their heterogeneity by creating Creoles and Pidgins, but also the internal articulation of languages that creates the possibility of a “nation.” The encounters between Europeans and Native Americans is so recent that Native languages have been able to keep their structure relatively safe from colonial syntaxes. In spite of modern attempts to annihilate their use of their own languages by educating Native children in colonial residential schools, the vestiges of these languages offer rare examples of an adherence between spoken word and territory, of which they are the symbolic and sonic expression. Some Mohawk traditionalists say that their language tunes to the telluric frequency of the territory from which it originates, echoing its plants, animals, and uses at the specific resonance of a given geographical constitution.
Could it be that the structure of Indigenous languages themselves contain something that resists the colonial matrix?4 This would explain both the colonizers’ relentless effort to exterminate these languages that are unfit for trade, as well as their astonishing survival five hundred years after contact. The practice and memory of these languages has become essential not just for cultural transmission and the history of a people, but also as a real support for the match between a mode of life and a vision of the world—a shared truth.
On the other hand, the fact that colonization and the operationalization of language is still ongoing even within our own Indo-European languages allows us to believe that they might carry something else, something like a mode of living that resists—a nomadic language inhabiting the perpetual movement of the verb. We would have to break open our language from within (using as much etymology as poetry) to see how Indo-European languages could only have become colonial through the force of a long history of struggles crystallized in language. This still leaves its traces in even the smallest of our statements.
V: JUNCTION
It is up to us to distinguish this originally animist “accursed share” presumed at the basis of any culture, and that which is a part of the colonizer mentality, in the sense of a perceptive structure able to project an abstract space-time and extract an isolated noun to which it can fix its infrastructures. In this case, everything seems to oppose Quebecois and Indigenous separatisms, except their common opposition to the British Crown. Historically, it was only for the sake of its collapse that they converged, if only periodically, centuries ago, at the cost of fratricidal wars with other Indigenous people. This is why the question of alliance is extremely delicate. More often than not, it amounts to the minority people only strengthening the ranks of the stronger element. The Two Row Wampum, created by the Iroquois in the seventeenth century, sought to delineate their relationship with white settlers. This beaded belt, setting a juridical precedent for the Iroquois, shows two parallel lines, which represent the respective rivers of two peoples, each standing in their own vessels: the Natives in their canoe and the settlers in their ship. Thus the alliance first and foremost requires the recognition of an unalterable heterogeneity: to be a shaman overnight—to play the sorcerer’s apprentice, in short, apart from one’s own cultural baggage—is no less colonialist than pressuring for development. We will have to find within our own boat that which will make it sink. For it could only be self-sabotage: the so-called “sovereigntist” tendency, irresistibly inclined to unify itself into a self-identical homogenous society, is the worst enemy of its poor parent—the separation of a minoritarian people.
This means that the fault line even passes through the notion of autonomy itself, which can have either a constituent or destituent form. These are two respective ways of grasping the absence of a People, either trying to reach it by synthesis or subtraction. Here lies the crux of the problem of the Quebecois People, being a minority in Canada but a majority in its own right. In one gesture of declaring independence, in this case, it may simultaneously evade the oppressor, and (all the better, they will say) oppress its own minorities. We must believe that the separatist problem is eminently a question of scale. And thus it points to the logistical consistency of governance—the scope of power being in proportion to its technical capacity to reach the territories it intends to subjugate.
To the extent that colonialism is opposed to all tradition, tradition can only appear to us in a fragmentary state, not just in the sense of ruins doomed to wither if they are not revived by contact, but also in the sense that it holds divisibility as an essential characteristic. If the current tendency of capital seems to lean toward fragmentation, this can only be explained by its will to track down all that escapes it in order to bind it to its never-ending technological growth. That is the defining aspect of liberal colonialism—British style, the only style, after all, that has really worked—to let the local powers go about their business as long as they continue to pay tribute to Empire. The fragment could not escape the reach of Empire, and thus remain a fragment, except by dividing itself at the slightest approach, showing still another side of the coin, twisting in on itself like a Möbius strip. The narrative of Quebec identity that considers the historical phenomenon of trappers—these fur traders who once deserted French colonies and disappeared into the woods to join in Native ways of life—as the proof of some privileged link between the French and Native populations often neglects to acknowledge that those who deserted would risk the death penalty if they returned to civilization. Only a faction can combine with another faction. Society, as a whole, is incorrigibly homogenous.
However, if we must admit a fragmentary character in the French colonization of the continent, it is contingent on the cowardly manner in which this colonization was conducted. As a mercantile settlement without any will to populate (contrary to New England), the first French-Canadians were extremely dispersed and vulnerable on the territory, which delayed the progression of homogenization for some time. This was true not only in their relationships with the Indigenous peoples, but among themselves. The first “inhabitants,” as they were called, did not speak the same imperial French that is familiar to us now, but Breton, Poitevin, Norman, and Occitan—without even taking into account the Irish, German, Finnish, and other peoples that immigrated to the new continent before disappearing into a single English-speaking bloc.
This fragmentary legacy highlights three things that we will outline in conclusion. First, there exists the eminently fragmentary character of orality, prior to the unification of language through print. This not only applies to spoken language, but also to the nature of story, which in the oral tradition is subjected to the contamination of contact and the fate of mistranslation. In written history—the Hegelian journey of the Spirit, at the end of which lies the synthetic horizon of the State and its New Man—there is a whole forest of spoken histories, event-based and situational chronicles, each time repeated, born anew.
Secondly, there is the crucial fact that the fragmentary escapes the categories of colonial understanding, which can only comprehend it as savagery either to train or exterminate. Paradoxically, this implies an absence of operational distinctions specific to Western culture within the fragment. The fields and disciplines which are integral to Western culture, namely the political, cultural, and religious, seem impossible to dissociate in the fragmentary perspective—which is infinitely divisible by the effect of another fragment, and not of that which advances into a totalizing bloc. Hence the singular opacity yet thriving character of the fragment in the eyes of settlers. On this point, there is no doubt that the most powerful moments in recent political history, such as the separatist decolonization of the Front de libération du Québec with respect to Quebec, owed their vigor and strength of conviction to their surprising capacity to hold together revolutionary politics and counterculture in one experimental movement. In this period, when independence was achieved by the deed, it was understood that autonomy requires—at the very least—not to be disarticulated by external categories, and therefore not to respond to the language of the enemy.
Finally, if there is really a tradition that we will never cease to carry on this continent, it is perhaps precisely our lack of traditions specific to the territory. That is to say our properly immigrant character. Let us not forget that the latter is distinguished from the colonist precisely through its minoritarian and un-constituent character, by its own impropriety. But what would it mean to (re)take charge of
