Reclaiming the Innu culture of Mashteuiatsh in French. The other story on the birth of Canadian Confederation in Michel Jean’s 'Kukum'

Abstract

The fiction that Michel Jean has been developing over the last ten years or so has sought to create breaches in the Canadian discourse, which has long idealized the birth of the country in a highly patriotic historiography. 'Kukum' can be seen as generating cracks in the founding narrative, which, all things considered, only held together because of a a general misunderstanding of the nature of the colonial act, which takes on a different meaning as soon as we focus on the indigenous question. Jean seeks to narrate the forgotten traumas of those who were forced to be civilized and bend to a way of life that was not their own. He tells the story of those who were forced to enter head-on, often over the course of a single generation,
into the progressive uniformity of the conquering peoples’ cultural hegemony. A paradox worth noting, which is commented on at length in this article, is that the tragedy of the Mashteuiatsh Innu recounted in 'Kukum' is not told in Innu-aimun, the language of Michel Jean’s ancestors, but in French, the language of the conquering colonizer. Michel Jean uses the language of the other to give form to the memory of his ancestors. While this can justifiably be seen as an undeniable sign of assimilation, it is indeed because of the mastery of this language that this tragedy suddenly becomes audible to the vast majority. Surprisingly, the use of French does not seem to conflict with Michel Jean’s literary project, which is to bring a greater degree of complexity to the story of Canada’s origins. The statues become unsettled, the pedestals erode, revealing in the light of day only unsuspected catastrophes, “horror stories” as the narrator of 'Kukum' relates.