Events

 

Jay Gitlin, Associate Director of the Lamar Center and Lecturer in History, will deliver the keynote address at 4:30 PM on Friday, September 11 in 211 Hall of Graduate Studies

The symposium will continue on Saturday, September 12 with two panels.

both to be held in 211 HGS, 320 York Street:

9:30 AM to 11:00 AM

The History of French North America: A Reassessment   New France: Allan Greer, McGill University    Modern Québec: Nicole Neatby, St. Mary’s University, Halifax   Louisiana: Carl A. Brasseaux, University of Louisiana at Lafayette 

11:15 AM to 12:45 AM

The French Heritage of Louisiana   The French Civilian Legal Tradition: James A. Babst, Tulane U. School of Law and Loyola University, New Orleans   Music: Ryan A. Brasseaux, Yale University   Cajun Cuisine: Carl A. Brasseaux, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The symposium will conclude with a gumbo lunch in the Hall of Graduate Studies

Short biographical sketches of the men and women on the Lamar Center postcard

(compiled by Jay Gitlin)

Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000) began his public career as the founder and editor of Cité Libre, a journal dedicated to intellectual dialogue and political opposition to the authoritarian regime of Québec premier, Maurice Duplessis, known widely as Le Chef.  Trudeau had studied at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a French Jesuit academy, where he nurtured a passion to alleviate the political and economic oppression of French Canada.  After having received a law degree at the Université du Montréal in 1943, he continued his graduate studies in political economy at Harvard and the London School of Economics. Influenced by Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Harold Laski, Trudeau developed a political ideology that emphasized the role of the state in pursuing social justice and supporting personal freedoms. As Lester Pearson’s Minister of Justice, he introduced a legal omnibus bill that decriminalized homosexuality, liberalized divorce laws, and legalized abortion and contraception.  Succeeding Pearson as head of Canada’s Liberal Party, Trudeau was elected Prime Minister and served from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984.  Trudeau was a larger-than-life political leader. In some ways similar to JFK in the United States, Trudeau rode the wave of “Trudeaumania” and ushered in the modern liberal nation that most Canadians continue to regard today with great pride.  Ironically, Trudeau’s legacy is contested in Québec, where his fierce opposition to Québec nationalism and his free-market approach to cultural and linguistic survival and emphasis on individual rights over the rights of collectivities has been seen as detrimental to the future of a francophone environment, despite his support of the Official Languages Act of 1969.

Henri Bourassa (1868-1952), the grandson of reformer Louis-Joseph Papineau (one of the political leaders of the Rebellion of 1837 in Lower Canada), was educated at the École polytechnique in Montréal and Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He began his political life as a protégé of Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier, the first French Canadian to serve as Prime Minister. He broke with Laurier over Canada’s role in supporting Great Britain’s Second Boer War in 1899.  Bourassa became one of the world’s most articulate critics of imperialism, arguing that working-class Englishmen in the U.K. and minorities abroad had nothing to gain from the military ventures sponsored by ruling elites.  Throughout his life, he supported Canadian autonomy in foreign policy and had a consistent vision of a Canadian nation that would be a welcoming home to both anglophone and francophone cultural communities.  In promoting such a vision in this period (1890s to 1930s), Bourassa ran afoul of what Charles Dickens called the “wild and rabid Toryism” of Ontario that promoted closer ties with the U.K. under the slogan “One Flag, One Fleet, One Throne.”  Bourassa founded Le Devoir in 1910, serving as its editor for over two decades. That newspaper remains Québec’s paper of record today.  A staunch Catholic and social conservative, Bourassa fiercely defended the cultural and linguistic rights of French Canadians. He did so, however, as a Canadian nationalist and opposed the idea of Québec as a separate nation.

Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) or Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born in New Orleans in the Creole neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny. His parents—Edward Lamothe or LaMothe and Louise Monette-- were both so-called Creoles of color, as was his godmother, Eulalie Hécaud. The name Morton likely came from his stepfather, William Mouton, a laborer born near Lafayette, Louisiana. His career as a brilliant pianist and the self-proclaimed “Father of Jazz” is well known.  His real name and the Creole birth and francophone environment of so many early jazz pioneers is much less familiar to even jazz aficionados. Their numbers included Duke Ellington’s clarinetist Barney Bigard, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and trombonist Kid Ory who recorded vocals in French. One early jazzman, George Lewis, christened Joseph Francis Zenon, wrote in his autobiography that his mother could speak French, German, Spanish, and a few words of Senegalese.  The linguistic polyphony of New Orleans may well have contributed to the shape of the music. Certainly, the musical training of many of these musicians owed a great deal to the French Creole heritage of the city. By the 1830s, the Creoles of color had formed a hundred-member Philharmonic Society. One Creole of color, violinist Edmond Dédé, was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire and later became a conductor at Bordeaux. He died in Paris in 1903.

Yvonne Chouteau (1929-), one of several celebrated Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma (including Maria Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Marjorie Tallchief), was raised in the small town of Vinita. Yvonne is the great, great, great granddaughter of Pierre Chouteau, Sr.--celebrated fur trader and a member of the powerful Chouteau extended family who dominated the antebellum American West and established the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City. She proudly described her “Chouteau famille” in a forward to a brief history of the Oklahoma branch of the family. A métis woman of French and Shawnee ancestry, Yvonne Chouteau’s love of music may have been inspired by her grandfather Edmond, who taught the violin and piano in Vinita for thirty years. Yvonne Chouteau performed Indian dances at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 at the age of four. She later won a scholarship to attend the School of American Ballet in New York.  In 1943, she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and worked with such choreographers as George Balanchine and Léonide Massine. She married dancer Miguel Terekhov in 1947, and the two became artists-in-residence at the University of Oklahoma in 1960, establishing the first fully accredited dance department in the United States. Also a founder of the Oklahoma City Civic Ballet (now Oklahoma City Ballet), Yvonne Chouteau was honored with the inaugural National Cultural Treasures Award at the opening of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in 2004.

Antonine Maillet (1929-) is a Canadian and Acadian novelist and playwright. Born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Maillet received her B.A. from the Université de Moncton and her PhD in literature from Laval.  Perhaps her best known works are La Sagouine  and Pélagie-la-Charrette, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1979, the first work by a non-European to receive that prestigious award. Among her many honors, Maillet has the highest rank, that of Companion, to the Order of Canada and is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada.

Giving voice to the Acadian people, Maillet’s major works often focus on the themes of exile and identity.  La Sagouine, the scrubwoman, recollecting a census taker, meditates:

“…We live in America, but we ain’t Americans. Nope, Americans, they work in’em factories in the States, and in summer, they come around, visitin our beaches in their white trousers ‘n speakin English. ‘n the’re rich, them Americans, ‘n we ain’t.  Us, we live in Canada; so we figure we mus’ be Canadians.

…Well, that ain’t true either, cause the Dysarts, the Carrolls, ‘n the Jones, they just ain’t like us….Cause the’re English, ‘n us, we’re French.

…Nope, we ain’t completely French, can’t say that: the French folks is the folks fr’m France, les Français de France. ‘n fer that matter, we’re even less Français de France than we’re Americans. We’re more like French Canadians, they told us.

              Well, that ain’t true either. French Canadians are those that live in Québec. They call ‘em Canayens or Québécois. But how can we be Québécois if we ain’t livin in Québec? Fer the love of Christ, where do we live?

…In Acadie, we was told, ‘n we’re supposed to be Acadjens….The way they sees it, seems l’Acadie ain’t a country, ‘n Acadjen ain’t a nationality…

Well, after that we didn’ know what else to say ‘n we told ‘em to give us the nationality they wanned. So, I think they put us down with the Injuns.”

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was born Jean Louis Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, natives of Québec. His mother was second cousin to future Quebec premier and leader of the Parti Québécois, René Lévesque. French was the language spoken in the Kerouac home, and Jack did not start to learn English until the age of six.  Although his most famous works—On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans—were written in English, scholars have discovered that Kerouac first began writing On the Road in French. Kerouac did produce a short manuscript entitled Sur le Chemin, one of two unpublished works in French, the other being La nuit est ma Femme written in early 1951. He also wrote some poetry in French and is now credited with being the first French writer in North America (before Michel Tremblay) to have used the working-class patois of Québec, joual, in a literary way.  The themes of his work, especially that of border-crossing/exile and double identity place him squarely in the tradition of francophone literature produced in Québec and Louisiana.