Director's Message - April

Guy Rodgers attending the Creative Resilience Panel event.
Photography by Nasuna Ulin-Stuart

The show must go on… but maybe not in any way that we have ever experienced, or can currently imagine. The COVID-19 pandemic’s ultimate impact on our personal and professional lives is impossible to estimate. Right now, ELAN is busy collecting and sharing useful information from all major funders, as well as health advisories from Ottawa and Quebec City. See our COVID-19 webpage. In the short term, our members want to stay physically and mentally healthy, pay their rent, and help one another where and when they can. Being underemployed or unemployed, living in isolation, and looking after children or parents is stressful, so we are also sharing suggestions for entertaining, stimulating activities. Please send us any suggestions that are making a difference in your life to research@quebec-elan.org.

Major shows and festivals closed in mid-March, followed by small venues, launch parties, galleries, studios, cinemas and restaurants. Then, Premier Legault asked all non-essential businesses to close until mid-April and schools closings were extended to May 1. These disruptions are serious and unprecedented, but our best chance of minimizing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is to take prompt, decisive action. That is where we are now. It is difficult but temporary, and the downtime can open a door onto reflection and creativity.

Once the pandemic has passed, we will get busy re-building, repairing and re-inventing the arts and culture sector. ELAN will provide support and information to help us all get back to work as soon as possible. The show will go on.

Guy Rodgers

Executive Director

Land Acknowledgement

ELAN is an official minority language organization within a country that recognizes two languages as official. ELAN is located in Tiohtià:ke, the original name for Montreal in Kanien’kéha, the language of the Mohawk—also known as Mooniyang, which is the Anishinaabeg name given to the city by the Algonquin. While we are based in this city, our projects have also taken place in many regions across Quebec.

We acknowledge the colonial origin of English and French in Canada, and recognize that both languages benefit from official status throughout the land. The province that we know as Quebec is an amalgamation of the traditional territories of the Innu and Inuit nations, Algonquian nations, as well as the Mohawk nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabemowin are but two of the original languages of this province; Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun are also among the many Indigenous languages spoken across Quebec as majority languages, all well before French and English.

ELAN acknowledges the important work being done by First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to revive the traditional languages of these territories, and their advocacy for the official status of Indigenous languages.

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Land Acknowledgement