The Invisible Nation – A documentary

A shameful part of Quebec’s history- it’s dealings with the Algonquin First Nation people’s is the subject of Richard Desjardins and Robert Monderie’s most recent documentary The Invisible Nation www.onf.ca

As we find out in the film the Algonquin Nation goes back over 5,000 years; but their horrendous living conditions are such that their future is at best is at high risk! The most horrifying thing about all this is that one does not have to travel to another continent – it is all happening here in Quebec – just hours from Montreal. The invisibility of a people is one of the salient points brought out in the documentary – Richard Desjardins grew up a stone’s throw from the Algonquin communities and yet as he points out they were/are invisible to the white persons’ eye!

Less than 200 hundred years ago the Algonquin occupied land that stretched from Laval to Val d’Or and over to Lake Huron. Now not only their land but their traditional ways of life have all but disappeared- leaving the 9,000 people divided in Quebec into about 10 communities. The Algonquin have been: forced into a sedentary lifestyle often reduced to poverty, cut off from their traditions and their social fabric has been torn apart.

“The many problems facing the Algonquin (some communities have no school, drinking water, or even electricity despite being a stone’s throw from hydroelectric dams) often stem from a series of historical misunderstandings marking their relationship with whites. Over the years, Oblate missionaries came to speak to the Algonquin about a god the Aboriginals knew nothing about. Rivers were turned into logging highways so their canoes could no longer use them. Country music replaced their traditional song, which vanished with the last shamans. With all these changes, the voice of a people has grown weaker and weaker” the film

In the short term, Algonquin communities must achieve access to basic living conditions – a social minimum must be a priority.”We don’t talk much about the future of this people; it floats somewhere between extinction and the expropriation of Mont-Tremblant, which was established on land the Algonquin never ceded.”directors word

As Quebec questions and discusses the issues around the reasonably accommodating new immigrants – it is more than reasonable to demand that it do the same toward those people’s that the white Europeans colonized and usurped from their lands – they can no longer be ignored – like an error of the past that one can simply hope will vanish from the face of the earth!