Director's Message - November, 2020

Guy Rodgers with Anne-Marie Jean CEO of CALQ at ELAN 2019 AGM.
Photo by Nasuna Stuart-Ulin

Artists are remarkably resilient people and quick to create solutions in difficult situations. That is an admirable strength in normal times. The situation we are currently confronting is totally abnormal and unpredictable. Trying to figure out too many things on your own, and in isolation, becomes exhausting and overwhelming, which is why it is important that we work through this together.

All levels of government and all of the arts funders responded to the pandemic with unprecedented urgency, making the first six months of the Covid-19 crisis, assisted by mild summer weather, bearable. As we enter a new phase, we are hearing calls of distress from artists uncertain where to turn for help, or who is eligible for new forms of assistance and under what conditions. ELAN’s Covid-19 page attempts to aggregate the most useful and up-to-date information. We invite all artists and cultural workers to contact us if you can’t find an answer, if you feel like you’ve fallen through the cracks of a program, and/or if you just feel lost. We can help dig for answers and push for solutions.

ELAN is offering a variety of information sessions and networking activities. These have been designed in response to conversations with members. Let us know if you have other needs and also keep us informed about support groups that are helping you and that others might want to join. ELAN is a community linked to many other communities. If we can’t help you directly, we may know someone else who can. It is going to be a long winter, but new ideas and experiments are happening all around us. Let’s share these resources and information so that we all weather this storm.

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