the English 

language as powerful weapons in the struggle for Native political and 

cultural rights in the years to come. 

That Methodist social intervention was less than total is further evinced 

by the fact that the Whitefish Lake residents rejected the principle of 

individual self-interest that was expected to follow from agricultural 

reform. Despite the fact that land tracts came to be “formally” held by 

household heads, for instance, lands continued to be worked and farm 

implements communally shared. Moreover, the products of cultivation and 

hunting continued to be circulated throughout the community rather than 

hoarded by nuclear family units. The Edmonton Bulletin reported that 

during a particularly harsh winter, in spite of the fact that “the majority of 

the [Whitefish Lake] band are not badly off … each [having] a little crop of 

wheat, barley and potatoes …,” Chief Pakan was running a “soup kitchen,” 

requesting flour and beef from the Indian agent and taking up collections of 

potatoes from band members, and a load of wood from each head of a family 

to be distributed to the “aged and helpless of the band” (12 February 1881). 

Thus, collective community prosperity and the system of reciprocity 

continued to dominate Cree social relations in spite of Methodist efforts to 

promote utilitarian “individualism,” private property and market 

production. Steinhauer had envisioned agricultural skills and English 

language literacy as instruments of empowerment rather than subjugation, 

as tools that might be used by Cree people to gain rather than relinquish 

control over their territories. And his experiences with Plains groups 

confirmed that neither he nor they saw hunting and cultivating, nor political 

education and religion, as mutually exclusive. 17 

In the Whitefish Lake community, where every able household head also 

engaged in bush hunting, it was the practice to make regular contributions to 

the teacher, the minister and the elderly (Erasmus 1976, 231). That 

Steinhauer was incorporated into the system of reciprocal exchange 

indicates that the community was not only fully capable of but also not 

averse to integrating selected extraneous elements, even when the inductee 

served no immediate practical function within the hunting paradigm—the 

central principle of social organization for Cree men. Clearly, Steinhauer 

saw himself, and was seen, as a provider, though of another sort of 

sustenance. 

He saw no moral contradiction in mixing hunting with farming practices; 

however, drawing from his experience of settlement in the east, he correctly 

foresaw that game would diminish and crop cultivation would become a 

skill necessary less for prosperity than for mere survival. He set about to 

create a Methodist world durable enough to prevent the social 

disintegration that was expected to follow when the mass settlement of the 

area would preclude Native peoples from pursuing their traditional 

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livelihoods. According to his biographer Mabindsa, Steinhauer 

endeavoured to teach an understanding of Euro-Canadian ways, but: 

… he felt they were to be selective in this process. Only those 

aspects of the White man’s culture conforming to the Methodist 

view of the world were desirable. As a result, he tried to keep his 

charges away from the corrupting influences of certain Whites 

who were hostile to the missionaries. This was especially true of 

the free-traders who peddled intoxicants while selling other wares 

to the Indians. (1984, 430) 

Proving that he was not prone to making Manichean racial distinctions, 

Steinhauer asserted that white traders were no less “heathen” than 

non-Methodized Indians. In this sense, his notion of “civility” was 

ostensibly at odds with the official settler sensibility, in which all settlers, by 

virtue of their European descent, were presumed to occupy a higher moral 

standing and mass European and Euro-Canadian immigration into the area 

was considered an inherently positive moral prospect. Although he used the 

language in which they were encoded, Steinhauer clearly rejected white 

assumptions concerning an innate Indian immorality and an ascribed 

non-Aboriginal authority. 

For Steinhauer it was the successful indigenization of the extraneous, 

rather than the whole-scale replacement of the latter by the former, that 

offered Indian communities the greatest chance to resist absorption by the 

settling masses. Methodists aimed to transcend tribal or ethnic distinctions 

and to unite Indian people nationally under the banner of Methodism. 

Owing to the diverse ways that Methodism was appropriated and localized 

by specific regional and cultural groups, however, Methodist proselytizing 

efforts unintentionally often produced multiple Methodisms. 

The Methodist “civilizing” project therefore introduced added intra- and 

inter-tribal distinctions rather than affinities. As the terms for discourse 

between nations were generally set by a government that was intent on 

dissolving Indian territorial sovereignty, unity of purpose at this historical 

juncture was more often based on the shared territorial concerns among 

both the “progressive” and “conservative” members of Indian bands than 

on any shared appreciation for or rejection of Methodist ideological 

principles. Methodist farmers and Plains hunters of the Treaty Six region, 

for instance, held councils to discuss the creation of a communal Indian 

territory comprised of linked reserves. No analogous meetings of 

regionally diverse Methodist Indians were convened at this time. 

Steinhauer, who had experienced first-hand the lack of any unified 

mentality in Methodist circles, whose experience with non-Native free 

traders precluded any belief in the existence of a singular white enclave and 

whose intimate awareness of the cultural complexity among Indian peoples 

led him to reject the idea that Indian peoples constituted a distinct racial 

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category, was disturbed by simplistic rationalizations of white or European 

supremacy. Typically, such reasoning, which issued forth from Methodist 

as well as from wider spheres of Euro-Canadian dominion, was based on the 

erroneous assumption of Native cultural homogeneity and on Native 

peoples’ alleged innate intellectual inferiority. In a letter that appears in the 

Western Missionary Notices (1 August 1872), for instance, he assertively 

dismisses the race-based differentiating discourse. Steinhauer writes: 

We speak of our Missions in this country as being a power of 

renovating the condition of those people who have come under 

their instructions; and in my estimation the school has been of 

equal power in elevating the scale of being those who, in the 

estimation of many a white man, were irrecoverably barbarous— 

too degraded to acquire knowledge, either moral or religious. (Qtd. 

in Mabindsa 1984, 444.) 

Steinhauer’s insistence that Aboriginal Methodists were adapting well to 

new social and economic environments was offered as evidence that Native 

Methodist farmers, at least, were qualified to govern their own affairs and 

ought to be collectively granted title to their lands. 

In addition to pursuing an avowedly hybrid approach to proselytization, 

Steinhauer continued to correspond with his colleagues in Ontario, and 

subsequently apprised his Cree contemporaries of developments in the 

virtually inseparable political and religious spheres of Methodist Ojibwe 

missions there. In addition to Christian and Western educations, Steinhauer 

therefore offered a political education, one that included the history of 

Indian–White relations in Ontario. 

Peter Jones’ letter and newspaper article writing campaigns, in 

particular, which aimed to secure land titles to the Saugeen tract in 1832, 

provided a useful methodology for coordinating effective political activity 

(Smith 1987). Had Jones been successful, Ontario Anishinabe people 

would have acquired the power to set up their own educational, political and 

economic institutions without interference from outsiders. Like Jones’ 

efforts on behalf of the Ojibwes, and later somewhat strategically different 

attempts by Big Bear, Piapot and Little Pine, 18 Steinhauer advocated for the 

establishment of an exclusively Cree homeland—though one founded 

upon a unique combination of Cree and Methodist organizational 

principles, and one based on an economy that included both hunting and 

agriculture. 

After the annexation of the Northwest Territories to Canada in 1869, 

Steinhauer served as a political advisor to Pakan, the Chief of the Whitefish 

and Goodfish Lake bands. In political disputes that arose between the band 

and the federal government, he acted as an interpreter and wrote letters on 

behalf of Whitefish Lake residents in terms that white government officials 

would understand (Mabindsa 1984, 480). Like Jones, Steinhauer thus 

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facilitated direct communication between Cree leaders and the agents of the 

Crown (rather than with the Indian administration) long before the standard 

treaties were brought to them (535). 

Throughout the 1870s the Native inhabitants in the Treaty Six region 

continued to hold council meetings and to discuss strategies for dealing 

with squatting settlers, government surveying teams and the demise of the 

buffalo herds. At some of these meetings, several of the participating chiefs 

drafted letters to the government setting out their demands. According to 

Sluman and Goodwill: 

Chiefs Sweetgrass and Pakan … one a Catholic convert and other a 

Methodist joined with local whitemen in requesting the 

government to get on with the treaty negotiations. Harry [sic] Bird 

Steinhauer, the missionary at Whitefish Lake where Pakan had 

settled tried to tone down Pakan’s enthusiasm, warning him that 

the land was all that the Indians really owned but the Chief ignored 

the advice of this native-born missionary. Some of the other chiefs 

were more wary. Mistawasis (Big Child) had a letter written for 

him to Lieutenant-Governor Morris in January of 1875 in which he 

stated; “I do not wish it to be understood that I and my people are 

anxious that the Governor should come and make a treaty but if he 

is coming we do not say to him not to come.” (1982, 8) 

Written addresses were made by or on behalf of Pakan to Lieutenant- 

Governor Archibald in 1871, and later to his successor Alexander Morris 

from 1872 to 1876, insisting that negotiations begin before any further land 

surveys be conducted, telegraph wires set or lands be appropriated by 

settlers (Mabindsa 1984, 510). Pakan was insistent that Cree territory 

would be governed in the Indian way and thus not necessarily in accordance 

with Euro-Canadian customs. The Whitefish Lake band, therefore, wanted 

more from the treaty process than mere lands reserved for their hunting 

grounds; they wanted to establish their proprietary rights to a territory they 

claimed as their own, on which they would determine their own affairs. 

Attempts to control access to lands, such as interfering with land surveys 

and tampering with telegraph wires, reflect this change in the sense of land 

as common area to a perception of land as private property (Sliwa 1995, 8). 

At Whitefish Lake, private property was not an entirely alien concept. From 

the time of his arrival, Steinhauer had been actively promoting the notion 

that farm land ought to be both cultivated and owned on an individual rather 

than a communal basis (Mabindsa 1984, 532). Evidently, the Crees had 

their own ideas about how to employ this information to their best interests. 

Steinhauer’s attempts to impart “individualism,” contrarily, had the effect 

of strengthening the sovereignty of the Cree nation. The information he 

provided was appropriated and employed by various Cree bands working in 

concert as a weapon against governmental policies that were designed to 

undermine Cree unity and independence. 

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Despite Steinhauer’s accomplishments, his efforts to promote a stable 

reserve economy based on agriculture were directly undermined by the 

government’s agricultural reform policies, which were introduced shortly 

after the treaties were signed. The Indian Act permitted local agents and 

farm instructors to assume even greater control over cultivating activities. 

The 1878 Model Farm experiment placed patronage appointees from 

Ontario, none of whom had experience in prairie farming, and many of 

whom had no familiarity with Native peoples, in positions of authority over 

all reserve farming matters. The program provided for the organization of 

bands in the treaties Four, Six and Seven areas into farming agencies, and 

for the installation of a permanent resident farm instructor in each one 

(Carter 1990, 79, 82). 

Settlers, who were indignant that such programs gave an unfair 

advantage to Indian farmers, voiced their dissent in the prairie presses. 

Frank Oliver employed both his newspaper, The Edmonton Bulletin, and 

his political position to press the point that any efforts to educate Indian 

people posed a threat to public interest. During the 14 June 1897 

parliamentary debates, Oliver insisted, “We are educating these Indians to 

compete industrially with our own people, which seems to me a very 

undesirable use of public money, or else we are not able to educate them to 

compete, in which case our money is thrown away” (qtd. in Hall 1977, 134). 

The model farm program was shelved in 1884 due to administrative 

problems, increasing criticism from the non-Native residents of the 

northwest, and an increasing concern for economy in the Indian 

department. 

By the turn of the century, settler fears of Indian competition were 

successfully assuaged. Government and journalistic discourses officially 

agreed: Indian people themselves had authored their own misfortune. In 

1904, Clifford Sifton, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, remarked, 

“The Indian … cannot compete with the white man … He has not the 

physical mental or moral get-up to enable him to compete. He cannot do it” 

(Parliamentary Debates 18 July 1904, qtd. in Hall 1977, 134). The 

institutionalization of Native farming would produce its desired results, 

and from 1896 to 1911 immigrants, mostly from Ontario, flocked to the 

prairies (Stanley 1960). 

In his final years, Steinhauer would be forced to relinquish the small 

measure of control over Indian educational pedagogy that he was able to 

assert in his on-reserve day school. This was particularly evident after the 

government began to implement some of the recommendations of the 1879 

Davin Report, 19 which called for a standardization and institutionalization 

of Native education. The abandonment of the farm program in 1884 thus 

coincided with the introduction of an industrial school system. According 

to John A. MacDonald, Indian people were “naturally” unsuited to 

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agricultural pursuits and were more likely to become blacksmiths, 

carpenters or mechanics (Carter 1990, 106). 

Steinhauer soon found out that the informal and personalized style of 

education he was able to offer through local day schools and camp meetings 

was to be replaced by a much more militantly routine system of large, 

off-reserve, government-regulated institutions. This system would alter the 

nature of Indian family life for generations to come. 20 From this point on, 

the churches began to concentrate their efforts on the enterprise of Indian 

education. And, as Grant has noted, “The collaboration of Indians in 

planning and support, so conspicuous in early Upper Canada, was as 

conspicuously absent later in the century” (1984, 182). That Native people 

might desire an alternative future than that prescribed for them in the 

government’s plan for Indian progress was not a consideration in the 

development of residential school curricula, nor in the day-to-day 

operation of the schools. 

As part of their expansion plan, the Methodists constructed an industrial 

school in Red Deer, Alberta, which officially began operations in 1893. The 

school was administered by an all-white staff (Miller 1996, 115). Although 

the reserve day schools at Whitefish and Goodfish Lakes continued to 

operate, Cree children were sometimes sent by their parents to the Red Deer 

institution with the hope that they would receive a better education there. As 

the voluntary quality of school enrollment was surpassed by more coercive 

measures, however, resistance to forced schooling began to mount, even in 

the previously enthusiastic Whitefish Lake community. According to 

Grant: 

Resistance to enrolment was widespread, and school burnings 

were more common than mere accident would explain. Arthur 

Barner, appointed by the Methodists in 1907 to revive their ailing 

industrial school at Red Deer, reported such hostility at Whitefish 

Lake that no one would undertake to drive him to the reserve. Yet 

this was Henry Steinhauer’s old mission, and one of Steinhauer’s 

sons was then in charge of it. (1984, 179) 

The final affront to Steinhauer’s efforts to promote the establishment of 

an independent, self-determined, Cree Methodist homeland came from 

within the Methodist Church itself. In his new supervisory role, John 

McDougall, who openly advocated and indeed facilitated western 

expansion, quickly curtailed Steinhauer’s political activities. In 1884, the 

Whitefish Lake band council asked Steinhauer to serve as Pakan’s 

translator on a trip to Ottawa, where he hoped to press the matter of the large 

reserve. Steinhauer was required by church protocol to ask McDougall’s 

permission. He later sent a letter to The Missionary Outlook explaining his 

frustration at having been refused the opportunity tohelp hispeople. Itread: 

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… urging as a plea that Chief Pakan’s band were my people, I ought 

at least to ask leave of absence from the proper authorities; I did so 

by sending the message that I did, and the answer to it puts an end to 

the idea of doing as the band desire. (August 1884) 

Steinhauer was thereafter expected to suspend his political opinions, to 

concentrate his efforts on mission work, and to refrain from involvement 

with the band council. Like George Copway, Peter Jones and other Ojibwe 

ministers before him, Steinhauer was without any official possibilities, 

outside of publicizing his displeasure, for recourse. Like them, he was 

forced to accept the irreconcilable contradictions of his existence as an 

Ojibwe Methodist. In December 1884, Steinhauer contracted influenza and 

passed away. 

Steinhauer’s syncretic strategies for Cree survival involved providing 

Cree bands with an agricultural, academic and a political education, while 

upholding the central principles of Cree social organization and the 

sovereignty of Cree territory. At first, Cree syncretization was borne of 

opportunity. Farming enhanced hunting and syllabic literacy improved 

one’s diplomatic capacities. These initial positive responses to Steinhauer’s 

innovations proved that the Crees were not averse to integrating selected 

extraneous technologies. With the threat of massive settlement that soon 

followed, however, the Crees at Whitefish Lake strategically blended 

hunting with agriculture and school education with traditional knowledge 

systems so as to protect traditional institutions, and ensure their longevity. 

At a time when all Cree communication with the outside world was 

mediated through Indian agents, Steinhauer encouraged the literate to write 

directly to the newspapers and to government officials outside the Indian 

department, in defence of Cree rights. Steinhauer 21 reasoned that adapting 

such technologies as English language literacy and agriculture, which were 

guaranteed under the treaties, would render Cree territory and culture 

impenetrable to outside forces. Economic stability and the capacity to 

engage with the non-Native political system offered means of ensuring 

Cree political autonomy and Native control of strategic resources. The 

preferred government interpretations of the treaties, however, engendered 

an obverse trajectory, one which would propel Crees, against their wishes, 

into subjugation. 

Contemporary Alberta Aboriginal English Media 

Less than a century after Henry Bird Steinhauer opened the first school for 

Aboriginal children in Alberta, his great-grandson Eugene Steinhauer 

(1929–1995) would inaugurate his own program for restoring the 

communications corridors that colonial projects had disrupted. In the 

intervening years, ongoing discrimination, political and social 

marginalization, the legislated impoverishment of reserves, and forced 

141



attendance at residential schools would profoundly alter the flow of 

information and affect the lives of Aboriginal peoples across Alberta. 

Despite the fact that church and government authorities enforced English as 

a culture-replacing technology and deployed the residential school project 

partially as a weapon to quell the spirit of Aboriginal collectivism, a 

sufficient number of resilient residential school survivors seized the 

opportunity to acquire and to make their own, or to indigenize, new skill 

sets. This new kind of Aboriginal leader would use the English language, 

for example, to create and to extend trans-First National networks, and to 

forge a pan-Aboriginal solidarity—a sense of unity that would coalesce 

around shared interests, experiences and events. 

Throughout the 1960s, Eugene Steinhauer, one of the original board 

members of the Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program, dedicated 

himself to the establishment of healing programs, and to the shaping of 

regional and national policies on Aboriginal substance abuse 

programming. Eugene Steinhauer was instrumental in the development of 

the first Native-operated rehabilitation centre in Bonneyville, Alberta and 

in the creation of community substance abuse programs and treatment 

centres throughout the province. He put to use the political skills and 

connections he had gained as a member of the International Woodworkers 

of America Union when he served as president of the Indian Association of 

Alberta from 1968 to 1972 (Alberta Native News, November 1991). 

Throughout his political career, he steadfastly advocated for the 

entrenchment of Aboriginal treaty rights in the Canadian Constitution. 

Pursuing strategies similar to those of his great-grandfather and other 

members of the 19th-century Ojibwe intelligentsia, he led a delegation to 

England in 1965, appealed directly to the United Nation, and lobbied 

through the English and Canadian press. 22 He wrote a regular newspaper 

column, “The Native People,” for the Edmonton Journal. He also visited 

bands across the province of Alberta, tape recording elders and leaders for 

broadcast over the CKUA Cree radio program he founded in 1966. 

Significantly, Steinhauer and fellow members of the emergent 

Aboriginal culturalist movement focused on institutionalizing particular 

forums for and modes of communication—talking circles, media, informal 

inter-tribal gatherings and friendship centres. Indeed, it has been to counter 

the broader effects of the war waged with words (rather than languages) that 

Aboriginal activists have historically mounted their strategic resources. 

The struggle to bring to light the ways structural violence underwrites 

contemporary inequities in Canada continues to inspire the activities of the 

Aboriginal avant-garde to date. 

In 1968, Eugene Steinhauer made the first concerted attempt to 

centralize control over the authorship of Aboriginal electronic and print 

texts in a provincial Aboriginal organization. That year, Steinhauer 

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founded the Alberta Native Communications Society (ANCS), the first 

organization of its kind in Canada (Native People, 23 March 1968). 23 

According to Steinhauer, who would later serve an eight-year term as 

Saddle Lake Chief, embracing English media technologies did not threaten 

to erase Aboriginal difference but, rather, offered a means to “promote the 

socio-economic welfare and the cultural development and thus restore the 

pride and self-confidence of native people in Alberta” (Native People,26 

April 1969). 

Meanwhile, Aboriginal cultural activists initiated several newspapers in 

Alberta in the early 1960s. In 1964, in southern Alberta Blood Country, 

Reggie Black Plume began publishing the Sun Dance Echo, a production 

geared toward the local Blackfoot Confederacy readership. It later became 

KaiNai News (Lusty 6 July 1997). Within a year of forming ANCS, 

Steinhauer’s workers in the Edmonton area began to produce the monthly 

English language newspaper The Native People, which aspired to address 

the entire province. Soon after, Terry Lusty, inaugurated Elbow Drums for 

the urban Calgary area Aboriginal population (Lusty 6 July 1997). 

By the early 1970s the members of the ANCS had established what 

would become the longest-running educational Native Communications 

Program (NCP) in the country at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton. 

According to Jane Woodward, ANCS’s first woman reporter and later 

department chair for the NCP, the members of ANCS inaugurated the 

program in 1972 in response to the expressed need of Alberta Aboriginal 

communities for individuals who could facilitate communication or 

translate between Aboriginal groups as well as between Native and 

non-Native populations (23 October 1997). 

Donna Rae Paquette, who worked at the fledgling ANCS organization, 

recalls how revolutionary Steinhauer’s vision was of developing a 

professional class of Native communicators at the time: 

It had never been done before, to have Indian radio broadcasts … 

never mind reporters and broadcasters of native descent. It just 

wasn’t done. We could be ditch diggers and waitresses and 

chamber maids, we could fight forest fires and clean other people’s 

houses, pick rocks, hoe sugar beets and do the many tedious 

back-breaking servile types of labour expected of us. But we 

always knew there was no such thing as a professional native 

person, a white collar Indian. Until Eugene came and forced his 

dream into fruition and formed the nucleus of a news outlet that 

would feature the positive side of Indian country, and yes, there is 

one. (Edmonton Journal, 15 September 1995) 

News of ANCS’s successes had a ripple effect beyond Alberta’s borders. 

In 1969, RAVEN, Sardis, British Columbia’s Radio and Visual Education 

Network came into being with the immediate aim of setting up a network of 

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radio set operators along the BC coast (Vancouver Sun, 29 May 1970). In 

1970, the Indian News Media Society took shape in southern Alberta’s 

Blackfoot country. Native peoples established the communications 

societies in Wawatay, Ontario, and Native Communications Inc. in 

Manitoba over the next two years. 

The first issue of Port Arthur, Ontario’s Kenomadiwin News includes an 

interview with Eugene Steinhauer on the subject of ANCS’s Cree radio 

programming. The paper reports that at first Native listeners in Alberta 

were unsure what to make of a media service operated by Native people: 

“Mr. Steinhauer admitted that it had been slow going to start with, because 

the Indians themselves did not realize that the program was theirs entirely to 

comment on with no strings attached” (April 1968). Steinhauer explained 

that the radio program was aired weekly on mainstream stations in Camrose 

and Edmonton and reached an additional 50,000 Native people in northern 

Alberta. He added that plans to extend the coverage to newspapers and 

newsletters were well underway, and that both the provincial and federal 

governments had expressed an interest in supplying funding support for the 

year 1968. Members of the Native community, he noted, were matching 

government grants with volunteer contributions for a cost-sharing 

arrangement (April 1968). Steinhauer’s ANCS provided the model on 

which to base radio service delivery to Native communities throughout 

Canada. 24 

Across Canada, Aboriginal mediators have innovated and annexed radio 

and print practices and the English language to their already existing modes 

of communication in ways that reflect and reinforce values that enable 

Aboriginal peoples to meaningfully order their existence, and which offer 

practical communicatory advantages in particular localities. Native radio 

shows and newspapers have not succumbed to some hegemonic 

commercial model. Instead, the culturally specific communicative 

activities to which Aboriginal media are applied include creating and 

enhancing bonds in and between communities; re-signifying the traditional 

(cf. Ginsburg 2002); indigenizing the extraneous; returning authority to 

“the people”; and strengthening the cultural fabric of Aboriginal life. 

First Nations English media has thus not disrupted the centrality of First 

Nationalist identity as a critical marker of Aboriginal distinction. Native 

media serves, for example, as an integral element in the healing movement 

—a grassroots effort to restore Native communities to physical, mental, 

spiritual and emotional health and to foster constructive relationships 

between individuals, families, communities and nations. In providing both 

the context for community discussions and a language with which to 

address their circumstances, Aboriginal media encodes, or culturally 

orders, novel forms and flows of vital information. 

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Aboriginal media also figures prominently in wider political struggles to 

subvert Native peoples’ subjugation, to assert Aboriginal authorial 

authority and to promote linkages between First Nations polities. Instead of 

merely reproducing mainstream models, therefore, Aboriginal media 

practices and products represent culturally appropriate paradigms for 

publicizing progress, through Aboriginally activated communications 

corridors. 

Throughout the years, Native cultural mediators have become 

increasingly adept at employing elements of the non-Native political and 

communications apparatuses to their own advantage. They have also 

actively engaged in articulating an alternative national discursive 

formation—an Aboriginal “mediascape.” 25 As Ontario Indian’s assistant 

editor, Sweetgrass’s founding editor and contemporary writer Lenore 

Keeshig-Tobias remarked that Native peoples are strategically deploying, 

among other devices, written English—“a language which has been used as 

a weapon [against them] as a tool to empower” (6 February 1992). To 

Canadians of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement era, who had only just 

begun to acknowledge a wider array of Aboriginal adeptness, (largely 

because Indian people did the work of cultural translation for them), it 

appeared as though Aboriginal people were finally becoming 

Canadianized. Because non-Native authorities failed to see that Aboriginal 

peoples sought to incorporate exogenous technologies into the indigenous 

rather than permit their whole-scale displacement, however, they tended to 

misrecognize Aboriginal approaches to modernity. 

In its most common Canadian usage, modernity is understood as a 

singular trajectory of social and technological progress that began and 

finished with Europeans (Mitchell 2000, 1). Working within the logic of 

this model, Aboriginal technological adaptations implied for non-Native 

authorities a less than completely successful assimilation into the 

mainstream. Reading Aboriginal English as unlettered or “broken English” 

and Aboriginal media products as sub-quality fare served to deny 

Aboriginal social actors their agency in a double sense. First, in an 

idiomatic sense, insofar as Native languages and communications corridors 

have been all but outlawed, Aboriginal peoples have been prohibited from 

communicating in and on their own terms. Secondly, in a more radical 

sense, Native agents have not been recognized as being capable of 

achieving technological sophistication on par with Canadians. These 

sentiments, when played out in policy, present tangible structural barriers to 

effective Aboriginal participation in Canadian public space. Moreover, 

operating as a metaphorical road block, this misread “incompetence” of 

practice has historically justified government projects that aim to forcibly 

redirect Aboriginal cultural change. 

Scholars have touched on the role of the popular press in the granting of 

citizenship to the masses (Anderson 1983; Habermas 1989; Martin- 

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Barbero 1991). In pursuing their own renditions of, or in resignifying, 

“advancement”—a keyword that articulates with other socially informed 

processes to organize meanings of Canadianness—Aboriginal activists use 

Aboriginal English language and media technologies so as to more clearly 

articulate a boundary line between Canadian and Native nations. 

Distinguishing Aboriginal progress enables Native polities to assert 

selective constitutional and legal rights, for instance, and to negotiate 

policies on the basis of Aboriginal peoples’ “Citizens Plus 26 ” status. 

Despite the many global influences Native leaders selectively bring into 

play, Aboriginal political and cultural activism has served to reinforce a 

sense of cultural continuity while engendering an aboriginally authored 

direction for change. These are the aboriginally authored tenets of Native 

neo- traditionality—stability in change. 

In 1983, a year after Native People ceased publication, Bert Crowfoot 

resurrected the paper renaming it AMMSA—the acronym for the 

Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta, which was incorporated that 

year. In 1986, Terry Lusty entered a contest and won the opportunity to 

name the new paper, which he called “Windspeaker.” It continues to serve 

as the umbrella organ for several other regional papers also put out by 

AMMSA including Saskatchewan’s Sage, Alberta’s Sweetgrass, British 

Columbia’s Raven’s Eye, and, most recently, Ontario Birchbark. Crowfoot 

was also instrumental in establishing AMMSA’s CFWE radio, based in 

Edmonton. At the time of the 1990 funding cuts to southern Native media, 

nine of eleven publications funded by the Native Communications Program 

were discontinued. Windspeaker was the only Native newspaper west of 

Ontario to survive. It has become the most widely circulated Native 

newspaper in the country. Crowfoot continues to serve as CFWE’s general 

manager. CFWE is a satellite network that is received in northern Alberta by 

43 satellites and six Native communities. The signal is broadcast live, 

twelve hours a day, five days a week, and four hours a day on the weekend. A 

satellite wraparound service fills the off-air period (Crowfoot 25 June 

1996). 

Crowfoot asserts that Aboriginal radio has strong community 

building potential: I think what’s happening is people are finding 

that they need to communicate to their people; that a lot of the 

problems that are happening on a reserve are a result of people not 

knowing what’s going on, or not knowing who is doing what; and 

knowledge is power. If people know what’s going on, then it 

empowers them to get control of their own situations. (25 June 

1996) 

Finding fluent Native language speakers who are media savvy, however, is 

a common problem plaguing many Aboriginal communications outlets. 

Native languages often lack the vocabulary necessary for discussing legal 

and technical issues relating to, for instance, environmental and modern 

communications issues. For this reason, AMMSA co-sponsored the 

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development of the Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary. In the section devoted 

to new terminology can be found Cree translations of such media-related 

terms as “broadcast” (ka pekiskweh etowihk), “journalism” (ka 

acimowasinahikehk), “newsworthy” (takahki acimowin) and “radio” 

(kanotohtamihk) (Waugh, LeClaire and Cardinal 1998). Joel Demay (1991, 

424-5) writes that the characteristics of developmental media include 

media practices that incorporate traditional forms of communication, 

accommodate social or communal interests, rely on interpersonal 

communication and show a commitment to social change. Developmental 

media, he says, motivate people to participate in the process of change by 

educating audiences and by providing technical information about 

problems, possibilities and innovations. 

One way that CFWE asserts Aboriginal difference is by construing an 

Aboriginal public sphere, providing a forum for the negotiation of relations 

between Native politicians and the Aboriginal public. Crowfoot explains: 

What we’ve done with our media, in some cases, especially on the 

radio, is we’ve had forums, where we’ve had two, or three, or four 

of the different leaders go on an open line show where people can 

ask them questions … you’ve got access to a talk show or to an 

open line where you can ask people questions about self-government, 

ask them questions about taxation, or ask questions about 

some of the other issues that are there. (25 June 1996) 

This dialogue between the Aboriginal leaders and their constituents not 

only promotes an understanding of the political process, which tends to 

encourage greater participation, but also serves also as a fundamental step 

in policy-making as leaders are publicly obliged to justify their decisions. 

Riggins (1983, 49) notes that because the mainstream media is, for the most 

part, uninterested in exchanges between Indian leaders and the Aboriginal 

public, Native media outlets (such as CFWE) are the only viable forums for 

political dialogue on these issues. 

The CFWE radio network has been adapted as a political forum; as an 

instrument of community mobilization; as a means of transmitting Native 

languages, stories, news and practical information; as an emergency 

hotline; as a community events bulletin board and town hall; as a 

promotional vehicle for Native arts; and as a means of encoding Native 

Englishes with local relevance. However, it has been implicitly assumed by 

the dominant cultural industries that “professionalism” is quintessentially 

synonymous with the mainstream model of journalism despite the 

fundamentally different demands Native communities make on Native 

journalists, and the unique types of responses they in turn make to those 

demands. The CFWE radio project, therefore, ought not to be apprehended 

as the surrender to some Euro-Canadian sense of media “professionalism,” 

nor as an acquiescence to the dominant direction through modernity. 

Rather, CFWE’s Aboriginal communicators have allied radio with a 

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concrete political movement and are employing the medium to address 

many of the same Aboriginal issues that Henry Bird Steinhauer set out to 

clarify—namely, Aboriginal sovereignty and political autonomy—but 

also to create inter-tribal or pan-Aboriginal community solidarity in urban 

areas—a distinctly (modern) neo-traditional concern. 

Conclusion 

Today, tourists who venture into Fort Edmonton Park may walk through the 

Fort, touring the sleeping quarters, where embroidered buckskin pillows 

adorn the beds of the early white settlers and the Native wives they took. 

Outside, Native women are to be seen tanning hides, cooking, or beading 

near a tipi. After a stage coach ride, one may promenade down 1885 Street, 

enter Fran Oliver’s reconstructed Edmonton Bulletin office, and read the 

headlines plastered on the walls. Inside the Methodist Church no memorials 

of Henry Bird Steinhauer are on view. That is, unless the organ player 

happens to be there, and one happens to ask specifically where such pictures 

might be found. Several photos of the Rev. Steinhauer are there, but hidden 

behind a roped off area, well out of plain view. Nor are there any 

celebrations of Native farming, nor media making to be found—no images 

of Aboriginal people on a contemporaneous evolutionary footing with the 

frontier Whites. The complex notion of a modern Aboriginality conflicts 

absolutely with the caricatured Nativeness which Canadian nationalism 

requires to sustain its core. The discursive equation that underwrites many 

Canadian heritage festivals calls for Aboriginality to stay the same in world 

of forceful change: for Indigenous people to remain resolutely 

“themselves” as Taussig writes (1993, 129), in order that Canadians might 

measure their progress. 

This is not to say that stories of the indigenization of the English 

language, farming and media technologies are not available to the public. 

The Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture in Edmonton—a culture 

centre housed in the Provincial Museum promotes an alternate version of 

Aboriginality. Created in collaboration with Native peoples, even Native 

media activists such as Terry Lusty, the centre celebrates the accomplishments 

of Aboriginal social agents such as Eugene Steinhauer. In this 

context, Steinhauer’s efforts to create an English Aboriginal media do not 

carry the evaluative charge of “assimilation,” nor, even, “acculturation.” 

Rather, the Aboriginal curators of the gallery authorize Steinhauer’s 

adaptive capacities by conferring on his proficiencies as a media maker the 

mark and value of “tradition.” The coupling of the notions of the imminence 

of cultural effacement with the diffusion of technologies such as the English 

language and communications hardware must therefore be read as an aspect 

of Canadian “heritage,” which carries no direct significance within First 

Nations’ social fields. Native social activists have historically indigenized 

the English language and communications technologies and employed 

these newly formulated technologies in unanticipated ways. 

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The tourist industry and right-wing citizens groups persist in authorizing 

their own mosaic of Aboriginal alterities, tactically constructing a useable 

indigenousness against which Canada measures up as worthy of a variety of 

foreign investments. Aboriginal activists counter by shifting the terms of 

discourse on aboriginality from a focus on advancement according to 

Euro-Canadian terms toward aboriginally articulated directions. 

The popular version of the narrative of Canadian colonialism conveys 

the idea that European colonizers made readers of listeners, and that 

agriculture, the English language and, more recently, “the media” were 

simply imposed on Indian peoples who were powerless to resist. The 

examples provided above show that something more ambiguous and 

historically complex has occurred, namely, that global forces played into 

local forms and conditions in unexpected ways and did not simply erase 

differences or homogenize worlds. While they challenged local symbols, 

English language pedagogy, pulpits, ploughs and the presses were 

variously and ingeniously redeployed to bear a host of new meanings as 

Native people fashioned their own visions of modernity. In seeking new 

knowledge and techniques of empowerment with which to overcome their 

oppression and achieve competency in a changing world, Aboriginal 

mediators have clearly demonstrated that their colonial history is 

irreducible to a simple dialectic of accommodation and resistance. Rather, 

the foregoing points to the pluralized field of colonial narratives and the 

contingency of located cultural productions of heritage. Moreover, in 

marshalling media technologies to decolonize as well as to mobilize the 

First Nations to pursue their own paths and paces of change, Aboriginal 

mediators offer a trenchant refutation ofany singular vision ofmodernity. 

As opposed to strict focus on textual concerns, the piece attempts to 

analyze those social processes that articulate the meaning of the political. 

This has entailed, following Martin-Barbero (1991), writing one of many 

possible histories of Aboriginal media and English language appropriation—one 

that takes into account the ways cultural processes articulate the 

communication practices of social movements. In this history, I have 

sought to shift the focus from the ideological content toward the meaningful 

ordering of life through media production. This account emphasizes the 

ways Aboriginal social agents invest “tradition” with meaning through 

selectively engaging with technologies such as the media and the English 

language, and the ways cultural mediators recognize their identities in these 

media. Attending to mediations and social movements rather than 

exclusively to “representations” reveals that Native media activists’efforts 

to grasp colonial communication and to harness elements of its power to 

their own advantage have figured centrally in the popularization of a 

modern Aboriginal nationalism. Engaging with, rather than resisting, a 

modern world system though mastery of the intervening forces of change 

provides indigenous culture workers with a means of mitigating 

colonialism’s destructive effects. Pressing their claims to heritage has 

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afforded Native social agents with a means of constructing a boundary 

around aboriginality and, thereby, of guarding the very traditions that 

colonial communication was engineered to subvert. 

Notes 

1. Some of the travel for this research was funded through a UMGF grant from the 

University of Manitoba. Library research for this paper was conducted in the 

context of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Calgary Institute for the 

Humanities (CIH) at the University of Calgary. I have carried out long-term and 

ongoing ethnographic research projects in urban Aboriginal communities in 

London, Hamilton and Toronto, Ontario, and in Edmonton, Alberta, from 1991 to 

the present which were funded in part by a SSHRCC Doctoral Fellowship. I am 

very grateful to Terry Lusty, Bert Crowfoot, Jane Woodward, Donna Rae 

Paquette and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias for sharing with, and teaching me. I also 

thank Lindy-Lou Flynn for her patient proofreading. 

2. As with the notion of an absence of “advanced” forms of Aboriginal governance 

—an idea frequently invoked in parliamentary debates over the course of the 

political development of the Canadian state—Canadian social constructions of 

technological “progress” have often been promoted as straightforwardly positive 

forces, and commonly construed against an oppositional “backward” Nativeness. 

3. I am grateful to anonymous reviewers at the International Journal of Canadian 

Studies for reminding me of the importance of Daniel Francis’ contribution to the 

literature on representation and Aboriginal peoples. 

4. A prevalent liberal nostalgic yearning for cultural “preservation” posits in the 

embracing of English and other “foreign” technologies, the displacement, indeed 

the destruction, of Indigenous languages and the knowledges engendered in, and 

generative of, them. The implication is that futile-to-resist global influences are 

placing under erasure critical criteria for marking difference, and thereby 

dissolving the very relationships through which alterity can be established. This 

idea led early globalization theorists such as Marshall McLuhan to predict that 

with the spread of media technologies we would all become more alike (1974). 

When Aboriginal individuals gesture toward similitude by taking on attributes or 

technologies that would admit them into the so called “global” imagined 

community, they tend to be perceived as having fallen into line with the singular 

march of Canadian progress and their alleged breach with “Aboriginality” is 

variously celebrated and mourned. 

5. With remarkable consistency over the course of three centuries, different agents 

of the Canadian government have sought to introduce the content of The 

Governance Act from as far back as the enfranchisement legislation (see below) 

in the mid 19 th Century to the most recently defeated First Nations Governance 

Act, or Bill C-7 (introduced in 2002, defeated the following year). The legislation 

generally seeks to dissolve the nation to nation relationships between Aboriginal 

political entities and the Canadian state replacing it with a more municipal to 

federal government-like arrangement and errodes Indian Status including the 

rights and liabilities that attend it. 

6. In 1857, for example, the colonial government passed the “Act to encourage the 

gradual civilization of the Indians …” which paradoxically, both established, and 

provided a mechanism for eliminating, Indian status. Though internally contradictory, 

the Act conferred on bureaucrats, rather than Indian people themselves, 

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the power to decipher and hence to author Indianness. This piece of legislation 

promoted full citizenship or enfranchisement. It was designed to legislate out of 

existence Native sovereignty and self-sufficiency, most notably self-determination, 

self-representation, self-management and self-government: 

The Act … stipulated that any Indian judged by a special board of 

examiners to be educated, free from debt, and of good moral 

character could, upon application, be granted fifty acres of land 

and “the rights accompanying it.” In short he could become 

“enfranchised,” or legally equal to his white neighbours, with the 

same rights and privileges—but he must cut all his tribal ties and 

sign away his rights as an Indian forever. His land would be taken 

from the reserve, and he would be removed from band 

membership. The most successful Indians would be absorbed into 

the general population, and their links with their reserves would be 

broken (Smith 1987:239). 

The Act targeted those, therefore, who were mostly likely to realize the 

aforementioned potentialities, namely, school-educated, alphabetically literate, 

English speaking members of the Native population. 

7. The incursions of New Age spiritual tourists into Aboriginal secret and sacred 

ceremonies and societies such as Sun Dances, Sweat Lodges and Yiwipi 

Ceremonies might be read as a variant strategy of prying Aboriginal spaces open 

for consumption by the Canadian masses. 

8. For the tourist industry the inviolability of Aboriginal tradition by change 

(typically read as the lack of technology) provides a clear marketing advantage. 

The cultural rhetoric of progress is invoked through “primitivizing” or often 

“infantalizing” Indigeneity, as is evinced in the “Half-devil and half-child” 

characterized in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “White Man’s Burden.” In the 

case of Aboriginal cultural tourism, contemporary Indigenous cultural 

formations become analogous to Europe’s antecedent social formations, or to 

childhood. The touristic aesthetic prizes this uncomplicated othering. Aboriginal 

touristic events will thus often seek to connect experiences of “the past as a 

foreign country,” with opportunities for non-regimented “leisure,” for somatic as 

opposed to cerebral exertion, and with glimpses of pristine nature. Herein, the 

values that are attributed to Aboriginality by outsiders, such as simplicity and a 

reverence for the natural world, provide useful symbolic materials with which to 

hail present-weary pilgrims into transcendent, counter-modern experiences (see 

also Thomas 1994, Smith 2000). 

9. The Canadian press coverage of Aboriginal affairs in the 1960s was somewhat 

less overtly opportunistic than the foregoing examples. Nonetheless, media 

treatments of Aboriginal and government contests over the White Paper in the 

1970s, The Indian Government Act and the Charlotteown Accord in the 1980s, 

and most recently, the Ministry of Indian and Norther Affairs’ Governance Act, 

have failed to situate current debates about self-government within a longer 

struggle for Aboriginal legal and Treaty rights. Curiously, after more than a 

century, with the exception of selected pronouns, it is the right-wing discourse on 

Aboriginal advancement itself that has failed to modernize. 

10. Meanwhile, tourist brochures for Lake Louise and Banff, Alberta feature staged 

performances of difference for urban escapees by feathered powwowing Indian 

dancers, according to appropriate State sanctioned, “multiculturalist” formulas— 

in song, dance and costume. Culturing nature for tourists, the justification for 

charging for these experiences, involves presenting difference in palatable, 

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non-threatening formats—in tame, park-like, manicured “natural” environments. 

For the more discriminating tourist who desires a more profound venturing from 

the familiar, joining a hunting camp in northern Alberta with furbearing, dogsled 

riding, tent dwelling northerners provides an opportunity to travel “backwards” in 

time and to experience life as “explorers” might have years ago. As silent guides 

to the authorial authors of Canadian heroic history, it is as if the snowshoe 

footprints and smoldering campfires were the only marks Aboriginal peoples in 

the north ever etched in Canada. The Canadian north draws tourists through 

marketing strategies which play up the area as pristine hinterland—unpolluted, 

undeveloped and often unused (except so as to accommodate preferred travelers). 

Ventures into the Canadian north and the southern parklands offer tourists who 

are desirous of an “authentic” wilderness experience the geographical distance 

from Canada’s urban centres through which historical and cultural distance might 

be construed. 

Anthropological discourse on Aboriginality has, until recently, employed the 

same archaic culture concept that informs travel brochures. An emerging 

literature on urban Aboriginality, however, is shifting the focus away from the 

impact of globalization on reserve communities toward the complex cultural 

circumstances Southern Canadian urban Native peoples msut negotiate. It shows 

Native urbanites to be no more culturally close to Canadians than are their 

northern Native compatriots. 

11. Aboriginal media agitators and other cultural activists often must first convince 

Aboriginal communities of the limitations of these constructions, debunking 

these myths before embarking upon their own agendas. 

12. Most Aboriginal individuals would balk at the assertion that Canada has two 

founding people and two founding languages. Aboriginal historians and anthropologists 

would insist that Canada would not exist in its present form had it not 

been for the contributions of Aboriginal peoples to its geo-political formation. 

Many would call to mind the guiding and care provided to European “explorers,” 

Aboriginal involvement in military defense, not to mention the sharing of a vast 

resource base. Aboriginal mediators in the West would remind us that French and 

English became Canada’s official languages owing more to political will than to 

sheer practicality. In the Colonial Northwest Territories (present-day Alberta), 

had it been put to popular vote among the settlers, Cree not English would have 

been named the lingua franca. 

13. The newspaper article from which this information is extracted was penned by 

Eugene Steinhauer, great grandson of Henry Bird Steinhauer. I am very grateful 

to Donald B. Smith for sharing his newspaper clippings by and about E. 

Steinhauer, in addition to other materials, with me. 

14. An article in the Manitoba Free Press submitted by the American consul in 

Winnipeg reported on the “extraordinary” diffusion of syllabics throughout the 

region citing the following example: “parties descending rivers would exchange 

messages by inscriptions on banks or bars of the stream. …” Syllabic messages 

were also inscribed on media which had previously been made to bear pictographic 

messages. According to Young, “Indians created post offices by blazing 

trees and writing the syllabics on the white surfaces. Sometimes they left 

birchbark messages under piles of stones, each with a peeled rod set up to attract 

attention” (1965:34). Significant numbers of Cree people, therefore readily 

adopted the syllabic system, employing handwriting, however, in distinctly Cree 

ways. 

Current translations of the Cree root “masin,” for example, clearly relate the 

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concepts of “debt,” and “employment” to “inscription.” The Cree word 

masinahamawew translates “S/he writes for her/him or s/he owes her/him or is in 

debt to someone.” The terms masinahikâtew and masinahikehiwew translate 

respectively: “It is written” and “S/he is hired” (Waugh et al 1998:72). Euro- 

Canadian interpretations of, or investments in, writing were thus not necessarily 

shared with the Crees. According to missionary publications, many Cree from 

distant localities visited the Norway House region, particularly during times of 

scarcity. Many of these visitors stated that the primary purpose of their journey 

was to learn syllabics (Christian Guardian 8 October 1862). For the most part, 

syllabic literacy was transmitted by Cree people themselves; and within less than 

a decade the system had spread from the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast (Murdoch 

1985:10). 

15. The extent to which Maskepetoon was actually converted to Methodism, 

however, is questionable. The following account in which Maskepetoon explains 

to Paul Kane his aversion to selecting one Christian religion, is telling. Kane 

recounts: 

Mr. Rundell (Rundle, a Methodist) has told him that what he 

preached was the only true road to heaven and Mr. Hunter 

(Anglican) told him the same thing, and so did Mr. Thebo 

(Thibault, a Catholic), and as they all three said that the other two 

were wrong, and as he did not know which was right, he thought 

they ought to call a council among themselves, and then he would 

go with them all three; but that until they agreed he would wait 

(cited in MacGregor 1975:96). 

Although the Bible was alleged to have been written in stone, little unity of 

opinion existed between the Christian denominations with regard to a singular 

narrative of Christianity as meaning was not given in the scriptural texts 

themselves. Rather, each Christian sect presumed to exclusively possess the 

authentic interpretation of these raw scriptural materials. Maskepetoon’s 

unwillingness to participate in this disunified realm pointed out what he 

considered to be the fundamental deficiency in Christian approaches to the 

production of authority. The missionaries’ inability to persuade the other 

denominations to arrive at some from of consensus with regard to the meaning of 

these texts, as well as their claims to sole possession of truth, their devaluation of 

other forms of knowledge and other factors signified to him, that their 

decision-making methods, and therefore, their capacities for leadership were 

critically flawed. Maskepetoon was not adverse, however, to appropriating the 

form of communication missionaries called syllabic literacy; he simply preferred 

to derive from his relationship with these texts, his own unique readings. 

16. Throughout the colonial era, the government set about to negotiate with Indian 

nations access to their lands through the treaty process. Aboriginal leaders tended 

to understanding the process as marking a formal covenant between sovereign 

nations. Federal authorities, on the other hand, approached the proceedings 

viewing the Western Canadian numbered treaties as a means for accomplishing 

the surrender of Indian lands to the Crown, and the subjugation of Indian peoples 

to Canadian laws. Western expansionists considered the alienation of Indian 

lands and the pacification of Indian peoples necessary preconditions to the 

large-scale settlement of the prairie West, the construction of a railway, and the 

construction of a political and administrative infrastructure which would 

politically and economically integrate Canada as a nation (Dyck 1986:123). 

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17. There is good reason to believe that Steinhauer was incorporated into the Cree 

social organization as a kindred member, owing to a perceived “internal social 

need.” According to Sliwa: 

While the nature of some kinship ties with outsiders was at times 

nothing more than metaphoric or figurative, the reciprocal 

responsibilities and obligations associated with being considered 

“kin” were far from symbolic (1995:5). 

Steinhauer’s contribution to the prosperity of the group was by way of imparting 

agricultural and literacy skills, and thus, the means of adapting to a rapidly 

changing resource base. While on the Plains, he did not actually participate as a 

buffalo hunter, as these prestigious positions were reserved for those with 

experience. Instead, Steinhauer remained in the camp with the women and the 

elderly (Erasmus 1976:205). The camp meetings he organized on the plains 

provided a context for instruction to be imparted to both adults and children. By 

contrast, by the mid 1870’s schooling in the East typically focussed solely on 

children as in the estimation of church and governmental administrators, the 

isolation and Euro-Canadian styled socialization of Indian youth presented the 

most efficacious manner of at least internally blanching Indian children through 

“temporal, intellectual and spiritual improvement,” thus rendering them more 

palatable for eventual public consumption (Grant 1984:178). 

18. Although these Cree leaders were also willing to explore the alternative of 

agriculture, Tobias submits that they sought primarily to guarantee the 

preservation of the buffalo-hunting culture for as long as possible (1983:523). 

Sluman and Goodwill submit that, “It was Big Bear’s contention that none of 

them should consider signing any kind of treaty unless the government first 

promised immediate action for the protection and conservation of the remaining 

buffalo” (1982:9). In treating with the government, part of their strategy included 

requesting a series of reserves that were contiguous to one another, in order to 

effect a sizeable Cree territory in the Cypress Hills area. Such a concentration 

would enable the inhabitants to engage in concerted action to defend their 

autonomy and their treaty rights (Tobias 1983:527). 

19. Nicholas Flood Davin was a former journalist with the Toronto Globe, the 

Toronto Mail, and an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for the House of 

Commons. In 1883, Davin founded the Regina Leader, Assiniboia’s first 

newspaper (DCB 1945:151). 

20. The same year the industrial school system was introduced, the government 

passed the Indian Advancement Act, which linked education with obligatory 

enfranchisement. It was amended ten years later when regulations were added to 

provide for compulsory school attendance. According to Persson, “punitive 

regulations were provided for parents and children who did not cooperate with the 

department in this regard” (1980:29). 

21. Henry Bird Steinhauer and his wife, Jessie Joyful, had 10 children. One of his 

great-grandsons, Ralph G. Steinhauer served as Lt. Governor for the province of 

Alberta from 1974-79, and on December 9, 1977, he officially opened Steinhauer 

Community School in Edmonton. The contributions of another great grandson, 

Eugene Steinhauer, are detailed below. 

22. Mike Steinhauer, Eugene’s brother, served as the Executive Director of Blue 

Quills, the first Native Controlled Residential school in Canada. In 1967, Alice 

Steinhauer (Eugene’s wife) with Christine Daniels and Rose Yellow Feet 

founded the Voice of Alberta Native Women Society, an annual conference (The 

Native People 9 March 1973). The following year, Alice Steinhauer presented the 

154



findings of the Alberta Native Women’s Conference to the Royal Commission on 

the Status of Women hearing in Edmonton. The brief concerned: health care, 

education and housing, and clearly articulated Native women’s desire for control 

over their own affairs (Freeman 1998:98). 

23. The following references to The Native People, refer to Eugene Steinhauer’s 

so-titled column, which appeared in The Edmonton Journal. 

24. When he passed away in 1995, Eugene Steinhauer left behind his wife, Alice, and 

his children Judy, Leon, Gary, Joseph and Michelle (Windspeaker October 1995). 

25. Appadurai (1996) underscores the idea that cultural diversity very likely 

intensifies, rather than diminishes, as a result of the globalization of 

communications when he characterizes mediascapes as arenas where different 

narratives intersect. We might therefore think of an Aboriginal mediascape as 

providing the context for Aboriginal versions of modern indigenousness, to 

dialogically interact with official and global versions of both Aboriginality and 

modernity. Aboriginal media thus powerfully refutes the postmodernist 

assumption that a system of social control and power is inherent in mass media 

(Meadows 1995:206-7), and the idea that socio-cosmological conformity 

naturally accompanies English language diffusion. 

26. This term emerged from the 1966 Hawthorne Report: A Survey of the 

Contemporary Indians of Canada. The report called for the recognition of the 

distinct status of Aboriginal peoples. The Government of Canada ignored the 

recommendations, choosing to table the White Paper instead. The Indian Chiefs 

of Alberta countered with their own report, “Citizens Plus,” otherwise known as 

the Red Paper. 

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158

Open-topic Articles 

Articles hors-thèmes

Emily Gilbert 1 

What is at Stake in the NAMU Debates? A Review of 

the Arguments For and Against North American 

Monetary Union 

Abstract 

Discussions regarding a possible North American Monetary Union (NAMU) 

exploded in Canada in 1999. While the furor has waned, there is growing 

support for monetary union among the business community, in government 

and by the public. What is at stake in the NAMU debates? Advocates 

emphasize the economic benefits to be had, from the creation of a less volatile 

North American trading area to increased trade across the continent. 

Opponents have countered that the different economic cycles between 

Canada and the United States make NAMU unviable, with the loss of 

monetary sovereignty too much of a cost to bear. This paper will provide a 

detailed review of these and other arguments for and against NAMU. It will 

also suggest, however, that more attention needs to be addressed to the 

potential social and cultural implications of monetary union—issues that 

have hitherto received less attention. 

Résumé 

En 1999, on a assisté au Canada à des débats acharnés entourant l’éventuelle 

Union monétaire en Amérique du Nord (NAMU). Quoique les émotions aient 

diminué depuis lors, on constate un appui croissant pour l’union monétaire 

parmi les gens d’affaires, au sein du gouvernement et auprès du grand public. 

Quels sont les enjeux des débats sur l’union monétaire? Les partisans 

soulignent les avantages économiques qui en découleraient, depuis la 

création d’une zone commerciale nord-américaine moins volatile, à une 

augmentation du commerce partout à travers le continent. Les opposants à 

l’union répliquent à cela que les cycles économiques qui sont différents de 

part et d’autre de la frontière Canada-É.-U. rendent le concept de l’union 

monétaire peu réalisable, le tout étant assorti d’une perte éventuelle de 

souveraineté qui représenterait à elle seule un coût insupportable. La 

présente communication fournit un survol détaillé de tels et d’autres 

arguments pour et contre l’union monétaire. Et elle propose également que 

nous devons porter davantage d’attention aux résultats potentiels de l’union 

monétaire aux plans social et culturel — soit des dossiers auxquels on a 

jusqu’ici porté peu d’attention. 

Debates around the future of the Canadian dollar erupted in 1999. On 20 

January that year, Gordon Thiessen, then Governor of the Bank of Canada, 

gave a speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa that questioned the future 


30, 2004



viability of the North American dollar (Thiessen 1999). The issue quickly 

went international: Bernard Landry, then finance minister of the Parti 

Québécois government, floated the idea of a fixed currency at the economic 

meetings in Davos, Switzerland, while Raymond Chrétien, then Canadian 

Ambassador to the United States, tested the idea of monetary union before 

an American audience. In March, the topic was raised in the House of 

Commons by Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Québécois, with the 

support of young MPs from the Reform and Conservative parties. Despite 

the voluminous opposition, later that month five economists were invited to 

present their views on monetary union to the Senate Committee on 

Banking, Trade and Commerce (Cusson 1999; Industry Canada 1999). Not 

long after, two formal proposals were produced, which in turn prompted 

further discussions by academics and policy makers at conferences in the 

United States and Canada (Courchene and Harris 1999; Grubel 1999; see 

also Buiter 1999). The debates were also regularly featured in the press with 

Maclean’s, the national newsmagazine, running it as the cover story the 

week of 5 July 1999. 

The timing was significant. That year marked the advent of the euro as a 

unit of account and in electronic form, although not yet as a hard currency. 

Robert Mundell received a Nobel Prize in 1999, largely for his work on 

optimal currency areas, which set out the theoretical groundwork for the 

shift to a transnational currency in Europe. In Canada, the dollar was at a 

then all-time low thanks to a drop in international confidence, a victim of 

the fallout from the 1998 Asian currency crisis. And 1999 also marked the 

ten-year anniversary of the original free trade agreement with the United 

States, with the government set to launch an initiative that would assess the 

future of the North American relationship (SCFAIT 2001a; 2001b; 2002). 

Millennial angst was no doubt also in the air. 

Since 1999, the issue of NAMU has waxed and waned, but it has never 

disappeared. As Terence Corcoran, editor of the Financial Post, has 

observed, “This is a topic that just won’t die” (MacLean 2001). In fact, 

many commentators have indicated that monetary union will be the policy 

issue facing Canadians in the first decade of the 21 st century. Several 

government reports have examined the potential of NAMU; although none 

have come outright in favour of monetary union in the immediate future, the 

reports do acknowledge that monetary union might be foreseeable in the 

longer term (see, for example, SCFAIT 2002). Support among the business 

community is not yet overwhelming, but it too continues to grow (see, for 

example, Tellier 2001; Cooper 2002). After the terrorist attacks of 

September 11, polls of the Canadian business community indicated a rise in 

support for NAMU (Vardy and Thorpe 2001, FP2; Carmichael 2002, 2). 

The business community was interested in any proposals for deepening 

economic integration as a way of ensuring that the border would remain 

open despite heightened security fears in the United States. Another flurry 

162

What is at Stake in the NAMU Debates? A Review of the Arguments For 

and Against North American Monetary Union 

of interest in NAMU arose in 2002 when the Canadian dollar dropped to its 

lowest ever value vis-à-vis the US dollar. Even as the Canadian dollar has 

risen significantly in 2003 and into 2004, NAMU discussions have been 

revived as a means to stabilize and de-risk the volatile North American 

monetary landscape as Canadian companies have struggled to adjust to the 

rapidly rising loonie (see, for example, Harris 2003; Segal 2003; Maich 

2004). As Hugh Segal has argued: 

The Canadian dollar is unlikely to be one of the four or five 

dominant world currencies in 25 years. Areasoned, open debate, at 

a time of political transition, makes immense sense. Putting the 

matter off, and hoping it will go away, makes no sense at all. (Segal 

2003, 64) 

Why is there so much interest coming from Canada for monetary union 

with the United States? What could Canada gain from NAMU? What might 

be lost? What interest, if any, has the United States demonstrated in 

NAMU? This paper will provide a review of the ongoing NAMU debates 

and the arguments that have been presented for and against monetary union. 

Particular attention will be addressed to the two substantive proposals for 

monetary union that emerged in the summer of 1999 (Courchene and Harris 

1999; Grubel 1999). In addition, I will draw upon the many reports that 

governments and think-tanks have produced since then, as well as the 

ongoing media attention to these issues. As will be clear from the discussion 

below, much of the debate has been undertaken by economists who deal, 

almost exclusively, on the economic issues. However, there are several 

academic papers that have been recently published that consider various 

political aspects of the debates, and these too will be drawn upon in the 

discussion below (see, for example, Clarkson 2000; Laidler and 

Poschmann 2000; Robson and Laidler 2002; Helleiner 2003a, 2003/2004; 

Bowles 2004). I will also argue that, as the debates unfold, further attention 

needs to be addressed to the potential social and cultural implications of 

monetary union. 

The Arguments for North American Monetary Union 

The visions of NAMU that have been put forward differ in several ways, but 

they are fuelled by similar critiques of the Canadian economic landscape. 

The two substantive papers—the first by economists Thomas J. Courchene 

and Richard Harris (1999) and the second by economist and former Reform 

Member of Parliament Herbert Grubel (1999)—both argue that a floating 

exchange rate has not served Canada well over the last 30 years, and 

especially since the advent of free trade in 1989. Since 1970, when Canada 

became the first country to withdraw from the Bretton Woods agreement, 

the currency has suffered from a series of “misalignments”—from 

moments of unusual highs of US$104.00 in 1974 to the significant decline 

from the mid-1990s, from US73¢ in 1996 to an all-time low of 61.75¢ in 

2002. The lows to which the Canadian dollar was sinking in the late 1990s 

163



prompted widespread concern, particularly as they seemed to be “far below 

any value justified by fundamental benchmarks” (Courchene and Harris 

1999, 8). 

The value of a currency is often thought to reflect the health of the 

national economy; hence sinking currency values often entail sinking 

feelings regarding national economies. As Jim Stanford remarks, “There is 

a common-sense wisdom, shared by high-powered financial analysts and 

common citizens alike, that equates the financial strength of a country’s 

currency with the economic and geopolitical well-being of the country 

itself” (Stanford 2003/4, 59). In turn, the low Canadian dollar is blamed for 

a wide range of outcomes, including a lower standard of living in Canada 

than in the United States, and an apparently growing north–south brain 

drain (Courchene and Harris 1999, 6; Grubel 1999, 35). But what has been 

especially galling to many advocates of NAMU is Canada’s continued 

lower rate of productivity, which remains about 25% below that of the 

United States, even after all the promises that free trade would equalize 

these figures (Landry 2000, 35; McIver 2001, 2; Parizeau 2002, 15). They 

argue that the depreciated currency has encouraged Canada to rely on its 

export sector—exports currently make up over 45% of the total Canadian 

GDP, with 86% of Canadian merchandise exports now going to the United 

States (SCFAIT 2001a). This has, in turn, prolonged a reliance on an “old 

economy” of natural resources—which still comprise 30% of Canadian 

exports—rather than on the development of an innovative, diversified 

economy (Grubel 1999, 14; Courchene 2001, 5; Parizeau 2002, 8). 

Moreover, rather than modernize and invest in new technologies—which 

often have to be imported at great expense from the United States— 

businesses rely instead on the low dollar to help them remain competitive 

(see Harris 2001, 3; Courchene and Harris 1999, 10; Cooper 2002). John 

Manley, speaking in 2002 as Deputy Prime Minister, echoed these concerns 

when he accused Canadian manufacturers of using the low dollar as a 

crutch—which had the immediate impact of devaluing the Canadian dollar 

even further (Stinson, Scoffield and Saunders 2002). 

This “lazy manufacturers” or “lazy firm” thesis has driven much of the 

push towards monetary union, and has fed into the expectation that hitching 

the Canadian dollar to the United States would not only immediately result 

in a stronger Canadian currency but would force a slack business 

community to undertake some fundamental restructuring (see also, for 

example, Crow 1999; McCallum 2000; Tellier 2001; Parizeau 2002; 

SCFAIT 2002). Yet while the depreciating Canadian dollar haunts 

advocates of monetary union, of equal concern has been the volatility of the 

currency. Its fluctuation—whether up or down—incurs hedging costs as 

both importers and exporters try to minimize the risks associated with 

future uncertainties. “Stable and predictable rates of international finance 

and cost calculations” are argued to be particularly important for a free trade 

164



zone such as North America, which implemented the North American Free 

Trade Agreement in 1994 (Harris [1993] qtd. in Courchene and Harris 

1999, 10). As Mundell has explained: 

You can’t have a real free-trade area with flexible exchange rates. 

It is absurd to think that lowering tariffs by 10% is going to make 

any big difference when there can be big movements in the 

exchange rate that can wipe out profits. (Mundell 2000, 61) 

Furthermore, this volatility creates confusion regarding costs and prices 

on either side of the border; making these more transparent by doing away 

with the exchange rate would, it has been suggested, mitigate the use of 

countervailing and antidumping allegations that have plagued US–Canada 

trade relations in recent years (Cusson 1999, 1; SCFAIT 2002, 199). 

What is the solution to all the problems identified above? Courchene and 

Harris advocate fixing Canadian–US exchange rates in the short term—as 

this could be implemented immediately—with a long-term goal of NAMU. 

Grubel, by contrast, argues that a short-term fix is not sufficient and that 

Canada should move without delay to the “hard fix” of a common currency 

with the United States, which could possibly also include Mexico. 2 While 

the scenarios are somewhat different in their implementation, both entail 

fixing the Canadian dollar to that of the United States so that it is eventually 

permanent and irrevocable. Ideally, a transnational central bank would be 

established, much along the lines of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 

the euro area. And a new currency would be created—which Grubel names 

the “amero”—that could feature some symbols of Canadian national 

identity—much as the new euro coins feature the national icons of the 

original members of the EMU. 

How would fixing the Canadian dollar to that of the United States remedy 

the economic problems identified above? There are four main arguments. 

First, the link would boost international confidence in Canadian markets 

given the strength of the US economy (which was particularly strong when 

NAMU proposals first emerged). Second, a fix would mean that Canadian 

business could no longer rely on a low Canadian dollar and would therefore 

have to become more efficient and more responsive to market conditions. 

Third, this, in turn, would mean that Canadian firms would become more 

productive. Finally, the fixed exchange rate would also create a less volatile 

and more stable trade and investment landscape, which would itself 

encourage more trade. 

Embracing a full monetary union (rather than simply fixing the exchange 

rates) would have several additional advantages.First of all, there would be 

little question that the fix was permanent—and that Canada would not just 

withdraw from it if political conditions were ripe. Second, the transaction 

costs that are incurred between the two countries when currencies change 

hands across the border—from transnational business to the winter-weary 

165



Canadians that travel to Florida—would be eliminated. Third, issuing a 

new currency would not greatly affect seignorage—the profit that the 

government accrues from issuing the currency—which estimates put at 

about $3 billion annually, as Canada could continue to accrue seignorage 

for the monies that it issued (Robson and Laidler 2002, 3; SCFAIT 2002). 

Fourth, the hedging costs now incurred to manage currency fluctuations 

would no longer be necessary because the volatility of the two currencies 

against one another would be eliminated. And it has also been argued that 

the labour and capital that currently go into market forecasting could be 

better directed elsewhere, which would result in a corresponding increase 

in the standard of living (Grubel 1999, 8). Fifth, the structural economic 

changes that would be required of NAMU—with, for example, the creation 

of a new transnational bank—would in themselves create such a “dynamic 

development” that they would “result in greater economic efficiency” 

(Grubel 1999, 8). Finally, and importantly, there is an underlying 

assumption that monetary union will raise Canada’s trade with the United 

States and hence the GDP, much in the same way that the free trade 

agreements are said to have done. The work of Jeffrey A. Frankel and 

Andrew K. Rose (2000) is often cited to support this claim as their research 

indicates that “currency union participation more than triples trade with 

other members of the union; and that each 1% increase in trade relative to 

GDP raises income per capital 0.33%, thanks to the economies of scale and 

productivity gains that accompany expansion of international trade” 

(Carmichael 2002, 3). Some projections deriving from this study suggest 

that if Canada were to adopt the US dollar outright, GDP could increase by 

between 30–50% over ten years (Robson and Laidler 2002, 4; Carmichael 

2002, 3). 

These economic benefits are contrasted against the alternative scenario 

that the NAMU advocates foresee: a dollarized Canadian economy (see, for 

example, Cusson 1999; Courchene and Harris 1999; Grubel 1999; Chriszt 

2000; Williams 2001; Carmichael 2002; Cooper 2002). Market 

dollarization, they argue, is already well underway—that is, US dollars are 

increasingly being used in the Canadian private sector and even informally 

among the public—and that this will only increase if the Canadian dollar 

continues to fall. This, they suggest, will lead to a “slippery slope” situation 

whereby the US dollar effectively becomes the de facto Canadian currency 

(Courchene and Harris 1999, 21). In this scenario Canada would lose any 

negotiating influence over the monetary region, particularly as it would 

likely include other states across the Americas where the US dollar is 

already used as currency, as in Panama, Ecuador and El Salvador. As 

Courchene and Harris conclude: 

If a pan-American currency area were to develop without 

Canada’s participation, the United States would derive fewer 

marginal benefits from adding Canada to the arrangement and be 

less inclined to trade influence (or seignorage) in exchange for 

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Canada’s later accession. This militates for speedy Canadian 

action in enunciating a coherent policy stance on multilateral 

currency arrangements. (24) 

Thus, while it is clear that a monetary union would erode Canada’s 

monetary sovereignty, NAMU advocates argue that it would at least offer 

some mechanism for Canadian participation by way of the new monetary 

institutions that would be created such as the North American Central Bank 

(NACB). The spectre of imminent dollarization thus infuses the NAMU 

arguments with much of its urgency, but also explains how it is the NAMU 

advocates can argue that a monetary union is the best possible “made-in- 

Canada” articulation of Canadian sovereignty (see Gilbert 2005a). 

The Arguments against North American Monetary Union 

Opponents to monetary union counter many of the economic premises of 

the NAMU advocates, but also introduce a number of additional issues into 

the debates. One of the most important of these is that despite the 

interconnections between the Canadian and US economies, the two still 

operate on very different business cycles and thus do not form the kind of 

“optimal currency area” that might warrant a monetary union. Canada is a 

net exporter of raw materials and a net importer of manufactured goods, 

whereas the United States is a net exporter of manufactured goods and a net 

importer of raw materials (Murray 2000, 50; see also Crow 1999; Robson 

and Laidler 2002; Thiessen 2000; Dodge 2002a, 2002b). External 

economic shocks thus impact the countries quite differently, which 

demands a flexible exchange rate that can be adjusted accordingly. The 

relatively limited impact of the Asian crisis of 1997-1999 on Canada is 

usually trotted out to support this argument (see, for example, McCallum 

2000; Drummond 2001; Thiessen 2000; Murray 2000; see also Crow 1999; 

Dodge 2002a). 

As noted above, opponents to NAMU also dispute several of the claims 

made by its advocates. With respect to the productivity arguments, for 

example, Robson and Laidler point out that the picture is not so dire when 

the figures are disaggregated to provide a finer assessment; it is clear that 

the US outperforms Canada in only some sectors, especially machinery and 

electrical and electronic equipment, and that Canada outperforms the US in 

some sectors (Robson and Laidler 2002, 10; see also McCallum 2000, 7; 

Laidler 1999, 326). Others query the degree of uncertainty that has been 

attributed to the current economic structure and have questioned whether 

fixed exchange rates actually lead to greater certainty (Williams 2001). As 

Laidler reminds us, a study by Osakwe and Schembri reports “no fewer than 

21 foreign exchange crises under fixed exchange rates since 1990, of which 

17 ended in devaluation and/or the adoption of a floating exchange rate” 

(Laidler 1999, 331). Furthermore, the high correlation between monetary 

union and increased trade has also been questioned as it has been disputed 

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whether the case studies utilized by Frankel and Rose are directly 

applicable to the North American context (Robson and Laidler 2002, 

21–22). Finally, dollarization is yet another argument that has been 

challenged. Research by John Murray and James Powell for the Bank of 

Canada suggests, for example, that there is less dollarization in Canada now 

than there was 20 years ago (Murray and Powell 2002, 3; see also Laidler 

and Poschmann 2000; Robson and Laidler 2002; Bowles 2004). This 

research indicates that the need for NAMU is not nearly as pressing as its 

advocates have maintained. 

In addition to their disputes with the economic rationales and motives for 

NAMU, many of its opponents take umbrage at the loss of monetary 

sovereignty that will result. Even advocates of monetary union 

acknowledge that “NAMU would mean the end of sovereignty in Canadian 

monetary policy” (Courchene and Harris 1999, 23). Not only would the 

Bank of Canada lose its ability to affect the value of the currency, but it 

would also lose control over interest rates—its most significant 

policy-making tool. The creation of an NACB—to be modelled on the 

ECB—would not offset this loss sufficiently as the European context is not 

directly comparable with that of North America. The ECB, established 

1 June 1998, is run by a governing council that consists of six executive 

members, plus the governors of the national banks of the twelve 

participating euro countries. Hence each of the participating countries has 

equal representation in the bank’s decision making, which provides them 

with some control over monetary policy—for many countries this is more 

input than they had previously, when their currencies were on a fixed peg to 

the Deutschmark. In fact, the ECB was actually seen as being particularly 

advantageous for smaller countries (Murray 2000, 54). 

Comparisons with North America are troubling for several reasons. 

First, North America is dominated by the United States, both in terms of 

population—at about 280 million compared to 31 million in Canada and 

nearly 100 million in Mexico—and the size of its economy, which accounts 

for 80% of the continent’s output (Dodge 2002a, 2002b). This has no 

parallel to Europe where the largest economy, Germany, accounts for just 

30% of economic output. The predominance of the United States in the 

region makes it unlikely that an NACB would be able to replicate the shared 

governance structure of the ECB. Indeed, Courchene and Harris suggest 

that Canada’s representation on the board of directors of a new central bank 

for the two countries should only reflect Canada’s much smaller share in the 

combined Canadian-US GDP (22; see also Grubel 1999, 4). Even they 

acknowledge that this is not ideal, admitting that whether Canadians would 

be content with this arrangement is “beyond our ability to assess” 

(Courchene and Harris 1999, 22). 

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Opponents to NAMU have been more vociferous in their criticism of this 

meagre role, arguing that such an arrangement would lead to a situation in 

which US interests prevail: 

US monetary authorities would more than likely make their 

monetary policy decisions on the basis of mainly domestic 

economic considerations … [they] could very well set interest 

rates at levels that Canadians [do] not appreciate, perhaps to cool 

off a robust US economy out of step with Canada’s economic 

cycle. (SCFAIT 2002, 205) 3 

Just because one monetary policy would be in place across Canada and 

the United States does not mean that the effects would be even, or even that 

decision making would not prioritize one economic sector over another 

(this is why there are calls for the economies of the two countries to be more 

in line first, something that David Dodge, Governor of the Bank of Canada, 

has advocated). Grubel offers some hope that the imbalance of power 

would be tempered by Mexico’s inclusion in the NAMU, with US 

dominance offset by the use of strategic voting on regional or transnational 

interests (Grubel 1999, 16). But this small measure doesn’t provide Canada 

with any more direct participation in decision making, given that the whole 

NAMU area would still have tobethe main focus ofall policy decisions. 

Although North America has become increasingly economically 

enmeshed since the advent of free trade, it is notable for having “minimal 

institutions of collective governance”—much less so than in Europe 

(Clarkson 2001, 7). Edward Carmichael, senior economist at the Toronto 

branch of JP Morgan, suggests that this lack of “North American political 

framework currently blocks implementation of a common currency. 

Without such institutions, the transfer of national sovereignty to a single, 

supranational central bank lacks political legitimacy. Without the 

transnational institutions to ensure the political accountability of a North 

American central bank, a North American monetary union is unlikely to 

emerge” (Carmichael 2002, 6). Moreover, there is doubt that the United 

States would even be amenable to a new institution, given that it would 

entail the loss of its own currency and the pre-eminent role of the Federal 

Reserve. One alternative that has been floated is that, rather than create a 

whole new institution, Canada (and perhaps later Mexico) be given 

representation on the Federal Reserve. The US dollar would become the 

currency for the continent, with Canada becoming, say, the thirteenth vote 

on the Federal Market Open Committee (FOMC). But even if this setup was 

more favourable to the United States—and it is not clear that it would 

be—clearly Canada’s role in monetary policy making would be 

minimized. 4 As it now stands, the voting members of the FOMC are picked 

from a revolving group of presidents of district banks in the United States as 

well as “governors of the Federal Reserve System, appointed by the US 

president (subject to congressional approval), who make up the majority of 

the FOMC and, through Congress, are accountable to the electorate for the 

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conduct of monetary policy” (Laidler and Poschmann 2000, 16). If the 

existing setup were retained, Canadian voting powers would be rotated, and 

always offset against a larger number of democratically elected 

representative FOMC members from the United States. 

Without direct representation in the newly configured monetary 

institution, Canada would lose its mechanisms “to hold policymakers 

accountable for their activities” (Robson and Laidler 2002, 12). While it is 

clearly the case that over the last decades monetary decisions have become 

more and more susceptible to external influences, and that decisions about 

exchange rates are less in the hands of central banks than international 

market players, accountability continues to be one of the governing 

elements of domestic institutions (Boyer 2000, 55; Robson and Laidler 

2002, 1). 5 Inflation targets, Laidler reminds us, rest on “an administrative 

agreement between the minister [of Finance] and the Bank of Canada” 

(Laidler 1999, 328). Former Bank of Canada governor John Crow concurs, 

“Whatever thought might go into it, and whatever advice may be given, in 

Canada the choice of an exchange rate regime clearly is, and always has 

been, a governmental decision, not a Bank of Canada one” (Crow 1999, 31). 

A Dual Responsibility Agreement of 1961 governs the relationship 

between the government and the central bank so that while the actions of 

each are putatively independent, they are also each subject to considerable 

limits, which hence reduce political opportunism and reinforces the Bank’s 

credibility (Laidler 1999). 

It is precisely over the issue of accountability that the ECB has received 

some of its harshest criticism. Its awkward political infrastructure empties 

it of parliamentary power and public accountability from the executive (see 

Crouch 2000, 1; Williams 2001, 4). Part of the awkwardness arises from the 

overlap in governance between the twelve members of the euro and the 

fifteen members of the EU. While Denmark, Sweden and the UK don’t 

participate in decision making regarding euro-zone monetary policy as they 

are not members of the EMU, it is nonetheless the case that while “the 

finance ministers of states participating in the EMU meet in the ‘Eurogroup’ 

to consider issues facing the monetary union, they can act authoritatively 

only as the Economic and Finance Ministers (Ecofin) Council, a body 

which includes representatives from EU countries that have not adopted the 

euro” (Andrews, Henning and Pauly 2002, 3). The loss of direct 

accountability that would occur with the creation of a transnational 

bank—and the shared responsibilities for decision making that would be 

required—is indeed one reason why Laidler and Poschmann argue that the 

US would oppose its creation (Laidler and Poschmann 2000, 16). 

Advocates of NAMU, by contrast, are little concerned with the loss to 

monetary sovereignty—in fact, some argue that it would benefit Canada 

precisely because of this reason. The Bank of Canada’s inflation-fighting 

agenda of the late 1980s and early 1990s still looms large in the minds of 

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many Canadian economic pundits. Inflation was minimized, but a 

recession set in as interest rates more than doubled those in the United 

States—at 9% in Canada in 1990 and only 4% in the United States; 

unemployment was also high and the result was a serious recession (see 

Courchene and Harris 1999; Grubel 1999; Parizeau 2002, 8). Despite the 

considerable support for the Bank of Canada in recent years under the 

governance of David Dodge (see, for example, Courchene 2001, 4), many 

see monetary union and the relinquishing of monetary sovereignty as a way 

to avoid repeating past mistakes with the additional bonus of acquiring the 

sagacity of the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve (Grubel et al. 1999, 

6; McIver 2001, 5; Parizeau 2002, 14). Freelance writer Linda McQuaig 

caustically observes: 

For some Canadians, particularly those in the financial and 

business sector, the prospect of tying Canadian hands like this 

would be a dream-come-true. They would rather trust Alan 

Greenspan and the US administration to make decisions about 

Canada’s economy than risk allowing ordinary Canadians having 

a say in the matter. (McQuaig 2002) 

And it is this fear, that the United States would have its way, that has fuelled 

much of the opposition to NAMU. The reticence to shared governance and 

transnational institutions by the United States suggests that if a monetary 

union were to unfold, political annexation would likely ensue (see, for 

example, Crow 1999; Thiessen 1999, 2001; Wallace 1999; Murray 2000; 

Williams 2001; Carmichael 2002; Dodge 2002a; SCFAIT 2002; Bowles 

forthcoming). Given that the putative model and template for NAMU has 

been the euro-zone, where negotiations around political union have been 

developing since WWII, this concern is not entirely unfounded (Bowles, 

Croci and MacLean 2003; Verdun 1999). Courchene has downplayed the 

importance of the politics of monetary union, arguing that “once the euro is 

up and working, its origins are no longer that important. What is important 

is that the euro is a supra-national currency and is triggering a major drive 

toward currency consolidation” (Courchene 2001, 4). 6 The numerous 

concerns raised by opponents to NAMU reviewed above suggest, however, 

that questions regarding political sovereignty are implicit in decisions 

regarding monetary restructuring. 

What Else is at Stake in the NAMU Debates? 

As described above, the NAMU proponents emphasize the economic 

benefits of a monetary union, from increased regional trade to more 

efficient, productive and innovative economies. Opponents to NAMU have 

challenged several of the premises and rationales of NAMU advocates, but 

many have also expressed concern with the degree of political integration 

that would be required under monetary union. But what about the social and 

cultural implications of NAMU? Very little attention has been addressed to 

these issues, even though the original proposals by Courchene and Harris 

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and Grubel acknowledge that these are important touchpoints. Both 

proposals recognize that national currencies can evoke strong feelings 

around national identity—and this was certainly a prominent issue raised 

by the early media attention on NAMU (see, for example, Maclean’s 5 July 

1999). A prevalent concern conveyed in the popular press was that a new 

currency would mean the demise of yet another Canadian icon in the wake 

of US cultural imperialism. Anticipating these concerns, both the proposals 

offer suggestions for the accommodation of nationalist symbolism on a 

transnational currency. Grubel proposes that the new “amero” have 

common symbols on one side, and national designs on the other (Grubel 

1999, 5), whereas Courchene and Harris suggest that even if the US dollar 

became the single currency, the dollars to circulate in Canada could be 

printed with some Canadian symbolism (22). 7 

Yet while symbolism is an important aspect of the ways nations are 

imagined into being as a kind of political community (cf. Anderson 1991), 

this is but one way that money evokes a sense of national identity. Indeed, 

the sole attention to the symbolic aspects of money deflects attention away 

from the other ways that money secures a sense of national cohesion 

(Gilbert 1999; Hewitt 1994). The circulation of a currency within the 

boundaries of a nation-state helps to reinforce the territorial boundaries of 

the state in which it is redeemable and in turn helps to produce and 

reproduce a sense of national belonging (Helleiner 1998, 1999). Moreover, 

as one of the most widespread state-issued cultural objects, the use of 

money affirms the relationship between the state and the public, especially 

in that modern monies have very little intrinsic value and hence rely on an 

investment of trust in the state to ensure a currency’s legitimacy. In turn, the 

smooth circulation of paper and representational coins, and the deterrence 

of counterfeiting, legitimizes the state and its ability to secure money’s 

value and authenticity (Dodd 1994; Giddens 1990). None of these aspects 

of money’s symbolic value are addressed in the NAMU proposals, and 

significantly, each one of them would be undermined in the move away 

from a national to a transnational currency arrangement. 

With respect to social policies, NAMU advocates again seek to reassure. 

Grubel takes pains to argue that under NAMU “Canada’s sovereignty in 

[culture and politics] would remain unchanged, just like it has in the wake of 

all of the numerous free trade agreements signed since the end of the Second 

World War” (Grubel et al. 1999, 7). 8 Courchene and Harris, by contrast, 

draw attention to Canada’s experience with a fixed exchange rate in the 

1960s to suggest that social programs will not be affected. They note that 

many of Canada’s social programs were initiated or finalized under Liberal 

Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, and that the flowering of programs such 

as medicare, equalization, CPP/QPP, the Canada Assistance Plan and 

regional development indicates that “[q]uite obviously, the Pearson 

government did not view a fixed exchange rate as an impediment to 

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asserting Canada’s identity in terms of a comprehensive social policy 

infrastructure” (24; Courchene 2001, 5). Moreover, and like Grubel, they 

argue that increasing North American integration thanks to successive free 

trade agreements has not circumscribed the development of Canadian 

social policy, and that instead Canada has “embarked on the development 

of a much more generous interregional and interpersonal transfer system or 

social contract than that of the United States even as trade became 

increasingly integrated into the broader North American economy” 

(Courchene and Harris 1999, 23–24). 9 In fact, Courchene and Harris go so 

far as to suggest that currency union would settle monetary matters once 

and for all and, hence, “the policy agenda would then be free to focus on the 

issues that really matter in further fostering a distinctly Canadian identity in 

the twenty-first century” (24). 

There are other indications, however, that the presumed viability of 

NAMU is precisely how it would effect government spending and, in 

particular, redistributive spending (Gilbert 2005b). Clearly, one of benefits 

presented by NAMU for many advocates would be the constraints over 

fiscal policy that could be implemented, much as was the case with the euro 

(Grubel 1999; Parizeau 2002). Entry into NAMU could be made 

conditional on establishing a certain degree of economic consistency set in 

terms of narrow convergence criteria. The constraints of the euro-zone 

members have been held up as example: with public sector deficit reduced 

to less than 3% of GDP; inflation kept within 1.5% above that of the best 

three countries, and public debt maintained below 60% of GDP (Parizeau 

2002, 4–5). NAMU could well follow similar criteria, with some advocates 

arguing for the implementation of a comparable agreement such as a 

“Stability and Growth Pact,” although notably the details have been little 

discussed (see Parizeau 2002, 5). 10 For NAMU advocates, one of the 

benefits of these constraints would be to pre-empt much of the fine-tuning 

of fiscal policy—what Grubel calls “experiments”—that governments 

have made when under the sway of Keynesianism—much as the 

implementation of the euro has been said to do the same (Grubel 1999, 15; 

Crouch 2000; Williams 2001). This would be affirmed by the NACB (or a 

reconfigured Federal Reserve) which would have as its main role, as with 

the ECB, the maintenance of price-stability (Grubel 1999, 5). 

Grubel is most transparent in his hope and expectation that the imposed 

convergence criteria and the emphasis of monetary policy on price stability 

(over issues such as employment) would impact upon state fiscal policies. 

In Grubel’s words, fiscal policies are as much to blame for a weak economy 

as are the monetary policies set out by the Bank of Canada: “Excessively 

generous unemployment insurance benefits, high rates of taxation, 

inflation, permanent subsidies to ailing industries and regions, misplaced 

agricultural policies, and other government measures are also to blame for 

the poor performance of the Canadian economy” (Grubel 1999, 17; McIver 

2001). Monetary union, Grubel argues, could help constrain Canadian 

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spending. The easy comparability of cross-border prices under a monetary 

union would make the costs of excessive taxation much more transparent, 

hence much harder for the government to defend (Grubel 1999, 20). It is an 

argument that he also applies to unionization (and higher union wages) as 

well as policies of income redistribution such as employment insurance. 

Here, too, he argues, the costs borne by the public for more generous wages 

or more generous state programs would be more readily apparent, and they 

would therefore be less tolerated, particularly as Canada sought to remain 

competitive in the NAMU area. Finally, regional subsidies—which have 

putatively been used in Canada to create some degree of equality across the 

have and have-not provinces—would also be eroded (43 ft 17). For Grubel 

this is to be celebrated, for these subsidies have not only increased Canadian 

reliance on the resource industry (see above), but they “have resulted 

mostly in a permanent state of dependency of the recipients and, most 

important, have delayed the needed reallocation of labour and capital” (13 

ft 17). Ultimately, therefore, for him monetary union will “increase 

incentives to dismantle supply management practices more rapidly than is 

now planned under the threat of sanctions permitted by the rules of the 

World Trade Organization” (12). Yet despite Grubel’s prognosis, NAMU 

would not necessarily have exactly the results that he anticipates, for 

governments would still retain discretionary power over their fiscal policy, 

albeit likely in circumstances of greater spending constraints. Still, 

Grubel’s comments point to an underlying interest, shared by many NAMU 

advocates, in the role that monetary union could play in further limiting the 

role of government, particularly with respect to its redistributive 

capacities. 11 

There is much greater agreement on either side of the debate that a 

monetary union would require labour to be flexible, and not simply labour 

in the unionized sectors. Without exchange rates to cushion economic 

shocks, labour would be particularly subject to pressures at moments of 

economic decline. Falling prices would be used to cushion economic 

shocks, but labour would also be vulnerable to lowered wages, increased 

layoffs, and/or increased demand for productivity (see, for example, 

Laidler 1999, 39; Courchene and Harris 1999, 2; Crouch 2000, 19; 

Williams 2001, 2; Parizeau 2002, 13; Robson and Laidler 2002, 15; Dodge 

2002a, 2). With wages relatively difficult to adjust in the short term, the 

imminent outcome would be more unemployment. As in Europe, labour 

would be expected to relocate out of areas of economic decline into other 

areas of the monetary union—although the populations have not been as 

readily mobile as anticipated. For many advocates of NAMU, this forced 

labour flexibility—which would also put pressure on union demands—is 

one of the advantages of monetary union as they argue that this pressure will 

force the economy to become more competitive. Labour organizations have 

demonstrated little support for NAMU. Whereas many social democrats 

and unions in Europe supported EMU “as an opportunity to reinvigorate 

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corporatist social pacts in which cooperative wage bargaining, 

employment-friendly taxation schemes, and other social protection 

measures can assume a key role in the adjustment process,” NAMU has 

been presented as strengthening “neoliberal pressures for deregulated 

labour markets” with little hope for more regional alliances across labour 

organizations (Helleiner 2003/2004, 80). 

Hence, monetary union is trumpeted by its advocates as a mechanism for 

not only further loosening the fundamental premises and programs of the 

welfare state but also for institutionalizing a neoliberal mandate through the 

new form of monetary organization. Labour is particularly vulnerable in 

this scenario. Not only is labour expected to become more flexible and more 

subject to demands for reduced wages and benefits, in Grubel’s vision of 

NAMU there would likely be fewer social programs in place to offset the 

cutbacks and layoffs. Relocation would be encouraged, but in the 

post-September 11 context, there is little sense of how the Canada–US 

border could be opened up to the free movement of labour, given that many 

in the United States continue to wrongly believe that the terrorists entered 

the US via Canada, thanks to its lax immigration policies (SCFAIT 2001a, 

2001b, 2002). Given the ongoing US security fears, the free movement of 

labour is likely only to be possible in a scenario of much deeper economic 

and political integration and policy harmonization (Gilbert 2005a). What is 

clear, however, is that NAMU is being designed to bring about the end of the 

“capital-labour accord” that typified the Pearson era, which recognized that 

productivity gains should be distributed amongst workers, with the Pearson 

era social programs only one cog of the broader “institutional architecture” 

that developed out of this mandate (Boyer 2000, 36). The advocates of 

NAMU laud monetary union precisely because it would reconfigure the 

relationship between citizen and state and call into question programs for 

redistributing wealth among citizens and across regions. Amonetary union 

in the new millennium would hence likely be used to reinforce the 

prevailing neoliberal agenda in this period, much as a social welfare of the 

postwar period could be implemented under fixed exchange rates in the 

1960s. 

That room can be made for national iconography on a new transnational 

currency, as the NAMU advocates suggest, may well be possible. But what 

is missing from the proposals for monetary union is an accompanying sense 

of political project that functions alongside the symbolic dimension. There 

is simply no overwhelming push for a political union in North America as 

there was in the buildup to a common currency in the EU. Indeed, as noted 

above, much of the drive for NAMU has been from those who also advocate 

decentralization, with no comparable reconstitution of the state at the 

transnational scale. Thus while the symbolism of a national currency can 

help knit together disparate parts of a country—say, Alberta, Prince Edward 

Island and Nunavut—without no accompanying political project or 

political accountability that functions alongside the iconography, the 

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imagery really functions only at a symbolic level. For Canada, social 

programs have become centrally associated with the national character, and 

notably have been used to establish Canada’s difference from the United 

States. If these are to be undermined by a shift to a transnational 

currency—and there are many indications that this would indeed be the 

case—then this would have a significant impact on the sense of national 

belonging in a country that has little in the way of a shared history, language, 

ethnicity or religion. Whether or not one finds this challenge to national 

identity troubling, or perhaps even whether one assumes that national 

identities are being challenged anyway by increasing globalization, may 

very well depend upon which side one falls in the NAMU debates. The 

point is not that national identity needs to be secured at all costs—even if 

this were possible it might not be desirable—but, rather, to recognize that 

there are social and cultural implications that will arise from a shift away 

from a national currency, and that these need to be on the table if NAMU 

debates again escalate, alongside political and economic concerns. 

Conclusion 

How much support is there for NAMU? As noted above, support has grown 

since the idea first captured national attention in 1999. In the months after 

the terrorist attacks of September 11 interest in NAMU was especially high, 

with a poll of business leaders indicating that 54% believed that Canada 

should adopt outright the US dollar (Vardy and Thorpe 2001, FP2; 

Carmichael 2002, 2). Business leaders such as Paul Tellier, then president 

and chief executive officer of CN Railways, also began to publicly advocate 

for a more serious consideration of monetary union, although the Canadian 

Council of Chief Executives, a think-tank of business leaders, has never 

supported NAMU outright (Merszei 2002, FP1; see Helleiner 2003/2004). 

Even public support for NAMU appears to be gaining. In October 2002, a 

poll by Environics for the Centre for Research and Information found that 

53% of the public was favourable to a common currency (MacDonald 2002, 

A21; see also NFO 2002). A Maclean’s-L’actualité poll, however, found 

63% of respondents not disposed to monetary union, although notably 70% 

predicted that within 30 years the loonie will be replaced by the US dollar 

(Sheppard 2002, 36). Perhaps surprisingly, the West is the region the least 

keen on economic integration, while it is of less surprise that Quebec most 

strongly supports NAMU. For sovereigntists, monetary union, like free 

trade before it, is seen as weakening the province’s ties to the Canadian 

federation and, hence, as making sovereignty more sustainable (Helleiner 

2003a). In the words of former provincial premier Jacques Parizeau, 

“Shifting from the Canadian to the US dollar would not meet much 

resistance, political or otherwise in Québec. Québec would not have any 

influence on monetary policy? It never had” (Parizeau 2002, 20). A July 

2002 poll of 300 Quebec small- to medium-size entrepreneurs indicated 

that 47.7% of respondents were open to the idea of North American 

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common currency, with a slightly larger number of this group favouring 

outright the adoption ofthe UScurrency (National Bank ofCanada 2002). 

But what about the United States? There seems to be little if any official 

interest in a NAMU. Indeed, both advocates and opponents view US 

disinterest as one of, if not the greatest obstacle to NAMU (see, for example, 

Carr 1999; Crow 1999; Wallace 1999; Fortin 2000; Laidler and Poschmann 

2000; McCallum 2000; Murray 2000; Drummond 2001; CSTEB 2001; 

Hart and Dymond 2001; SCFAIT 2001b; Cooper 2002; Parizeau 2002; 

Robson and Laidler 2002; SCFAIT 2002; d’Aquino 2003; Bowles 2004). 

Carmichael has noted that “economists from the US national Bureau of 

Economic Research, the Bank of England, the Atlanta Fed, and the Institute 

for International Economics have debated the potential benefits and 

implementation issues of Canada’s linking its currency to the US dollar” 

(Carmichael 2002, 2; see also Helleiner 2003b, 265). But as Wendy Dobson 

has noted, “Although some Americans have revealed passing curiosity, the 

US electorate has shown no interest in either giving up its currency for a 

regional one or sharing any aspect of domestic monetary policy 

sovereignty” (Dobson 2002, 29). In one opinion poll of 2002, only 10% of 

US respondents expressed support for a continental currency—although 

almost three times (27%) that number would be open to Canadians adopting 

the US currency (NFO 2002; see also Robson and Laidler 2002, 25). 

Some advocates of NAMU, such as Grubel and Courchene and Harris 

are not so sceptical. As Grubel makes clear, the United States has already 

demonstrated that in certain instances it is willing to relinquish some 

national sovereignty to better economic growth and national security by 

signing international agreements—he mentions the WTO, IMF, World 

Bank, and of course NAFTA (Grubel 1999, 21; see also Christz 2000, 35). 

And Grubel points out that monetary union would also have escape clauses, 

just as there are with other international treaties. Secondly, as the euro 

continues to solidify its international standing, it could pose a significant 

challenge to the US dollar as an international currency (its use in capital 

markets; in the statistics of the IMF and World Bank; as a peg for small 

countries internationally; in illegal activities; but most importantly in that it 

comprises a large component of international reserves). It is certainly the 

case that the US currency internationally plays a dominant role— 

conservative estimates suggest that between 55-70% of total greenbacks 

already circulate outside the United States (Cohen 2002, 68; Saunders 

2003). Yet Grubel foresees the possibility that “third world” countries with 

historic ties to Europe might switch to the euro, as would Russia and the rest 

of Central Europe, while some countries in Eastern Europe and Africa have 

created rigid links to the euro through fixes of currency-board arrangements 

(Laidler and Poschmann 2000, 6). Already in September 2000, Iraq 

switched over to holding its foreign reserves in euro currency (instead of US 

dollars) as a way of trying to undermine US international influence and 

power, with suggestions that other countries of the Middle East might 

177



follow suit (Bannerjee 2000; Brethour 2004). Clarkson points out that the 

rise of the euro might help undermine US global hegemony to make 

monetary union favourable, in much the same way as US decline in the 

mid-1980s made room for the negotiation of the first free trade treaty 

(Clarkson 2000, 157). 

As Benjamin Cohen has written, if the euro were to seriously threaten the 

dollar’s global hegemony, it would not be surprising if the United States 

adopted a more activist stance towards dollarization (Cohen 2002, 80). 

Indeed, some, such as Senator Mack, have suggested that encouraging 

dollarization will help retain the US dollar as premier international 

currency (Cohen 2002, 82; cf. Robson and Laidler 2002, 25). Mexico might 

play an important role here, as one key part of President Vicente Fox’s 

mandate is to push ahead with further NAFTA-style integration, including 

monetary union (Chriszt 2000, 1). 12 That dollarization is already 

widespread across much of Latin America, even in countries such as 

Nicaragua, Peru and Bolivia—in the financial and business sectors; in 

government accounts; in the banking system at large; in individual bank 

accounts; and in large everyday transactions, such as real estate—will also 

continue to place pressure on the United States to entertain some more 

formal monetary arrangement (Bouchard 2000, 9; Cohen 2002). 

Dollarization has already been said to be a major incentive in the push for 

the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and, conversely, if monetary union 

were to be included in future negotiations it would place particular 

pressures on the United States (Bouchard 2000, 6). Canada too would likely 

face particular pressures to be included in any such negotiations (see 

Courchene and Harris 1999, 24). 

For the moment, however, US interest continues to be muted, and 

Canadian efforts have also turned elsewhere, especially as the loonie has 

soared above US80¢. More incremental forms of deeper economic 

integration that more closely resemble a customs union or common market 

have been drawn up in the hopes that they are more responsive to ongoing 

US security fears (Gilbert 2005a). These proposals appear to have 

resonated more clearly than those of monetary union; in March 2005 a 

Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement was signed between 

Presidents Bush, Fox and Prime Minister Martin that recommends 

deepening security and economic integration, more along the lines of a 

NAFTA-plus agreement, with nary a mention of monetary union. This does 

not, however, signal the end of NAMU. Indeed, the incremental steps 

towards deeper economic integration, if implemented, will likely draw the 

countries closer together, paving the way for a NAMU in the longer term 

(Dodge 2002a). 

What role, if any, the nation-state will play in future monetary policy 

making is a crucial question with which Canada and other countries will 

continue to grapple as globalization continues apace (see, for example, 

178

Sandbrook 2003; Held and McGrew 2002; Held 2000; Sassen 2000). 

Although advocates of NAMU promote monetary union as a mechanism 

for formalizing a more market-oriented economy in which the state plays a 

smaller role, as I have indicated above, money is not simply an economic 

tool, detached from political, social and cultural concerns—an argument 

that runs through much mainstream, neoclassical thinking about the 

economy (see, for example, Courchene and Harris 1999; Grubel 1999). 

Rather, it is also embedded in political institutions, social structures and 

cultural identities. As the discussions over NAMU unfold, it is especially 

important that not only the political and economic outcomes be 

considered—although these are of course crucial—but that the social and 

cultural implications of NAMU also be taken into consideration in 

whatever new forms of monetary territorialization ensue. 

Notes 



1. The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers whose perspicacious comments 

have helped sharpen the arguments in this article. Any remaining errors are the 

sole responsibility of the author. 

2. Most advocates of monetary union argue that Mexico should be included at some 

point, although they differ greatly about when. Whereas Grubel is more open to 

involving Mexico in the initial negotiations, generally it is assumed that a 

monetary union would be negotiated first between Canada and the United States 

and only later extended to Mexico—much as was done with the free trade 

agreements. Given Mexico’s strong support for a currency union, however, their 

role would likely be much more prominent than many Canadian proposals 

anticipate. For a critical assessment of the impact of monetary union on Mexico 

see Ramírez de la O (2004). 

3. Moreover, the protectionism that has risen in the United States since the events of 

September 11 makes the Canadian negotiating position especially difficult. 

Political scientist Reg Whittaker has cautioned that “entering into strategic 

negotiations towards closer integration with a bargaining partner that is fully 

committed to unilateralism and maximum maintenance of its own sovereignty, 

and has the clout to enforce that, seems unwise and ill-advised” (SCFAIT 2002, 

26; see also Golden 2003). 

4. Anne Golden, chair of the Conference Board of Canada, has suggested that even 

the worst-case scenario of Canadian adoption of the US dollar has little viability: 

“It is impossible that the US Federal Reserve would grant Canada a voice at the 

table for the purposes of making monetary policy, simply because we adopted the 

US dollar” (Golden 2001, A19). 

5. Robson and Laidler describe the Canadian monetary structure as follows. “The 

current monetary order has four main elements: a central bank with the power to 

create money at will, a floating exchange rate, a credible target for domestic 

inflation, and institutional arrangements through which policymakers may be 

held accountable for their choice of goals and the tactics they use in pursuing 

them” (Robson and Laidler 2002, 1). 

6. Advocates are waiting anxiously for the United Kingdom to join the euro—which 

they believe will soon take place—as this will send the message that monetary 

union is all about economics and not politics or sovereignty (see Seyfang 2000; 

Harris 2001; Cooper 2002). That the decision to hold a referendum on joining the 

179



euro has been put off yet again in Britain, despite the government’s pro-euro 

activism, suggests that the hopes of the advocates will not materialize in the 

immediate future—but also points to the very political nature of the decision. 

7. Even the Bank of Canada appears to recognize the symbolic importance of the 

currency; the newest currency issue, which has been entitled “The Canadian 

Journey,” is overtly nationalistic. The new ten-dollar bill, released in January 

2001, depicts themes of remembrance and peacekeeping, and the five-dollar bill, 

released March 2002, depicts a winter scene of children sledding and playing 

ice-hockey, accompanied by a citation from Roch Carrier’s beloved children’s 

book, The Hockey Sweater. The press release at the launch of the new money 

carried a quote by then Finance Minister Paul Martin who declared that 

“Canada’s bank notes reflect our growth both as a nation and as a people. Each 

series released by the Bank of Canada has provided a new way for Canadians to 

see their country and themselves” (Bank of Canada 2002). 

8. Not everyone shares Grubel’s conviction that cultural policies have not been 

threatened by free trade. Limits have been placed on Canadian cultural promotion 

and regulation (Mosco 2003) and there has been greater convergence in US and 

Canadian cultural policies, with greater emphasis on market-driven policies over 

public programming (Thompson and Randall 2002, 300–302). 

9. Courchene and Harris do acknowledge that social programs have unravelled in 

the post-NAFTA era, but they claim that this was because of federal program cuts 

(especially in 1995) and not because of integration per se—although it is not clear 

how these are to be disentangled. They also make the point that since part of this 

funding cut in 1995 has been restored—especially since the 1999 budget—this 

supports their claim that the changes have less to do with free trade than with the 

government getting its books in order. 

10. The United States would be hard-pressed to meet the euro criteria given its 

burgeoning debt. How this will continue to play out vis-à-vis international 

confidence in the US dollar, which has itself slid significantly into 2004, will be 

worth watching. Another point to consider, as one of the anonymous reviewers to 

this paper helpfully pointed out, is that the ability to exert fiscal pressure through 

the Stability and Growth Pact has not been effective, with discussions underway 

in Europe as to its reform. 

11. Again, I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pushing me for 

greater clarity in this section. 

12. Since 1999, the Mexcian banker’s association has pushed the idea of dollarization 

in that country, followed by a similar appeal by Mexico’s most influential 

business lobby group—but Fox’s statements have been more along the lines of a 

currency union (Courchene and Harris 1999, 25; FOCAL 2000, 5). The push 

towards monetary union was following on the heels of the Mexican peso (or 

“Tequila”) crisis (1994–1995), and may have been tempered in light of the 

ongoing problems in Argentina over dollarization. 

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184

Rachel Laforest 

Governance and the Voluntary Sector: Rethinking 

the Contours of Advocacy 

Abstract 

This article examines some of the implications of networked governance for 

national voluntary organizations in Canada in the field of family and children 

services. It argues that collaborative governance has brought about a shift in 

the structure of representation as more voluntary organizations have focused 

their advocacy work on research and policy analysis in order to meet the 

demands of greater policy involvement. The nature of their advocacy 

activities has therefore moved away from more traditional forms of advocacy 

grounded in power struggles toward more evidence-based politics. As a 

result, voluntary organizations have undergone profound organizational 

transformations and may have undermined their relationship with their 

members, thereby undercutting their long-term capacity for involvement in 

policy. 

Résumé 

Le présent article se penche sur certaines des incidences qu’a la gouvernance 

en réseau sur les organisations bénévoles au Canada qui sont actives dans le 

domaine des services aux familles et aux enfants. Il soutient que la 

gouvernance collaboratrice a entraîné un déplacement structurel de la 

représentation alors que davantage d’organisations bénévoles ont axé leurs 

travaux de la défense des intérêts sur la recherche et l’analyse de politique 

afin de satisfaire aux besoins résultant d’une implication plus intense dans 

l’élaboration de politique. L’essentiel de leurs activités de défense des 

intérêts s’est donc déplacé depuis les formes de défense des intérêts faisant 

fond sur la puissance vers la politique fondée davantage sur la recherche. 

Par conséquent, les organisations bénévoles ont subi des transformations 

profondes au plan de l’organisation, ce qui aurait pu contribuer à affaiblir les 

liens avec leurs membres, sapant ainsi leur capacité, à long terme, à 

contribuer au processus de la prise de décisions. 

In recent years, governments in most industrialized countries have had to 

face similar challenges and pressures associated with the restructuring of 

the welfare state and the context of fiscal constraint, which have 

significantly undermined state capacity and authority. The role of 

government has been reduced while the realm of private action has 

expanded. As a result, both polity and service delivery are increasingly 

developed through collaboration and coordination between the public, 

private and voluntary sectors (Rhodes 2000; Stoker 1998; Pierre and Peters 


30, 2004



2000). Given that the nature of governance has shifted in this context, it is 

not surprising that a wide range of scholars has been interested in the 

phenomenon and sought to understand the implications of these new 

dynamics. They are important for understanding the process of governance 

and the relationship between state and civil society. 

Increasingly, social scientists across a variety of disciplines are being 

drawn to the subject of “new governance,” to the emergence of new 

governance arrangements that rely more on horizontal relationships and on 

a wider range of instrument choice for service delivery (Paquet 2000; 

Rhodes 2000; Peters 2001; Salamon 2001). While there is a burgeoning 

literature that focuses on new governance, most of this work has focused on 

the instruments for and implications of governance on the delivery of 

services. Anumber of recent studies, however, have drawn attention to how 

governance is reshaping representation and encouraging a broad rethinking 

of the relationship between the state and the voluntary sector (Basok and 

Ilcan 2004; Taylor, Craig and Wilkinson 2002; Laforest and Orsini 2002). 

This evidence suggests that something fundamental is at play in these new 

governance arrangements. The governance processes entail the coordination 

and co-operation of diverse actors across sectoral boundaries that rely 

on new and transformed organizational and institutional practices. Forms 

of political representation are evolving as voluntary sector organizations 

gain influence in the policy process. These new opportunities for 

engagement in policy are transforming the terms of access to policymaking, 

the routes of political representation and the forms of political 

expression. The understanding of such practices and their influence upon 

the capacity of voluntary sector organizations to participate effectively and 

to make a difference is of critical importance for policy makers, 

practitioners and researchers. 

The case study presented here explores the new politics of governance as 

it unfolds in the Canadian context by focusing on the dynamics within a 

particular policy community, that of children and family services. It 

provides an important case study for understanding how voluntary sector 

organizations have contributed to the broad purposeful redesign of their 

relationship with the state. By focusing on the dynamics occurring at a 

national level, it demonstrates how the process of governance has 

compelled organizations to think as a ‘sector’ and to think across policy 

fields, which until the mid 1990s had not been done (Phillips 2001). Such a 

change in the scale and scope of sectoral issues is significant. It provides a 

new space for the collective definition of problems arising from the process 

of governance and solutions. It influences the goal towards which action is 

oriented and in the process, it can shape the repertoire of political actions, 

strategies and skills of organizations. Based on an examination of national 

voluntary organizations in the field of family and social services, I explore 

some of the key challenges and opportunities that voluntary organizations 

186

Governance and the Voluntary Sector: Rethinking the Contours of 

Advocacy 

must face as they are increasingly delegated greater responsibility in the 

policy process. The case study demonstrates that the decisions and choices 

that voluntary organizations have made at a national level have had an 

important organizational legacy that has radically altered the nature of the 

sector. 

Politics of Governance 

More than ever before, voluntary organizations are implicated in the 

process of governance and the voluntary sector has emerged as an 

important actor and partner in both policy-making and service delivery. It 

is not accidental that this development is taking place now. It is occurring 

amidst a transition in governance practices and it reflects a number of 

profound social and political developments in the fields of service 

provision, policy-making and relationship building (Rhodes 1997). 

Analyses of governance are useful in order to capture the unintended 

consequences of public sector reforms and how they have affected the role 

of the state and the way society is governed (Rhodes 2000). Although they 

are mainly state centred and do not directly address issues pertaining to 

voluntary organizations’ involvement in governance arrangements, these 

studies are relevant in order to conceptualize the context within which they 

act. 

The basic argument is that complexity of the policy process and the 

decline in state authority has brought about alternative forms of 

coordinating mechanism, creating networks as opposed to hierarchies and 

markets (Ansell 2000; Rhodes 1997). Rhodes, who is an exemplar of this 

approach, links the emergence of networks to the fragmentation of service 

delivery and to what he calls a “pluralization of policy making” (Rhodes 

2000, 54). Besides recognizing that governance involves both state and 

non-state actors, Rhodes also views governance as providing greater 

autonomy to the actors of civil society in their dealings with government. 

Nevertheless, he does recognize that actors within the networks depend on 

each other in order to reach their goals and even for some of their resources. 

As a result, co-operative and horizontal forms of policy development are 

based on the principles of interdependence, negotiation and coordination 

(see also Peters 2000; Stoker 1998). 

Because of the growing complexity of policy-making, traditional modes 

of governance, where governments make policy and bureaucrats execute it, 

are now largely misleading. Hence, policy-making under governance is 

best conceived of as an ongoing process of institutionalized dialogue, of 

coordination and of collaboration between state actors and actors of civil 

society. The process of governance entails a form of “institutionalisation of 

coordinating mechanisms between state and civil society and the nature of 

state intervention in civil society to promote its objectives” (Pierre 1998, 3). 

This is manifest in sustained efforts to formalize this new partnership 

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through the development of mechanisms such as a compact, accord or other 

agreements between the state and the voluntary sector (Larner and Craig 

2002; Phillips 2002; White 2001). These processes at play on a macro scale 

signal a broad purposeful redesign of the relationship and they influence 

actors’ behaviour. While on one hand these processes shape institutional 

routines, norms and expectations and structure political struggle by 

defining who is included/excluded within the political arena and delimit the 

realm of the possible, it is also important to recognize that they have opened 

up opportunities for organizations to affect their relationship with state and 

to act as agents who transform the process of governance, creating new 

opportunities for action and redesigning power relations. The process of 

governance, therefore, has become the very terrain on which struggle is 

waged. 

As such, the outcomes of governance are open as actors struggle to 

exercise power and influence in decisions concerning public life. In this 

perspective, politics matters. The analytical importance of such an 

approach to the study of government-voluntary sector relationships cannot 

be underestimated. By moving away from a deterministic explanation of 

networks, and conceptualizing the governing structures as variable, the 

analysis focuses on the challenges posed to governance and the diverse way 

actors — both state and non-state actors — respond. This actor-centred 

theoretical approach to governance incorporates notions of agency and 

contingency to the study of politics. 

The network approach also presents a number of other advantages for the 

study of government-voluntary sector relationships. First, it provides an 

interesting framework in order to examine the interaction between state and 

non-state actors because it is much more closely linked with practices on the 

ground involving day-to-day processes of policy-making. It focuses 

directly on how governance has transformed the way the public, private and 

voluntary sectors relate to each other. 

Understanding modes of governance therefore involves the question of 

power and how it is negotiated. Within networks, issues are debated and 

contested as each actor tries to influence the process to reach its goals. 

Networks have created new political arenas as well as new dependencies, 

which affect three aspects of government-voluntary sector relationships: 

access, resources and the rules of engagement. By focusing on the struggles 

that unfold in these arenas, the analysis provides an account of governance 

that incorporates variables such as the changing nature of power, decision 

making and agency interaction (Rhodes 1994, 1997; Kooiman 1994). Bevir 

and Rhodes suggest that we think of governance as “the contingent product 

of political struggles that embody competing sets of beliefs” (Bevir and 

Rhodes 2002, 19). This approach challenges the assumption that states 

control decision making. Instead, it suggests that states use other tools to 

steer and guide the process. 

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By emphasizing the role that the state plays in guiding and structuring the 

policy process, this approach calls attention to how it can constrain political 

action and determine which interests prevail. This includes, on the part of 

government, deciding whose participation will be encouraged and who will 

contribute to the development of public policy. It can affect representation 

by conferring access, resources, legitimacy and credibility to political 

actors. In fact, government policy limits the space for political 

representation on many levels. It can decide which issues will be included 

and excluded from the policy agenda; and through the rules of the game, it 

can define the roles of actors and shape their behaviour. Participation in 

networked governance ultimately recognizes and legitimizes the 

organizations and their representatives. Resources and shifts in policy and 

opportunities also play into these dynamics. Not only do these practices 

have an impact on the policy process, but they also have an impact on the 

forms of representation through which interests are articulated. 

The network approach can illuminate in important ways our 

understanding of how voluntary organizations make sense of their role and 

place in new governance arrangements, how they respond, strategize and 

make choices in order to achieve their goals. It offers an interesting 

framework precisely because it recognizes that the process of governance is 

political and that it involves struggle over meaning. This is not to say that 

the relationship is unidirectional and that the state determines the shape of 

the voluntary sector. Rather, it sets out the context within which political 

action will take place. Policy choices ultimately fall upon the organizations 

themselves. Voluntary organizations set their goals and utilize strategy in 

light of their perception of their place in the policy process, their sense of 

involvement and the opportunities that present themselves. For voluntary 

organizations, the main challenge therefore is to adapt to the changing 

circumstances and expectations that confront governance arrangement in 

order to position themselves as legitimate and credible players in public 

policy. 

Governance in Canada 

The context of governing in Canada has changed remarkably in the last 

decade as the federal government has come under increasing strain. As a 

result, Canada, like many other industrialized countries, has been subjected 

to a wide range of public sector reforms. Modes of governing have shifted 

away from traditional hierarchical command and control toward more 

interactive collaborative forms of governance and this has led to a critical 

rethinking of the role of government and of its relationship to society 

(Paquet 1999). It has affected all aspects of interaction between the federal 

government and the voluntary sector from service delivery and 

policy-making to the very nature of their relationship. 

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Perhaps most importantly, the processes of governance have shifted the 

roles and responsibilities between the state and the voluntary sector. In fact, 

under pressure to reduce costs and increase performance, the federal 

government launched a series of reforms to modernize government, which 

played a key role in reshaping the relationship between the public, the 

private and the voluntary sector. The modernization of the federal 

government has provided context not only to changes in structures of 

service delivery but to policy-making as well. Under the Program Review, 

not only did the federal government withdraw from services that it deemed 

could be better delivered by external parties but it also began working 

increasingly in partnership with other levels of government, the private and 

the voluntary sector. 1 By the mid-1990s, the downsizing of the public 

service and the program cuts had significantly affected the federal 

government’s policy functions and weakened its ability to influence and 

manage public policy outcomes (Peters and Savoie 1994, 1996; Hart 1998; 

Andersen 1996). Hence, the shift from government to governance 

heightened its need for external advice and policy support—hands-on 

knowledge that now lay with third parties that in many cases are at the front 

lines of service delivery. 

Another outcome of the governance process was the transformation of 

the funding regime of the voluntary sector that until then relied heavily on 

government funding (Pal 1993; Jenson and Phillips 1996). Perhaps the 

most significant change was the major funding cutbacks that began in the 

mid-90s targeting specifically advocacy organizations (Phillips 2001; 

Swimmer 1996). 2 Instead of providing core funding, the federal 

government moved towards the greater use of short-term contract based 

funding, which signalled a pronounced shift towards a “contract culture” 

thereby privileging voluntary organizations providing services (Smith and 

Lipsky 1993; Rekart 1993; Scott 2003). 3 In the process, it questioned the 

legitimacy of activities to be funded, seeking explicitly to discourage 

advocacy (Jenson and Phillips 1996; Dobrowolsky 1998; Basok and Ilcan, 

2004). By the same token, advocacy organizations had lost access to the 

state. Their role in public policy forums and public consultation was 

discredited as the federal government started to encourage the 

democratization of public policy and praise the contribution of the 

“ordinary citizen” in the policy process (Jenson and Phillips 1996; Brodie 

1995). More weight was given, in the policy discourse, to the voices of 

individuals as opposed to that of intermediary organizations (Graham and 

Phillips 1997). Arguably, voluntary organizations were confronted by a 

political opportunity structure that had been closed off to them. On one 

hand, the credibility of organizations had come to be questioned not only on 

the part of political leaders, but scepticism had also spread to the general 

public who had become mistrustful ofthe work ofvoluntary organizations. 

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Strategizing to Turn the Tides 

By the mid-1990s, many national organizations were fending to survive 

and their relationships with the federal government had become 

antagonistic. Nevertheless, the transformations occurring around service 

delivery and policy-making brought about important changes in 

relationships both within the federal government and across sectors, 

creating some new opportunities for action. For one, they launched 

interesting new dynamics within the sector, affecting the patterns of 

relationship across sub-sectors. The prospects brought on by a shift in 

governance and the increasing reality of partnership and collaborative 

mechanisms have joined actors at different scales in a common discourse. 

They have done so under the leadership of the Voluntary Sector 

Roundtable 4 (VSR) and the Voluntary Sector Initiative (VSI) created new 

political spaces where issues affecting the broader community could be 

addressed. 

In the name of the sector, these national organizations led lobbying 

efforts, made requests to receive funding grants and tried to take advantage 

of the political climate to rebuild the political profile of the sector. They 

tried to transform the political climate that was largely unfavourable to 

them in the early 1990s, and to redress power imbalances brought about by 

large cuts in funding and the delegitimization of the role played by interest 

groups in the policy process. 

The VSR successfully recast itself as a credible and legitimate partner in 

the context of governance, and this process of identity building set the stage 

for future action. New actors were empowered, which fostered new models 

for thinking about the link between the voluntary sector and government. 

As a result of their lobbying work, there is growing interest from the federal 

government in working together with the voluntary sector (Phillips 2001). 

In fact, ten years ago, there was barely any talk of the voluntary sector in 

government circles. Now, nearly a decade later, the voluntary sector and 

community are mentioned in key speeches and the federal government has 

committed to building an effective relationship with the sector. Patterns of 

horizontal collaboration and interaction have become a dominant feature in 

the relationship. 

The federal government, therefore, is looking for new ways to include 

organizations on an ongoing basis rather than in an ad hoc fashion. The 

federal government went from sporadic dialogue with sectors—with no 

ongoing focus in government on voluntary sector issues—to mechanisms 

and structures in place to ensure dialogue with the sector. As a result, in 

2000 it invested 95 million dollars over five years in the VSI for the specific 

purpose of strengthening the contribution of the voluntary sector to better 

serving Canadians. 5 

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The VSI Process 

The launch of the VSI served as a critical juncture in the politics of 

governance. With growing interaction and collaboration, mechanisms are 

needed to institutionalize the relationship between the government and the 

voluntary sector at multiple levels: governmental, departmental, sectoral 

and micro (Kooiman 2002). As Phillips suggests, “A governance model is 

about guiding, not controlling, and about working in partnership with the 

voluntary and private sectors” (Phillips 2001, 653). In order to create better 

policies and deliver services efficiently, a shift in governance requires the 

development of active and responsive relationships among the sectors. As 

the roles and responsibilities of the different actors are being renegotiated, 

so are the rules and governing structures to support such collaboration. The 

VSI contributed in a significant way to setting the policy context 

conditioning the relations between the federal government and the 

voluntary sector at all levels. Precisely because the VSI addressed concerns 

that all voluntary organizations share, such as how to develop effective 

engagement mechanisms for voluntary sector participation in the 

policy-making process, building capacity, and funding issues, its work has 

an impact on the dynamics that play out at the national, sectoral and micro 

levels. The VSI process in effect has shaped the broad institutional and 

discursive conditions within which these actors interact on a day-to-day 

basis. Not only has it affected the attitude of the federal government and the 

general public with respect to voluntary sector organizations but it has also 

redefined the terms of engagement with the state and ultimately affects how 

organizations conduct themselves at all levels. 

For one, the process itself played an important role in helping to foster 

new understandings and mutual respect across the sectors. It provided the 

opportunity for representatives of the federal government and the voluntary 

sector to examine multiple facets of their relationship. For the voluntary 

sector, the discussions and the broad consultations that were held with 

organizations across Canada generated a better understanding of the 

policy-making process and made organizations more aware of the 

constraints facing the federal government. For the federal government, the 

process dispelled many myths regarding the sector, and led to the 

recognition that voluntary organizations should be key informants in policy 

and program development given their knowledge of issues and experience. 

As a result, the VSI process not only repositioned the voluntary sector 

higher on the political agent; it also brought unprecedented financial 

support and political leverage to the struggles of the voluntary sector 

around capacity issues. Hence, it conveyed a new openness towards 

partnering with voluntary organizations in policy-making and service 

delivery. 

Moreover, one of the goals of the VSI process was to lay out a set of 

guiding principles and practices to foster a more positive relationship 

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between the federal government and the voluntary sector. These guiding 

principles were detailed in key documents: the Accord and the Codes of 

Good Practice on Funding and Policy Dialogue. In addition, the VSI 

produced a series of documents and research reports that promote good 

practices in accountability and financial management, human resources 

management, skills, training, even guides for voluntary sector involvement 

in policy-making. 6 The goal of these studies was to provide a database of 

practices deemed successful and effective in order to encourage their 

uptake and dissemination. 

The VSI process was thereby central to providing “master frames” 

embodying rules, norms and accepted patterns of behaviour that have 

resulted in far-reaching changes in the structure of the voluntary sector, its 

identity and in its patterns of relationship. It produced nationally sanctioned 

professional guidelines and guides for best practice, which may be taken for 

granted on a day-to-day basis but will nevertheless serve as institutional 

parameters that guide political behaviour at the macro, meso and micro 

level. However, it is important to recognize that this process is the product 

of both the state and voluntary sector action. Through the VSI process, the 

VSR created opportunities for itself and for others at the national level, 

which ultimately affected the opportunities for organizations at the 

provincial and local level. 

The VSI also signalled to voluntary organizations that advocacy was no 

longer an appropriate strategy for making one’s claims to the state. The 

federal government had in fact systematically refused to discuss issues 

concerning advocacy jointly with the voluntary sector. 

For voluntary organizations there was an urgent need to build capacity in 

the area of policy development and research so as to influence the social 

agenda and improve the quality of the community input. Many felt that 

greater participation in policy requires that organizations become 

politically and socially aware of the stakes. To ensure progress on the 

voluntary sector agenda, organizations interviewed felt they needed to 

unify their positions on specific issues, express their views more 

coherently, and use their expertise to make a meaningful contribution to the 

social dialogue and policy formulation. 

As a result, the idea of “capacity building” is currently in vogue in 

government and voluntary sector circles and is a driving force in the 

elaboration of new funding programs for voluntary sector organization. 

This discursive shift has opened the door to re-examining how voluntary 

organizations ought to operate in order to better contribute to 

policy-making and to service delivery. Asking what it takes for a voluntary 

organization to develop better practices reveals a lot regarding effective 

routes for political and social action. Capacity-building initiatives come 

with a particular vision of perceived needs, desired outcomes and preferred 

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methods. They have led to the identification of new priorities for funding 

and a reorientation of existing resources towards specific projects, which 

would involve the development of capacity and expertise by supporting 

training, transfer of skills, technology development, the development of 

management systems and leadership skills to support the voluntary 

organizations’ involvement in policy development and in service delivery. 

As a result, they lend status to certain practices over others. 

The capacity-building rhetoric aims to strengthen the organizational 

capacity of organizations to carry out particular functions and in some cases 

new functions associated with new governance processes. While policy 

advice was traditionally the safeguard of public servants, the federal 

government now needs the input of the voluntary sector in developing, 

designing and implementing policy. Through analysis, consultation, 

networking, information sharing and strategic planning, it is widely held 

that voluntary organizations may better inform and influence policy. 

The federal government’s rhetoric on capacity building translated into a 

range of capacity-building programs with funding attached to voluntary 

sector involvement in policy initiatives. Through the creation of the 

Sectoral Involvement in Departmental Policy Development Program 

(SIDPD) and the Social Development Partnerships Program, funding is 

available for projects in the voluntary sector that support departmental 

program objectives through research activities and evidence-based 

practices (Laforest and Orsini 2002; Shields et al. 2003). 7 These monies are 

meant to strengthen the policy capacity of voluntary organizations by 

facilitating networking and consultation within the sector, but the capacity 

issues are being defined by governmental priorities. Supporting knowledge 

development and dissemination activities is also intended to increase 

voluntary sector involvement in the departmental policy process, enabling 

them to acquire the necessary tools to enrich their knowledge of relevant 

issues, namely through research, and the development of their capabilities. 

However, the direction of the programs is strictly determined by the needs 

of departments involved. As the evaluation of the SIDPD program 

revealed, “There is no indication from background documents for SIDPD 

or interviews of any consideration being given to understanding what the 

voluntary sector’s strategic needs might be, nor any indication of what the 

‘policy gaps’ might be for government” (SIDPD evaluation 2004, 21). 

These programs nevertheless play a prominent role in driving 

organizational change across scales. They help to legitimate particular 

institutional forms and practices articulated around the importance of 

research and evidence-based practices for policy-making. 

Embedded in these funding mechanisms are implicit assessments of 

what constitutes a legitimate activity, which organizations may undertake 

advocacy and which may not, who takes part, on what basis and in which 

capacity and encouraging some kinds of group formation and collective 

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action, but not others. It is through these signifying practices that rules and 

norms of behaviour are challenged and possibly transformed. These 

struggles, although less visible and often latent, are primary concerns 

underlying and shaping the other more visible and manifest topics and 

issues under discussion. Therefore, funding “evidence based advocacy” 

rather than more direct and confrontational forms of advocacy directly 

affects the terms of access to policy-making, the routes of political 

representation, the forms of political expression through which advocacy is 

done, and, even more importantly, affects the legitimacy and credibility of 

the actors involved in the policy process. 

Moreover, policy guidelines produced to help guide the behaviour of 

voluntary organizations involved in policy-making also reinforce these 

norms. Participating in Federal Public Policy: A Guide for the Voluntary 

Sector; Policy Toolkit for Public Involvement in Decision Making; and 

Commitment to Effective Consultations are all documents illustrative of 

the broader institutional discourse framing common rules and practices, 

and of mutual understandings of the parameters of collective action. In a 

way, this very process of codification occurring on a macro scale designates 

the knowledge most valuable in the field of policy-making—research and 

analysis. 

Organizational change also gets transmitted through individual 

departments, through a greater number of programs signalling these 

priorities and through organizations that adopt these new practices. In fact, 

a number of the projects funded under SIDPD are identified as examples of 

“best practice” in voluntary sector-government partnerships and are to be 

reported and shared with the voluntary sector and government departments 

in order to encourage similar action (Laforest and Orsini 2004). This creates 

new organizational and societal expectations regarding what is a legitimate 

practice in the policy field. What is clear from these initiatives is that the 

institutional basis for involvement in the policy process has shifted away 

from one that recognized the value of organizing and mobilizing interest to 

one that values interventions grounded in research aid policy analysis to aid 

in policy development. As a result, strategies employed by organizations 

shifted in fundamental ways. 

Organizational Impacts: A Look at the Field of Children and 

Family Services 

On a micro scale, patterns and practices of organizations involved in policy 

shift in response as they adapt to this new environment. Much like the 

broader dynamics occurring on the macro level, the children and family 

policy field felt the closure of the federal government to policy advocates 

and to confrontational approaches. Organizations were increasingly aware 

that they had to build legitimacy for their participation in the policy-making 

process in order to be called upon to provide policy advice and input. 

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Organizations such as the National Children’s Alliance (NCA), who 

adopted mainstream practices, were very successful at getting the federal 

government’s attention. Not only were they frequently invited to dinners 

and informal meetings with ministers but they came to be a valuable source 

of information for senior level bureaucrats who increasingly called on them 

for advice and information. Moreover, they received funding from Human 

Resources Development Canada and from Health Canada at a time when 

many organizations were seeing their funding cutback. What is more 

striking, however, is that this newly created organization received funding 

over Campaign 2000, a well-established organization that had served as the 

national advocate for children’s issues (Jenson, Mahon and Phillips 2003). 

Although there is considerable overlap in membership within these two 

coalitions, the main difference lies in the practices they adopt. Campaign 

2000 is well known for its mobilization tactics, generating media and public 

campaigns around the issue of child poverty, whereas the NCA adopts a 

more conservative approach privileging institutionalized routes to political 

representation. It has gained respect because it engaged in consensus 

building. 

The new-found consideration that the NCAhad received and the greater 

access they had gained were both seen as signs of success, which reinforced 

for many national organizations in the field of children and family services 

the value of adopting a collaborative approach and working with 

government. It further influenced many organizations to adopt a more 

collaborative approach and to position themselves as partners in the 

development of a children’s policy agenda rather than adopt a more 

conflictual approach. 

Advocates began to frame the issues using data and research such as the 

longitudinal study on children/youth and the work of Dr. Frasier Mustard 

(Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004). Because of the attention that this research 

was generating, organizations strategically began to focus their policy 

stances on the importance of the early years for child development. Groups 

utilizing these research tools in order to substantiate their position began to 

gain credibility as valuable policy actors and were increasingly called to 

participate in policy discussions. In fact, they gradually came to be seen as 

the “experts” in the field of early childhood development and began to 

receive funding support to invest inadditional research around these issues. 

The new-found emphasis on evidence and knowledge dissemination has 

brought about a number of significant changes in the sector by redefining 

the requisite skills set and changing the repertoires of political action and 

the basis on which stakes and claims are made. As voluntary organizations 

increasingly play an operational role in the policy process, political 

participation, representation and advocacy are being rethought and 

reshaped. The very nature of advocacy has been redefined to encompass the 

greater extent of their role in the public policy process. Advocacy is no 

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Advocacy 

longer limited to the act of supporting an issue or speaking in favour of a 

particular constituency; voluntary sector organizations are now called upon 

to provide policy advice, research, to consult and to mediate policy to the 

general public. When questioned about their advocacy role, national 

organizations in the field of children and family services maintained that 

while they continued to exercise that role, the way they advocate has 

evolved in response to the changing nature oftheir dealings with the state. 

A major effect has been that organizations’ advocacy activities have 

steered towards a greater focus on public policy-making and governmental 

priorities. Public policy and state-oriented work has become central to the 

agendas of national voluntary organizations. Following the strategy that 

proved successful for the VSR, national organizations in the field of 

children and family services developed links with the government through 

formal and informal meetings. One respondent described their new strategy 

as follows, “Our approach is based on developing positive working 

relationship with government, not sending confrontational messages. We 

work together despite the fact that we have had the cuts...since the early 

1990s, we are more involved with policy formulation prior to this 

government priority was different... now it is more amenable to partner for 

policy formulation.” Another explains, “You had to find doors... A lot of 

organizations do the tango, meet with government and are energized at 

being at the table... The advocacy effort is really dynamic. We haven’t given 

up the idea; at the table we can continue to challenge them.” Athird claimed 

that advocacy “...changes when one gets to the policy engagement stage, 

making it a policy issue rather than a political issue. We’re getting to the real 

action stage. Our relationship with government is fairly open....” 

Driven by a boom in research contracts, request for proposals and 

demands for consultant work, voluntary organizations have seen their 

research budgets expand. In fact, fifteen of the nineteen national 

organizations surveyed reported a greater use of research activities in the 

past five years. An executive director stated, “[W]e’ve started to focus more 

on our research because most of our money comes from project to project 

funding. The federal government would not give us funding to do solely 

advocacy work. They’ll give us money to do peer advocacy support through 

research but not pure advocacy really focussing on research and life course 

changes can help… having research behind the voices, to back up the 

voices… It’s a lot easier for us to get money for research.” Another noted 

similarly having to strategically turn to research money and its impact: 

“You have to reframe the language, the programme in order to compete for a 

finite amount of money and this process is reinforced by government’s 

promise to work together and to build stronger communities.... You have no 

choice to do that.... Only certain things will go through that’s the filtering 

process.” Most organizations perceived access to project funding for 

building policy capacity as a route to redistributing power. In fact, the 

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majority of groups have viewed their increased involvement in policy as a 

positive shift. 

As the state becomes a focal point of much of the collective action; 

research has already showed that it shapes the movement’s direction 

(Bashevkin 1994; Dobrowolsky 1998). Whereas before advocacy was 

reactive and responsive, aimed at acting upon the government, the ultimate 

agent of policy; it is now less political and rooted in policy analysis, where 

the ultimate means to influence policy is by tracking government progress. 

Voluntary organizations have in fact been particularly adept at using 

longitudinal data and studies to gain credibility in policy-making. For 

example, in the field of children and family services, advocates began to 

frame the issues using data and research such as the longitudinal study and 

the work of Dr. Fraser Mustard (Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004). We also 

found that broad monitoring efforts, such as The Progress of Canada’s 

Children and How Does Canada Measure Up? serve as important resources 

to organizations to support research, proposal writing, policy, program 

development and advocacy. Because of the overt focus on the value of 

evidence and data by the policy-making process, voluntary organizations 

have found it necessary to rely on this type of information in order to 

substantiate their position when engaging in policy debates. 

Greater access to information and research by a variety of actors has also 

transformed the policy-making playing field. The politics of policy-making 

are different, and the skills required to influence policy are different. It is no 

longer a politics of power, where actors leverage their strength through 

numbers. It is a politics of numbers, where knowledge represents power. 

The former is achieved by requiring a proficiency of personnel in certain 

policy subjects and by hiring staff with particular research interests who, in 

turn, further reinforce the move towards evidence-based practice. 

This move towards more evidence-based practices is generating some 

important long-term organizational changes. For one, it has been 

accompanied by pressures to professionalize organizational practices. As 

participation in the policy process requires the ability to access, interpret, 

analyze and use information for making decisions, the skills and 

competencies needed for voluntary organizations to successfully influence 

the policy process are changing as well. To meet these demands, 

organizations must develop new analytical skills either through training or 

new hiring practices. Among these pressures, organizations noted the 

importance of developing greater sophistication with understanding and 

applying information to ensure the quality of the inputs feeding into the 

policy process. Among the organizations interviewed, twelve reported that 

they had capacity issues and that their professional development needs have 

increased. One executive director noted, “With all that is expected of me, I 

find the skills I have need to be upgraded.” Others have transformed their 

hiring practices. While traditionally the practice in five voluntary 

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Advocacy 

organizations in the study had been to hire social workers and activists with 

careers in grassroots organizations, increasingly they are hiring 

professional researchers who may not have those necessary links to 

community. One cannot underestimate the profound cultural shift these 

new hiring practices are creating at an organizational level. 

Organizational change also involves profound internal reorganization of 

resources, skills and personnel, all of which shape the practice and optic of 

organizations. By relying increasingly on expertise and knowledge rather 

than on experiential knowledge on the ground, voluntary organizations 

tend to be managed in a top-down fashion with few opportunities for 

member leverage from below. This poses a new set of challenges while 

reinforcing the informal and normative pressures that promote changes in 

practice. 

The move towards evidence-based practices has also required 

organizations to develop stronger links with outside actors such as 

government departments and research institutes. These connections have 

become particularly strong, amplifying the general tendency towards 

bureaucratization and professionalization in the sector at large. The 

majority of organizations have in fact reported opting for institutionalized 

channels of political representation, both formal and informal. They want to 

convey the sense that they are truly engaged and vested in the policy 

process. Four national voluntary organizations suggested that to be at the 

table with the government and involved in public policy development, they 

need to be “objective” and advocate on the basis of “evidence.” One 

executive director recalled that their advocacy strategy is now “based on 

developing positive working relationship with government, not sending 

confrontational messages. We work together despite the fact that we have 

had the cuts...since the early 1990s, we are more involved with policy 

formulation prior to this government priority was different... now it is more 

amenable to partner for policy formulation.” 

This shift in advocacy strategies has not come without a cost. Through 

the reconfiguration of the structure of representation, new relationships 

within and among voluntary organizations have surfaced. Our study 

revealed that organizations with higher levels of organizational capacity 

had higher levels of adaptation to this new environment and underwent 

substantial organizational change in their hiring practice and in their 

organizational structure. As organizations moved towards evidence-based 

practices, they underwent an organizational overhaul, which led them to 

abandon former strategies grounded in mobilization and protest. As a 

result, these differential opportunities drive a wedge within the sector 

between “elites” who enjoy privileged access to policy makers and/or 

bureaucrats and rank-and-file members of these same organizations who 

may not. 

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While it has helped support a broader vision at a sectoral level, it has also 

created some tensions within organizations, as the local and provincial 

members would rather see their national umbrella groups concentrate their 

advocacy work around specific issues of interest to them. As national 

organizations become largely centralized and professionalized, the rift 

widens between local organizations. This problem is becoming even more 

acute as local chapters are increasingly relying on their national 

representatives to advocate on their behalf because they no longer have the 

resources to manage both advocacy and services. One group noted that they 

“are more overstretched, trying to stay on top with little staff and resources. 

They are almost relying on you to do the advocacy and just attach the name 

of the organization without having to stretch. They wouldn’t be able to do it 

themselves or would only do very sectorally based advocacy for funds, not 

policy.” The provincial members of three other national organizations have 

also questioned the involvement of their representatives in the National 

Children’s Agenda. For example, while youth organizations hope to secure 

long-term gains by participating in this coalition, their provincial 

counterparts do not see the direct relatedness of the early childhood 

development agenda. 

This practice of organizing to cut across sectoral lines and to address 

generic issues, however, has created dissonances within the family and 

children services sector. It has focalized all of the energies on engaging in a 

relationship-building process with the federal government, neglecting 

other levels of government. As most voluntary organizations in the field of 

family and children services remain locally based and service oriented, they 

tend to mobilize around issues on a local scale. For them, these broad macro 

issues that quickly took precedence were not seen as a priority—especially 

given the context of strained resources in which they lived. They were much 

more concerned with their everyday operations. Local chapters of national 

organizations began to question the energy that was being directed towards 

the relationship-building exercise. Because these organizations were 

mainly dependent on local relationships and their interests were essentially 

locally based, these national efforts needed to be represented in a manner 

that was locally relevant. However, many felt that this was not done. As a 

result, this shift has caused small-sized organizations to experience a 

greater level of atomization and political alienation, creating important 

long-term implications. Not only has this created a level of disconnection 

within organizations but it has made it more difficult for organizations to 

mobilize for social change. This may have important implications for 

constituent involvement and more research needs to be devoted to 

understanding these connections across scales. 

Conclusion 

The implications of this case study on our understanding of the role of 

voluntary organizations in governance are significant. New collaborative 

200

forms of policy design and development, supported by funding practices 

aimed specifically at strengthening the voluntary sector’s capacity to 

contribute to policy, have enabled voluntary sector organizations in the 

field of children and family services to reposition themselves with respect 

to the state. The growing professionalization of politics, the relative decline 

in the power and legitimacy of advocacy groups, and the mainstreaming of 

large, well-established organizations have all contributed to changing the 

locus of power. By emphasizing the specialized knowledge of the voluntary 

sector and its importance to the process of governance, it has meant that the 

more established and bureaucratized organizations have occupied the 

pre-eminent place in the policy process and have advocated for the sector as 

a whole. 

The long-term implications of this shift are important. Not only has the 

shift created a level of disconnect within organizations but it has made it 

more difficult for organizations to mobilize for social change by creating a 

disconnect between national and local organizations. More important to 

keep in mind, however, is the organizational legacy of the transformations 

that have begun to take place in the sector around hiring practices and 

management techniques and which may significantly alter the nature of the 

sector. 

Notes 


Advocacy 

* School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University. The author would like to 

acknowledge support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 

of Canada. 

1. In the early 1990s, the federal government began a process of modernization of 

the political and administrative system and embarked on a major review of the 

machinery of government. The goal of the Program Review which followed was 

to assess federal government’s responsibilities and examined government 

programs in order to determine the most effective and cost-efficient way of 

delivering services. 

2. The 1992 mini-budget announced cuts of 20% over the next two years; the 1993 

budget further cut funding 15% (Phillips 2001). Susan D. Phillips, “How Ottawa 

Bends: Shifting Government Relationships with Interest Groups,” in Frances 

Abele (ed.) How Ottawa Spends 1991–92: The Politics of Fragmentation 

(Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 183-227. (Phillips, www.vsi-trsb.net/ 

publications/phillips-e.htm#13#13). 

3. The Canadian House of Commons estimates that the public sector contracted 

$5.2 billion worth of services in 1992–1993 (Canadian House of Commons 

1994). The Treasury Board Secretariat estimated that 7% of this is contracts with 

voluntary organizations for specified professional services (Treasury Board 

Secretariat 2001). 

4. The VSR represents a cross-cutting community of leaders whose objective is to 

bring forth a vision and action plan for the sector as a whole. It is composed of 

organizations: the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, the Canadian Centre for 

Philanthropy, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the Canadian Council for 

International Cooperation, The Canadian Council on Social Development, the 

201



Canadian Environmental Network, the Canadian Parks/Recreation Association, 

Community Foundations of Canada, Health Charities Council of Canada, the 

Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations, United Way of Canada/Centraide 

Canada, Volunteer Canada, and later they were joined by a representative of the 

faith communities. See http://www.vsr-trsb.net/main-e.html. 

5. The VSI is a joint initiative bringing together government and voluntary sector 

representatives to develop projects around five key priority areas of the 

relationship: the development of an Accord, Information Technology and 

Information Management, Public Awareness, Capacity, and Regulatory Issues. 

6. See Web site www.vsi-isbc.com. 

7. This shift is not unique to Canada, as a number of industrialized countries such as 

the UK, New Zealand and Australia have also recently embarked on initiatives to 

encourage evidence-based policy-making in the voluntary sector (Solesbury 

2001; Davies and MacDonald 1998; Oakley 1998). 

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203

Review Essay 

Essai critique

Donna Patrick 

Understanding Canada through a Linguistic Lens: 

French, English and Aboriginal Realities in an 

English-dominant World 

Kaskens, Anne-Marie. A Beginning Look at Canada. Second Edition. 

Saint-Laurent: Pearson Longman, 2003. 

Larrivée, Pierre, ed. Linguistic Conflict and Language Laws: Understanding 

the Quebec Question. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK/New York: Palgrave 

Macmillan, 2003. 

Morris, Michael, ed. Les politiques linguistiques canadiennes: approches 

comparées. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. 

This past summer, the failure rate of Canadians taking a 2005 Canada Day 

quiz made headlines in the Canadian print and broadcast media. While this 

news focused on Canadians’ lack of knowledge about specific historical 

facts about Canada, it could be argued that such knowledge is not crucial 

either for “understanding” Canada or for assessing contemporary Canadian 

issues, policies and initiatives. This leads us to ask what kind of knowledge 

might be crucial. One kind, arguably, is knowledge both of language issues 

in Canada and of the ideologies and discourses that construct them. This is 

because such issues may well be at the core of what shapes and 

“distinguishes” Canada as a nation in an increasingly post-national, 

globalized world. What is also important for understanding Canada are the 

social, political and economic relations among its different social and 

linguistic groups. This includes an understanding of the rights of citizens in 

contemporary nation-states and of the policies and laws that regulate the 

conflicts associated with these rights (Asad 2003). 

This review essay examines three books that discuss language issues: 

Linguistic Conflict and Language Laws: Understanding the Quebec 

Question, edited by Pierre Larrivée (2003); Les politiques linguistiques 

canadiennes: approches comparées, edited by Michael Morris (2003); and 

A Beginning Look at Canada, written by Anne-Marie Kaskens. The first 

two books deal specifically with language rights, laws and policies in 

Canada, with a focus on francophone and anglophone language issues, and 

thus offer a useful starting point for the subject of linguistic and cultural 

pluralism in Canada. The third text is a very general introduction to Canada, 

intended for children or adults with basic English-language skills. My main 


30, 2004



goal in bringing these three rather different books together is to consider 

how a critical discussion of language issues, as represented by the first two 

books, can inform introductory (or other) texts about Canada, as 

represented by the third. The contribution I have in mind includes an 

understanding not only of language policies, laws and conflicts, but also of 

the ways in which, and the reasons why, ethnocultural and linguistic issues 

are “managed” in contemporary Canada (through rights, policies and laws) 

and how this affects the lived political and social realities of people. 

Since I cannot in this short review essay do full justice to the complexity 

of language issues in Canada, I will instead identify some key points that 

emerge from the books under review regarding language policy in Quebec 

and Canada and the historical context in which these policies have been 

embedded. These will be discussed in terms of three themes: (1) the 

importance of historical analysis, particularly from francophone, 

Aboriginal and other minority perspectives, for an understanding of 

contemporary language conflicts and political responses; (2) the usefulness 

(despite its pitfalls) of comparative analysis; and (3) the prominence of the 

goal of greater social justice in Canadian language politics and policies. 

The detailed historical analysis offered by many of the chapters in the 

Larrivée and Morris volumes highlight the importance of historical context 

for an understanding of how and why French has persisted in Quebec. These 

chapters offer a wide range of historical analyses and methods: statistical 

analyses of survey and census data (Michel Paillé and Charles Castonguay 

in Morris); discussion of language policy in Canada, Ontario and Quebec 

(C. Michael MacMillan, Marc Chevrier and Pierre Larrivée in Larrivée; 

Normand Labrie, Jacques Maurais and Louise Lafontaine in Morris); and 

historical overviews of language planning theory and its paradigms and 

typologies, in Colin H. Williams, and in Jean-Phillippe Warren’s history of 

French in Quebec (both in Larrivée). In these chapters, historical facts are 

presented and particular events or policies (and their fallout) are 

highlighted. What these chapters collectively suggest is that a range of 

historical perspectives and interpretations are necessary for understanding 

the complexity of English-French relations in Canada. 

In brief, understanding how and why French has survived in Quebec 

involves an awareness of the specific socio-historical, political and 

economic circumstances of Quebec, the political goals of Canada and 

Quebec and the series of language rights and policies put in place. All of this 

has led to the development of Quebec’s language laws, which have always 

enjoyed strong support among Québécois despite the controversies they 

have brought (Levine 1990; Heller 1999). 

The specific political and economic context that has shaped 

Quebec-Canada relations can be traced to the Paris Treaty of 1763, when 

France turned Quebec over to England after the 1759 conquest. But events 

208

Understanding Canada through a Linguistic Lens: French, English and 

Aboriginal Realities in an English-dominant World 

from the time of this treaty to the Constitution of 1867, when the use of 

French and English were entrenched in Canadian courts of law, make it 

clear that Canadian political and economic arrangements have not been 

isolated from global forces. This can be seen, for example, in the 

political-historical circumstances of the Quebec Act of 1774, drafted just 

before the American Revolution of 1776 when the British feared that 

Quebec might be annexed to the emerging independent American republic. 

At the time, these fears seemed legitimate, especially given the fact that in 

1764, before the large influx of British and the American loyalist 

immigrants, there were 300 English speakers and 65,000 French in the 

province of Quebec. For Quebec, being “conquered” after existing as a 

relatively independent French colony for about two and a half centuries 

resulted in a particularly unstable situation; an offer from the “anti-British” 

republic to the south might have been tempting. To eliminate this 

possibility, the British drafted the Quebec Act, which “restored the French 

civil laws, the seigniorial regime and the rights of the Catholic church” 

(Warren qtd. in Larrivée, 63). This system consolidated the power of a 

propertied and clerical francophone elite, which, to a certain extent, 

accommodated English power and the entrenched social structure in order 

to persist. Meanwhile, the majority of the French-speaking population 

remained in the occupations on which Canada’s economy has been largely 

based, including forestry, pulp and paper, textiles, mining and farming. 

Asociolinguistic rule of thumb is that when language becomes a political 

issue there is more at stake than mere symbolism or the forms in which one 

communicates. Language became a specific political “problem” with the 

1838 Durham Report, which was commissioned after the failed uprising of 

Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Patriot Party in 1837–38 (which also had 

the support of some of the English of Upper Canada). Durham framed this 

colonial “problem,” which included both French and English resistance to 

repressive colonial structures, in terms of a language “problem,” in which 

French and English were conceived as two distinct “races” and these 

“racial” barriers were preventing the modernization and “development” of 

French-speaking Quebec. Durham’s solution was to assimilate the French 

into English society (Warren qtd. in Larrivée, 67; Chevrier qtd. in Larrivée, 

120); however, the “problems” or “barriers” that he perceived are probably 

best understood as political and economic ones. The seigneurial system, the 

Church elite and the ideology dominant in Quebec at the time, which linked 

the French language to faith and romantic nationalism, served to keep the 

French-speaking population relatively isolated. For the English elite, who 

wished to expand their economic power farther into Quebec, the seigneurial 

system was a problem since property held by the seigneurs could not be sold 

privately. Even after the seigneurial system was abolished in 1854, its last 

vestiges did not disappear until a century later. Durham’s solution was 

doomed to failure, given both the complexity of the situation and the 

209



resistance in Upper and Lower Canada to any changes to the broader 

political and economic arrangements in place at the time. 

Broader political and economic forces can also be seen to figure in the 

language conflicts that gave rise to the policy solutions reflected in official 

Canadian bilingualism and Quebec unilingualism. Prior to 1867, French 

and English were both well established and used in official domains. The 

Constitution of 1867 simply confirmed this practice of adopting “laws in 

French and in English” and in guaranteeing “parliamentarians, judges, 

litigants and parties to a legal proceeding the right to use both languages” 

(Chevrier qtd. in Larrivée, 121). After World War II, however, there was a 

significant shift in political and economic conditions and, in turn, in power 

relations in Quebec and Canada. As Warren states, “more than ever before 

Quebecers were willing to join the consumer society” and increase their 

household incomes and purchasing power like other Canadians at the time. 

During this period of great political, social and cultural change known as the 

Quiet Revolution, francophone Quebec was characterized by significant 

urbanization as well as a shift away from an identity defined by the Church 

and toward one defined by politics and a desire for socio-economic 

advancement. Accompanying these social, cultural and economic shifts 

was a new Quebec territorial nationalism, which brought new language 

policies and laws, increasing the importance of language in political and 

cultural discourse. 

Significantly, however, as Larrivée notes in his chapter on anglophones 

and allophones in Quebec, the urbanization of francophones in cities such 

as Montreal did little to unite English and French. This was not only because 

of their geographical separation but also because of certain economic 

developments, which led to a rise in the economic importance of Toronto 

and a decline in the importance of Montreal. These developments included 

the opening of the Saint-Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which provided a direct 

link between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes and therefore reduced 

the importance of Montreal’s harbour, and the signing of the 1965 free trade 

agreement between the United States and Canada related to the automotive 

industry, known as the Auto Pact, which led to the movement of capital and 

industry to southern Ontario, closer to the American automobile 

manufacturing centres of the Great Lakes. In Canada, this resulted in a 

movement of financial and many other industries from Montreal to 

Toronto. And as Heller (1999, 153) points out, this “caused many members 

of the English-speaking Montreal financial elite to move west, leaving a 

vacuum at the management level for the regional market of Quebec.” These 

social and economic factors arguably left Quebec even more “distinct” 

from the rest of Canada than it had been previously. This, together with the 

postwar “rights revolution” and the “politics of recognition” for 

non-dominant social groups, can be seen to have paved the way for the 

rather different legislation on language rights and usage in particular 

210



institutional domains that are currently found in Quebec and Canada, and 

for the “territorial” and “personal” language rights that characterize 

Quebec and the rest of Canada, respectively. 

These developments give rise to all kinds of questions, including what 

different kinds of language rights exist, what they mean for the people who 

have them, and why they are there in the first place, and, in the Canadian 

context, what real effects they have had on francophone communities 

outside of Quebec and anglophone communities in Quebec. As many of the 

contributions in Larrivée and Morris attest, French remains strong in 

Quebec, although the federal policy of official bilingualism has not been as 

successful in promoting French outside of Quebec—except in the case of 

New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province (see Castonguay 

qtd. in Morris, 204). As such it is tempting, in this era of ethnic and linguistic 

conflict on the one hand, and of concern for endangered languages on the 

other, to look to Canada and Quebec and compare their situations with those 

of other minority or “endangered” languages. Yet we need to be wary of 

facile comparisons with regard to language issues. This is because, as 

mentioned above, the political and economic arrangements and 

demographic trends in colonial Canada gave rise to specific historical 

circumstances and political outcomes, which do not obviously generalize 

to other contexts. 

Jacques Maurais (in Morris) makes precisely this point in arguing 

against simplistic comparisons of Quebec and Canada with language 

conflicts and ‘solutions” elsewhere, such as in the United States. There, the 

English-Only movement became prominent in the 1990s, primarily as a 

reaction to increasing numbers of Spanish speakers. The English-Only 

movement constitutes a discourse that is embedded in the eighteenthcentury 

nationalist ideology of “one language, one culture, and one nation” 

and centres on the notion of one language serving to unify a strong, modern 

nation-state. Maurais points to a number of ideological misconceptions and 

false comparisons with Quebec in the American English-Only discourse. 

Among these is a false comparison of Quebec’s Bill 101, La Charte de la 

langue française, and the American English-only policies, which have 

been put in place in a number of states to prohibit the use of languages other 

than English. As Maurais notes, Bill 101 was adopted out of a desire to 

protect French in a sea of North American English. What is more, it was 

adopted in a context of “correcting the historical injustices” experienced by 

the francophone majority in Quebec, as detailed in the Royal Commission 

on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–1969). These injustices were 

reflected in, for example, the socio-economic stratification of francophones 

in Canada, who in Quebec itself ranked twelfth out of fourteen main 

ethnic groups in terms of income, ahead only of recent Italian immigrants 

and Aboriginal peoples (see Maurais qtd. in Morris, 63). Thus, while 

French and Aboriginal languages in Canada are indeed threatened by the 

national and international power of English, the power associated with 

211



English means that it is not threatened in the same way that French and other 

less globally powerful languages are; fears that English is endangered, as 

reflected in the American English-Only movement, seem to be fears about 

something else. 

This asymmetry between French and English in Canada and 

internationally means that—despite the calls for equal recognition of 

groups that are part of a liberal democracy and the “official language” 

discourse in Canada, which maintains that French and English are equal and 

should be treated as such—the English linguistic minority in Quebec is not 

in the same position as the French linguistic minority outside of Quebec, as 

many contributors to the Larrivée and Morris volumes observe. Inevitably, 

the tension between language rights discourse and the greater power of 

English has brought language conflicts into the courts, with francophones 

outside Quebec demanding schooling in their language, and anglophones 

inside Quebec arguing that their rights have been infringed on under Bill 

101, such cases having equal claim to attention under federal law. 

Such issues of language rights, education and social justice are, of 

course, relevant not just to French-English relations but also to the situation 

of Aboriginal, immigrant and other minority groups in Canada. This is 

particularly true given that multiple and contingent social identities— 

ethnic, linguistic, gendered, national, regional and so forth—are very much 

part of the complex fabric of Canadian society. Although there is certainly 

much more to be said about language and French-English relations in 

Canada, what should nevertheless be clear from the discussion so far is the 

necessity of understanding the broader historical, political and economic 

context of Canada if we are to understand its contemporary social 

dynamics. 

This brings me finally to Anne-Marie Kaskens’text, ABeginning Look at 

Canada. This text interested me in particular because of my experiences 

teaching English as a Second and Foreign Language in the 1980s, and 

continued interest in teaching material relevant to students’lives. Kaskens’ 

text has 70 readings, designed for elementary, high-school or adult 

students, with the aim of providing “basic knowledge” and “essential facts” 

about Canada through “an introductory overview of [its] geography, 

history, people and government” (Kaskens, vi). 

While this book does provide considerable information about Canada, it 

is disappointingly reticent on the topics of language, ethnicity and diversity. 

And it makes little attempt to introduce readers to the complexity of French, 

English, and Aboriginal relations in Canada. Granting the introductory 

nature of this book, these lacunae are still surprising given both Kaskens’ 

general aim and the categories into which she has organized her readings, 

which provide excellent opportunities for offering such material. 

212



For example, the second section of the book, on “people,” might easily 

have included more material on diversity and ethnic relations—especially 

in the subsections “Who are Canadians?” “Immigrants to Canada” and the 

“Languages Canadians speak” (56-62). The section does mention, for 

example, that the French and the British were the first Europeans to settle in 

Canada, that English and French are official languages and that Canada is 

bilingual, with government services and product labels using both 

languages, and some statistics are given on the most common first 

languages in Canada, gathered from the 2001 Census. There is also some 

discussion of immigration and where people are from. Yet, these 

subsections do not even mention Quebec let alone relations among the 

various ethnic groups in Canada. 

Happily, the section on “history” deals more with the French in Canada 

and with linguistic and cultural pluralism. The first unit presents some facts 

about Aboriginal peoples, the second turns to New France and the third to 

British Rule. Here, the facts selected by the author become interesting, as 

she discusses the motivation behind the conquest of 1759 (which, oddly, is 

not actually mentioned): 

… thirteen parts of the eastern United States were colonies of 

Britain. They were loosely called the thirteen colonies. In the 

1700’s, Britain wanted to own colonies in Canada too… . France 

and England both wanted to own parts of Canada. They went to 

war. In 1763, England won the war (84). 

Since the text here is a bit more complex, one might wonder why the 

author has not provided more information about the Quebec Act beyond the 

fact that “the French people wanted to keep their language and customs. The 

British government agreed. Alaw called the Quebec Act described how the 

French people’s way of life would be protected” (84). At this point in the 

book, however, Quebec simply drops out of sight and is not mentioned 

again, except as a province like any other. 

For a book called A Beginning Look at Canada, the Quebec and 

French-Canadian reality of this country seems conspicuously absent. Also 

absent is anything political or contemporary about Aboriginal peoples. 

Here, the issue of contact, treaties, the Indian Act, land claims, 

contemporary Aboriginal cultural and social achievements come to mind. 

Considering that we are talking about “seventy texts” in a book “about 

geography, people, history, and government,” the substantial lack of 

discussion of the linguistic, social and political issues that have shaped 

Canada suggests that much about the country has been overlooked, even in 

what is meant as only a first look at it. 

If Kaskens’ text is at all representative of introductory texts about 

Canada, then what is indicated by my juxtaposition of it with scholarly texts 

is that many issues taken by scholars to be central to an understanding of the 

213



country’s linguistic and cultural issues are still far away from the 

layperson’s sense of what is important to know about the country. This is 

rather troubling, since there are many open questions related to the 

management of linguistic and cultural diversity in Canada, and the answers 

to these questions will require far more than knowledge of names and dates. 

For example, serious discussion of whether the Official Languages Act 

should be abolished, as advocated in Samuels’ (2002) Toward a Canadian 

Languages Act, requires an understanding of language domination, 

discrimination and injustice and of the mechanisms that have been put in 

place to redress these injustices. Recognition of the complexity in Canada’s 

language conflicts, policies and laws is a good place to start such 

discussion. 

References 

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. 

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

Blommaert, Jan (ed.). 1999. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin/New York: 

Mouton de Gruyter. 

Cardinal, Linda. 1999. “Linguistic Rights, Minority Rights and National Rights: Some 

Clarifications.” Inroads 8: 77–86. 

Clift, Dominique and Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos. 1979. Le fait anglais au Québec. 

Montréal: Libre Expression (1980, translated as The English Fact in Quebec, 

McGill-Queen’s University Press). 

Crawford, James. 2000. At War with Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of 

Anxiety. Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney: Multilingual Matters. 

———. 1992. Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only. 

Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 

Edwards, John (ed.). 1998. Language in Canada. Cambridge UK: Cambridge 


Heller, Monica. 1999. “Heated Language in a Cold Climate.” In Jan Blommaert (ed.) 

Language Ideological Debates. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 143–70. 

Herriman, Michael and Barbara Burnaby. 1996. Language Policies in English- 

Dominant Countries: Six Case Studies. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. 

Levine, Marc V. 1990. The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social 

Change in a Bilingual City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Marsh, James H. (editor-in-chief). 1999. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Toronto: 

McClelland & Stewart. 

Maurais, Jacques (ed.). 1992. Les langues autochtones du Québec. Conseil de la langue 

française. Québec: Publications du Québec (1996, translated as Quebec’s 

Aboriginal Languages: History, Planning, Development, Clevedon, UK: 

Multilingual Matters). 

Porter, John. 1965. The Vertical Mosaic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Ricento, Thomas and Barbara Burnaby (eds.). 1998. Language and Politics in the 

United States and Canada: Myths and Realities.Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum. 

Samuels, H. Raymond II. 2002. Toward a Canadian Languages Act: Rejuvenating the 

Official Languages Act. Ottawa: The Agora Cosmopolitan. 

Taylor, Charles. 1992. “Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition.’” In C. 

Taylor and A. Guttman (eds.) Multiculturalism and the the Politics of 

Recognition. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 25–74. 

214

Authors / Auteurs 

Jesse ARCHIBALD-BARBER, PhD Candidate, Graduate English, 

University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A1. 

Kathleen BUDDLE, Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department, 

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg (Manitoba) R3T 5V5. 

Michelle DAVELUY, Associate Professor, Department of 

Anthropology, University of Alberta, 13-15 Tory Building, 

Edmonton (Alberta) T6G 2H4. 

Emily GILBERT, PhD, Program in Canadian Studies and 

Department of Geography, University College, University of 

Toronto, 15 King’s College Circle, Toronto (Ontario) M5S 3H7. 

Lynette HUNTER, Professor of History of Rhetoric and 

Performance, University of California, Davis, 222 Wright, 

Davis, CA 95616 USA. 

Catherine KHORDOC, professeure adjointe, Département de 

français, Université Carleton, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa 

(Ontario) K1S 5B6. 

Jane KOUSTAS, Professor, Modern Languages/Cultures, Brock 

University, 500 Glendridge Avenue, St. Catharines (Ontario) 

L2S 3A1. 

Rachel LAFOREST, Professor, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s 

University, Kingston (Ontario) K7L 3N6. 

Donna PATRICK, Associate Professor, Canadian Studies, 

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, DT 1221, 1125 

Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Ottawa (Ontario) K1S 

5B6. 


30, 2004

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES 

Call for Open Topic Articles 

The Editorial Board of the IJCS has decided to broaden the format of the 

Journal. While each future issue of the IJCS will include a set of articles 

addressing a given theme, as in the past, it will also include several articles 

that do not do so. Beyond heightening the general interest of each issue, this 

change should also facilitate participation in the Journal by the international 

community of Canadianists. 

Accordingly, the Editorial Board welcomes manuscripts on any topic in the 

study of Canada. As in the past, all submissions must undergo peer review. 

Final decisions regarding publication are made by the Editorial Board. 

Often, accepted articles need to undergo some revision. The IJCS 

undertakes that upon receiving a satisfactorily revised version of a 

submission that it has accepted for publication, it will make every effort to 

ensure that the article appears in the next regular issue of the Journal. 

Please forward paper and abstract (one hundred words) to the IJCS at the 

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6K7. Fax: (613) 789-7830; e-mail: gleclair@iccs-ciec.ca. 

REVUE INTERNATIONALE D’ÉTUDES CANADIENNES 

Soumission d’articles hors-thèmes 

La Revue internationale d’études canadiennes a adopté une politique visant 

à modifier quelque peu son format. En effet, la Revue continuera à offrir une 

série d’articles portant sur un thème retenu, mais dorénavant elle publiera 

aussi des articles hors-thèmes. 

Le Comité de rédaction examinera donc toute soumission qui porte sur un 

sujet relié aux études canadiennes indépendamment du thème retenu. Bien 

entendu comme toute soumission, celle-ci fera l’objet d’une évaluation par 

pairs. La décision finale concernant la publication d’un texte est rendue par 

le Comité de rédaction. Une décision d’accepter de publier un texte est 

souvent accompagnée d’une demande de révision. Une fois qu’elle aura 

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la mesure du possible, d’inclure cet article dans le numéro suivant la date 

d’acceptation finale. 

S.v.p. faire parvenir votre texte et un résumé (100 mots maximum) au 

Secrétariat de la RIÉC : 250, avenue City Centre, bureau 303, Ottawa, Canada, 

K1R 6K7. Téléc. : (613) 789-7830; courriel : gleclair@iccs-ciec.ca.


Call for Papers 

The Prairies: Alienated or Dominant? 

(Volume 33, 2006) 

In the classic The Canadian Prairies (1984), Gerald Friesen quotes an 

excerpt from a letter written by a Prairie farm mother to Prime Minister R. 

B. Bennett in 1935. The letter shows the courage and resiliency of Prairie 

farmers during the 1930s drought and Depression. Impressed by that 

testimony and by numerous messages from Prairies farmers aired on CBC 

radio during those years (which are still available through the CBC 

archives), some saw in the determination of the Prairie farmers in the 1930s 

the ‘true’ Canadian values of courage, faith and optimism. 

However, people in the Prairies feel, even today, alienated from political 

power in Canada or by the process of decision-making perceived to be in 

Central Canada. In Canada, this feeling is referred to the “alienation” of the 

West. Yet, the Prairies have produced many of Canada’s best poets, short 

fiction writers, dramatists, novelists, singers, artists and architects. It is in 

the Prairies that the most important national parks in Canada were 

conceived. 

On the political spectrum, Canada since the 1930s has been defined by a 

center-left agenda that originated in Saskatchewan, home of Tommy 

Douglas, and by Medicare, the result of the vision of Justice Emmett Hall 

also from Saskatchewan who articulated in the 1960s the “Canadian” vision 

of Healthcare. Over the past two decades, the challenge to the social 

democratic vision of Canada and its redefinition has come from the 

“Calgary School,” which invokes a vision first articulated by former 

Albertan premier Ernest Manning in the late 1960s based on a religious 

form of populism. After all, perhaps far from being “alienated,” the Prairies 

seem to be the norm, if not the source of inspiration to major ideological and 

cultural shifts affecting all of Canada. 

Kindly submit your paper (20-30 pages), along with an abstract of 100 

words or less, by October 15, 2005 to the Guy Leclair, Managing Editor, 

IJCS, 250 City Centre, S-303, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1R 6K7. Tel.: 

(613) 789-7834. Fax: [1] (613) 789-7830. E-mail:gleclair@iccs-ciec.ca.


Appel de textes 

Les Prairies : aliénées ou dominantes? 

(Volume 33, 2006) 

Dans l’œuvre classique The Canadian Prairies (1984), Gerald Friesen cite 

un extrait d’une lettre rédigée par une fermière des Prairies au premier 

ministre R. B. Bennett en 1935. La lettre de cette mère de famille illustre le 

courage et la résistance des fermiers des Prairies pendant la période de 

sécheresse et de Dépression des années 1930. Bien des gens, impressionnés 

par ce témoignage et par d’autres messages de fermiers des Prairies lus sur 

les ondes de la radio CBC au cours de ces années (et qui sont encore 

disponibles dans les archives de la CBC), ont perçu dans la détermination 

des fermiers des Prairies dans les années 1930 les « vraies » valeurs 

canadiennes : le courage, la foi et l’optimisme. 

Par contre, les habitants des Prairies se sentent encore aujourd’hui détachés 

du pouvoir politique au Canada ou du processus décisionnel qu’ils 

associent au Canada central. D’ailleurs, au Canada, ce sentiment est connu 

sous le nom d’ « aliénation » de l’Ouest. Pourtant, les Prairies ont produit 

certains des plus grands poètes, nouvellistes, dramaturges, romanciers, 

chanteurs, artistes et architectes du Canada. C’est dans les Prairies que les 

parcs nationaux les plus importants ont été conçus. 

Dans le domaine de la politique, certains aspects importants du Canada 

d’aujourd’hui ont été élaborés depuis les années 1930 à partir de principes 

de centre-gauche dont plusieurs situent l’origine en Saskatchewan, 

province de Tommy Douglas. Notamment le régime d’assurance-maladie, 

mis en place après les rapports du juge Emmett Hall (lui aussi originaire de 

la Saskatchewan), aurait contribué dans la seconde moitié du 20e siècle à 

forger une identité typiquement canadienne. Par contre, au cours des deux 

dernières décennies, l’opposition à la vision sociale démocratique du 

Canada et à sa redéfinition est venue de l’ « école de Calgary » qui a repris 

récemment un projet d’abord élaboré par l’ancien Premier ministre 

albertain Ernest Manning vers la fin des années 1960 et inspiré par une 

forme religieuse de populisme. Somme toute, loin d’être « aliénées », les 

Prairies semblent être la norme sinon la source d’inspiration pour de grands 

changements idéologiques et culturels qui touchent tout le Canada. 

La RIÉC vous invite à soumettre un texte (20 à 30 pages) ainsi qu’un résumé 

(maximum 100 mots) d’ici le 15 septembre 2005 au secrétariat de la Revue 

internationale d’études canadiennes, 75, rue Albert, S-908, Ottawa, 

Canada, K1P 5E7. Tél. : (613) 789-7834; télécopieur : (613) 789-7830; 

courriel : gleclair@iccs-ciec.ca.



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