From Parkman to Pearson: Historical context and the transformation of Quebec’s strategic culture

“Strategic culture” is one of those conceptual bridges that link history with political science because, among other reasons, it reminds us of the hold that memories of past events can continue to exercise upon contemporary reality. But those memories are always subjective, sometimes downplayed to the point of nearly being forgotten altogether, at other times so overstated as to yield a highly distorted sense of the past and of its relationship to the present. This article constitutes a revisitation of contemporary Quebec strategic culture, from the perspective of historical memory. That strategic culture has of late been so strongly stamped with the impress of a “Pearsonian internationalism” that it becomes easy for analysts to confuse it with “pacifism.” Yet it has also been a strategic culture that stems from a great deal of historical amnesia. What has been effaced from the collective memory is the long period in which war was endemic in New France—the period that gives the lie to the notion of Quebeckers somehow being a “pacifistic” folk. This was the sanguinary era upon which the historian Francis Parkman focused such a large share of his prodigious intellectual energies. Only the closing act of this era seems to have escaped erasure from Quebec’s collective memory. Indeed, that act, which took place on the Plains of Abraham, has been “remembered” only too well. So well has it been recollected, in fact, that it has fostered within Quebec society the unshakable conviction that, for Quebeckers, war must always be a risky undertaking susceptible of leading to catastrophe.

The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt

Chapter three traces preservation’s antebellum theorization and long-lasting repercussions. The first parts of this chapter delineate the flawed aesthetic logic of preservation, beginning with the earliest proposal for a “Nation’s Park” in painter and writer George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1844). Preservation emerges as an environmental ethic because indigenous, “wild” natural spectacles are imagined to benefit an expanding, increasingly “civilized” white U.S. population. While Catlin calls for preservation of the beauty he sees in the Plains peoples, bison, and their threatened landscape, Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail (1849) writes of an ugliness in need of violent eradication. Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) illustrates the pernicious persistence of such aesthetic violence. The final portion of the chapter illuminates preservation’s flawed spatial logic. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) rejects the possibility of whale extinction by insisting that whales have ocean sanctuaries to which they can retreat. A. S. Byatt’s plastic pollution tale, “Sea Story” (2013), plays out the destructive twenty-first-century consequences of Moby-Dick’s romantic ideas about nature. Altogether, the chapter suggests that preservation is an environmental ethic imbricated in settler colonialism, incapable of fostering meaningful human or interspecies community, and whose meagre benefits only continue to diminish as anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies.

Henri-Raymond Casgrain, historien

Résumé Littérateur d'abord et avant tout, l'abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain commence sa carrière d'historien en adoptant le point de vue providentialiste sur l'histoire du Canada. Mais le désir de réfuter les publications successives de l'historien américain Francis Parkman l'amène à réviser sa méthode. Au lieu de se contenter de dénégations sans réserves, comme plusieurs de ses compatriotes, il apprend à considérer les arguments de son adversaire et à ne le réfuter que sur la foi des documents. Toutefois, malgré des progrès significatifs, surtout dans ses dernières oeuvres, Casgrain ne se départit pas de sa tendance aux propositions générales et aux éloges gratuits.

De l’incorporation à l’exclusion : les relations entre Amérindiens, Européens et Anglo-Américains dans la Vallée du Mississippi de 1699 à 1830

Au cours du XVIIIe siècle, la vallée du Mississippi vit se succéder ou coexister les souverainetés française, espagnole, britannique et états-unienne. C’est pourquoi l’analyse des relations entre les Amérindiens et les Européens ou les Euro-Américains de la fondation de la colonie de Louisiane en 1699 au Removal Act de 1830 permet de s’interroger sur la thèse du génie colonial que l’historiographie traditionnelle depuis Francis Parkman attribue aux Français.1 Ces derniers, en tant que peuple, auraient développé des relations beaucoup plus ouvertes, fluides, tolérantes et conciliantes avec les Amérindiens que les Espagnols et les Anglo-Saxons. Ce poncif ne relève pas seulement d’un discours construit a posteriori par les historiens.