Director's Message - March 2019

Guy Rodgers presenting at the 2019 State of the Arts Activation Conference

Photo by Sufia Duez

ELAN is celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2019. The world around you will have changed little or much during that period depending on your age and personal milestones. One benchmark that most of us share is Facebook, which also came into existence in 2004. It is surprisingly difficult to remember the “pre-FB” world, back when we were still using message boards and fax machines. I am not going to claim that ELAN’s impact is comparable to Facebook – for better or worse – but our local environment has changed dramatically in several ways.

ELAN was created as a network for English-speaking artists whose main issue was language. One pragmatic ELAN objective was to build bridges with our French-speaking neighbours. A more daunting but less tangible problem was a country neatly divided into English Canada and French Quebec. ELAN devoted its first decade to documenting an English-language cultural renaissance in Quebec, to making English-speaking artists visible outside Quebec, as well as making the case that we could be both proud Quebeckers here at home and important ambassadors for Quebec culture.

Many of ELAN’s younger members see language as a minor issue or a non-issue, which is a testimonial to how far we have progressed. Part of this change was possible because our world is becoming much more receptive to diversity and inclusion. As ELAN becomes less preoccupied with language issues, we have turned our attention to broader issues of diversity and inclusion, which have been the focus of our State of the Arts project. Many of you have already participated in State of the Arts activities, and are welcome to participate in additional upcoming events in March. More information about those events will be shared in our future newsletters, our website, and through our social media channels. As we celebrate ELAN’s accomplishments over the past 15 years, we are also charting a new course for the decades that lie ahead.

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.