Quebec Travel Guide

Francophone-anglophone relations may be the principal concern of most Québécois - eighty percent of them have French as their mother tongue - but the province's population also includes eleven nations of aboriginal peoples, the majority of whom live on reservations "granted" them by the early French settlers. Resentment and racism are as rife here as elsewhere in Canada, but aboriginal grievances are particularly acute in Québec as most of the province's tribes are English-oriented - the Mohawks near Montréal even fought on the side of the British during the conquest. Still, relations are even bad between the authorities and French-speaking groups. The Hurons near Québec City, for example, battled in courts for eight years to retain their hunting rights, while around James Bay the Cree fought and won the right to block the expansion of Québec's hydroelectric network which, had it been completed as planned, would have covered an area the size of Germany. Begun in 1971, the project nonetheless resulted in the displacement of Cree and Inuit, due to flooded lands as well as the pollution of rivers that had not been safely channelled. Aboriginal peoples have categorically voted against separation and have used mostly peaceful methods to register their land claims, which amount to 85 percent of the province's area. There was violence at the Mohawk uprising at Oka near Montréal in 1990 , which, though condemned by most Canadians and aboriginals, drew attention to the concerns of aboriginal Canadians. This led to the creation of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, a nationwide examination of the issues at stake. In November of 1996, the commission recommended a revamping of the aboriginal welfare system, greater self-government and a settlement of land-claims negotiations. Some of these have been enacted - such as the Nisga'a treaty in British Columbia - but scarcely any movement has been made on other issues. First Nations have also been asserting ownership of natural resources, especially in the eastern provinces where fishing rights are a hotly contested issue, and these have also been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada. Each decision in favour of aboriginal land claims carries implications for Québec's aboriginal groups who have repeatedly refused to join their territories to a sovereign Québec state in the event of secession.