Rural anglophones a vanishing breed in Quebec
Back in 1989, a National Film Board documentary titled Dis paraitre warned that Quebec's French culture could disappear within a couple of decades.
That doomsday scenario has not come true.
But there is a group whose presence is fading in some parts of the province. Anglophones.
Quietly, without fanfare, English-speakers are disappearing from regions where the roots of both language communities run deep.
For rural anglophones, the prospect of Disparaitre poses a vexing question: Who will remember them after they are gone?
That is a constant preoccupation for Donald Stewart, the last anglophone in Irlande, a community of 950 near Thetford Mines whose name betrays the origins of its first settlers.
Stewart, 73, is a retired miner who looks after the cemetery at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Maple Grove, a former English-speaking hamlet in Irlande that now survives only in memory.
History weighs heavily on his shoulders....
Read entire article at Montreal Gazette
That doomsday scenario has not come true.
But there is a group whose presence is fading in some parts of the province. Anglophones.
Quietly, without fanfare, English-speakers are disappearing from regions where the roots of both language communities run deep.
For rural anglophones, the prospect of Disparaitre poses a vexing question: Who will remember them after they are gone?
That is a constant preoccupation for Donald Stewart, the last anglophone in Irlande, a community of 950 near Thetford Mines whose name betrays the origins of its first settlers.
Stewart, 73, is a retired miner who looks after the cemetery at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Maple Grove, a former English-speaking hamlet in Irlande that now survives only in memory.
History weighs heavily on his shoulders....