Hybridity and Being Between Cultures

Abstract

"Even though the French left Canada in 1763, they had already been involved in facing hybridity and métissage. The English and then the British were in Canada longer and actually had something to do with the foreign policy of the state until the Statute of Westminster in 1931. My own approach is literary, historical and ethnological, and I wish to mention two examples from New France that were, in retrospect, proleptic for hybridity in Canada, the one having to do with Samuel de Champlain in the early seventeenth century and with Louis Riel in the late nineteenth century. In the case of English Canada, I will use more contemporary examples. In this brief essay I will concentrate on Native-settler relations and will do so largely in terms of historical and literary texts and two films."