Quebec and Its Origins
Canada, the name that Jacques Cartier understood to be what a part of the St. Lawrence valley was called, was the Iroquoian name for a village that he assumed was in a region downstream from Stadaconé, or Quebec City. Our fixation with nouns carries a burden of creation. Other languages can use descriptives or even verbs, or actions. In Innu (Montagnais) Stadaconé means place where one crosses on pieces of wood like on a bridge. While Stadaconé was located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, a map credited to Champlain from 1613 shows the word Québec on the south shore. This is not surprising because the word meant narrowing, obstructed or blocked, and it indicated the place where the river narrows, as is the case at the location of Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River. Champlain spelled it Québecq and other early French explorers spelled it Kébek, Kébec, Képak, Kebbek and other variations. It can be thought of as onomatopoeic, or a word that evokes a sound, if one imagines the echo that would rebound in a narrow passage. As with the naming of Canada, historians argue over the origins of the name Quebec and suggest that it could have been influenced by the Norman rule of adding the suffix ‘bec’ to indicate a promontory at the junction of two rivers, and Quebec City is on such a promontory between the St. Charles River and the much more massive St. Lawrence. It seems unnecessary to analyze the individual syllables and their meanings in other, distant languages. In Algonquin the suffix ‘ek’ means ‘here’ but may be dismissed for the same reason since the people who used the name that Champlain recorded were Innu, not Algonquin.
The names Canada and Quebec have existed since before the first Europeans arrived in the Americas. The Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples both shared and had disagreements, pushing each other back and forth along their frontiers. Even after Contact, one group allied itself with the English while the other with the French. Thanks to Cartier, the territory entered via the St. Lawrence became known as Canada, but New France was not Canada, it was simply located in Canada. Quebec, the name for the place, soon replaced Stadaconé, the description of the village where one crosses on pieces of wood.
On Champlain’s map of 1613, the south shore of the St. Lawrence is called Nouvelle France and the north shore is called Nouvelle Biscaye. Neither region is called either Quebec or Canada. Champlain dealt with the Algonquin and Innu. What happened to the Iroquoian peoples that Cartier had met seven decades earlier is a matter of conjecture, but it is not impossible that they had been weakened and were suffering from diseases contracted through their meeting with Cartier’s expedition. Champlain would have had little reason to call a specific part of the river Canada. Intriguingly, though, the Innu used a similar word, Kannatats to describe foreigners, and it is not impossible that the first French colonists, who came to call themselves Canayens, may have taken the word from the Innu. In such a case, the word Canayens may be commemorating a different naming from that of the territory Cartier identified as Canada (or Kanata).
The French designated New France as the Diocese of Quebec in 1674. It comprised all French holdings from Acadia to Louisiana and was administered in part from Quebec City. In 1763, when the French colony became a British one, the British proclaimed the Government of the Province of Quebec, not of Canada. Jean Cournoyer’s Le petit JEAN, dictionaire des noms propre du Québec mentions that the name Canada replaced Quebec only in 1791, twenty-eight years after the proclamation, when the colony was divided into Upper and Lower Canada. Until then, Canada was a colloquial name for our part of the New World and the people who lived there sometimes called themselves Canayens, possibly meaning ‘foreigners’ in the Innu language, or Canadien(ne)s. Later, in 1840, the two colonies were reunited as the colony of the Province of Canada until they separated and became the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario at Confederation, and its citizens became Canadians, or Canadien(ne)s. It was not until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s that the Canayens and Canadien(ne)s began to call themselves Québécois. Prior to that, a Québécois was someone from Quebec City.
St. John the Baptist Day (La Fête Nationale) has become synonymous with Quebec nationalism even as Québécois have become less religious. The holiday, along with the fleur de lys, have come to symbolize the aspirations of the descendants of the Canayens. The celebration is older than Christianity. Early Christian proselytizers in Europe, rather than suppressing local feasts, co-opted them by associating them with saints’ days, and in this way the Summer Solstice, celebrated with a bonfire, became St. John the Baptist Day, the fire itself symbolizing The Light of The World: Christ, whose arrival St. John heralded.
The fleur de lys is first documented from the time of Clovis, head of the Franks who conquered the Gauls in 486. Originally his coat of arms showed three stylized yellow frogs, but over time they changed into three yellow flowers. They have been interpreted as representing everything from the head of a javelin to the Holy Trinity. The original lily that inspired the symbol is the yellow swamp iris (Iris pseudacorus) that is native to Europe but is considered an invasive species in parts of North America.
From the earliest days of the settlement of New France, la Fête de la Saint-Jean was celebrated with feux de joie, bonfires, lighted from village to village across the colony, forming long festive chains of fire. In the 1500s in France, King François the First went to battle with a blue flag with three fleurs de lys emblazoned on it. He was the king who mandated Jacques Cartier to explore the New World, and among Cartier’s first actions was to plant the coat of arms showing three fleurs de lys at Percée on the eastern tip of the Gaspé peninsula. It was a territorial aggression that did not go unnoticed by the people who lived there.
In Quebec, there is an assumption that we should all assimilate and see ourselves as Québécois, but minorities in Quebec have their own understanding of their origins and many of us do not necessarily identify with the American-style melting pot. English Quebec is made to feel it should apologize for things that Quebec nationalists said their ancestors did, thereby reinforcing a form of alienation among that local minority while Italian Montrealers see themselves as Italian Montrealers and the many Indigenous Nations embrace cultures that predate the arrival of Jacques Cartier. The modern Québécois ethnicity was carried in the womb of the newly formed Ultramontane Roman Catholic Church between 1836 and the death of Montreal Bishop Ignace Bourget in 1885. It took until the 1960s for the young new ethnicity to self-realize, and from there it quickly assumed ownership of not just its identity but also of the territory that had come to be known as the Province of Québec. Thus, residents of that territory came to be seen as Québécois because the new ethnicity legislated the territorial identity by majority decree. There has been resistance to this publicly regulated ethnicity in lots of places as Québécoise Emanuelle Dufour discovered in finding the title for her diary of encounters between Indigenous and Québécois peoples. She reports that when someone mansplained to Anicinape-Cree Anna Mapachee that she was a Québécoise because she was born here, she said no, “Québec was born in my country,” giving Dufour the title she needed. Mapachee’s ancestors had moved here following the melting glacier 8,000 years before Christ and her negation clarified the meaning of a land acknowledgement, but each of our communities has its own sense of identity tracing to a large variety of ethnicities. All of us live comfortably in Québec and get along with our neighbours, tolerating the odd need for our leaders to legislate things that do not really need regulation, and we all see ourselves as we always have, with our complex connections to our past admiring the different groups, including the majority one, the Québécois, with its own complex origin story.