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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 our immigrant condition, the one that was once the lot of renegades fleeing the old continent infested with plague and famine? At the very least, this would imply inquiring once more about the uses and languages specific to this place, which would become foreign once again through our stay.

But above all, to assume our immigrant past could lead not to national appropriation but to a secret passage between indigeneity and exile. Because the continent, rediscovered by exiles, might very well approach the freshness that was always already felt by the first. Whereas the Indigenous people see themselves as sojourning in the territory, no less than exiles, beyond—or rather below—all property, at the root of indigeneity, there is perhaps no self-sufficiency but rather the constant need to renew the link, to keep contact. And thereby becoming-people, irreducibly minoritarian.

1. Inspired by the Chilean cacerolazos, hundreds of people took to the streets every day banging pots and pans in protest against police repression.

2. Particularly in the century between the 1840s and 1940s, terroir designated a specific set of values promoted in Lower Canada’s literature, emphasizing a rural lifestyle centered on land, family, language, and religion.

3. The Great Darkness was a period of Quebec’s political history marked by patronage and corruption, during the conservative reign of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959.

4. An inquiry would be needed on the role of tonal and verbal languages, largely present in the Indigenous world and in which intonation plays a determining role in meaning, which marks the recalcitrance of these worlds to colonization. The agglutinant or polysynthetic character of these languages suggests that a non-ownership conception of territory could be carried within their structure, which presents a surprising absence of subjects as much as objects. These are replaced by a potentially infinite agglutination of adjunctions, prefixes, and suffixes, which situate the expressed reality in relation to a series of symbolic orders: temporality, localization, gender (often much more numerous than the two sexes), position of locution, etc. Thus, these languages might well conjure the possibility of landing on a substantive noun having full ownership over itself: they would discern their object by its contours, a game of mirrors and cross-references where narration identifies the living reality.