Director's Message: October 2017

ELAN’s 2017 edition of Arts Alive! Québec kicked off July 1 in pelting rain, and ended September 24 in melting heat. The vagaries of weather were beyond our control, but three years of steadily growing audiences, media attention, collaborators, and community support confirmed the value of the things we can control.

Canada 150 was the main funder this year and their support enabled us to hire more artists (including an impressive number of ELAN members), host more performances, and offer more workshops. It was a real pleasure working with enthusiastic volunteers in Knowlton, Quebec City, Hudson, Huntingdon, Wakefield and Montreal’s West Island. We have no immediate source of funding for a next edition of Arts Alive! Québec, but several ideas. For a taste of summer 2017 activities, click here.

Thanks to new funding, mostly from le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), ELAN is doubling its staff from two to four. We received 132 excellent applications for the positions of Membership Services Coordinator and Communications and Outreach Coordinator, and will be conducting interviews throughout October. I expect to be able to announce the names of our new team members in November. We are excited about what ELAN can do with a fresh injection of ideas and energy. Stay tuned.

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.