French-Canadian
My Dad was 100% French-Canadian. He never called himself that, but that’s what he was: his entire ancestry came from over 300 years in what he used to call “lower Canada”, which is today’s Quebec.
Recently a Canadian cousin, originally from Saskatchewan and most of his adult life in Montreal, and I, had a back and forth about the matter of persons of French in America ancestry call themselves. With his permission, I’m basically simply going to replay the two or three e-mails discussing the topic. To begin, but not further elaborated on here, I had written about Judson LaMoure, an illustrious ND pioneer who spent much of his life as a merchant in the border town of Neche ND, and grew up in an English speaking section of Quebec. The article about LaMoure is here, if you’re interested.
The dialogue (all on Nov. 18, 2024):
from Remi: The descendants of the French colonists who settled in the St Lawrence River Valley called themselves Canadiens by 1700. Almost all the French speaking Canadians who settled in the American Midwest called themselves Canadiens. Others called them French Canadians. When my grandmother spoke French, she referred to French Canadians as Canadiens, including her relatives in the USA. Until the British invasion the Acadians considered themselves French, not Canadien. They had a separate identity and dialect. When some of them came to Lower Canada, they were rapidly assimilated by the Canadiens and completely lost their Acadian identity. I am sure that the Acadians who settled in Louisiana first called themselves Acadians. I think that almost all Métis in the West are descendants of Canadiens. There are Métis in the Maritime provinces who are descendants of Acadians. There are pockets of Acadians in Maine who still speak French. Today French Canadian usually refers to Francophones in Canada like me, born outside of Quebec who are descendants of Canadiens. I suppose that today someone outside of Canada could call Quebecois and Acadians French Canadian (but not the hundreds of thousands of Francophones from Europe, Haiti and Africa who live mainly in Montreal). I see that some of the descendants of Canadiens in the United States call themselves French Canadian. Jacques Kerouac, who only learned English when he went to school called himself a Canadien Français, but his mother called herself a Canadienne.
from Dick: As I think I told you, my 23andMe DNA declares me 100% German&French& Netherlands, Northwest European. When I was first getting at my project, I hoped I’d have some indigenous blood. You’ve said I do, and I’m glad, but apparently it’s just a touch back to the early 1600s, 14 or more generations back. I’ll have to drag out my neanderthal percentage, whatever that means: (It says I have more than 89% of the total sample, less than 2%, 307 variants. Do I get a prize!?) Long and short, I’m a white man, which doesn’t make me particularly proud these days.
from Remi: Mine is mostly French and German and 2 per cent indigenous. By the way, I have never heard of an Acadian calling themselve French Canadian. When someone asked about my nationality at school, I said half French and half German. For a very long time the anglophones considered Canadian to be associated only with the “dirty French Canadians”. No one called themselves Canadian until the Second World War except French Canadians. When they buried soldiers in Europe someone thought, perhaps they should be called Canadians and not British subjects. The first person to get a passport with citizenship referred to as Canadian was the Prime Minister of Canada in 1946. My grandmother called French Canadians Canadiens in both English and French.
from Dick: Until I started doing Chez Nous, I never heard Dad refer to himself or any of his relatives as French. He would mention Lower Canada and not much else. A very likely reason was that he had to repeat first grade because he couldn’t speak English and this was in Grafton. It was humiliating. He was fond of telling the story of when Grandma and Grandpa went to visit relatives in Quebec in 1925, and Grandpa, who was last to migrate in 1894, greeted his brother in French. His brother said, in French, “this man cannot be my brother. He does not speak French!” For some reason, Dad had real affection for William Henry Drummond’s book “The Habitant”, especially the story “How Bateese Came Home”. I found the book in the UofMinnesota Library and reprinted that story in ChezNous. https://thoughtstowardsabetterworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CN-NVJ-505-544020.pdf scroll down to page 537.
from Remi: Very interesting. I read some of your dad’s stories. We read Drummond in school but I didn’t like him because I thought he made fun of French Canadians – our huge families and happy go lucky simple spirit. I am curious about your grandfather. If his son, your father could not speak English until he went to school (like my father), then surely your grandfather spoke French when he met his brother.
from Dick: I think I forgot to comment about Grandpa and the French language.
The Conversation continued, Nov. 21:
from Remi: The term ‘Franco Americain’ was first used by the Canadien elite in New England in 1901 as an inclusive term to unite Canadiens and Acadians in the U.S. Simple Canadiens never used this term. David Vermette wrote he never heard this term in his youth. See his article ‘Where did the term Franco American come from’. Since there were no Acadians in the Mid West there was no need for this term. ‘Franco American’ came into general use when people no longer spoke French. Before that they were always ‘Canadien’.
Around 1700 the descendants of the French colonists in the St. Lawrence Valley began calling themselves Canadien, meaning French people who live in America. In 1760 when English American colonists invaded Canada many Canadiens shared their hatred of the British and some joined them in their revolutionary fight south of the border. The term French Canadian was a racist term coined by Lord Durham when he came to Canada in 1839 to make a report on the Patriotes and all of the people of Lower Canada who had failed in their attempt to create a French speaking republic in America. He called them “a people with no literature and no history” who must be assimilated.
Canadiens immigrants to the U.S. were unique because they thought of themselves as American before they came. “The French Canadian is as American as someone born in Boston” said civil war hero Edmond Mallet. George Kenngott, who edited a book on Lowell Mass. wrote “The French Canadians objected to being called ‘foreigners, and counted themselves as Americans”. The American politician Henry Cabot Lodge, in a speech on immigration said “the French of Canada are one of the oldest settlements on this continent. They have been in a broad sense, Americans for generations, and their coming to the United States is merely a movement across an imaginary line from one part of America to another.”
I have spoken to Acadians in the Maritime provinces, the Magdalen Islands and Cajuns in Louisiana. They all speak with an identical accent and in an identical manner.
In the broad sense of the term Franco American includes not just US Americans but everyone in Canada also, since they are
Americans too.
from Dick: This is all very interesting to me.
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