An Academic Retreat – Canada and the French-Canadians

Metis has sometimes had an ambivalent relationship with French-Canadians and with the communities surrounding it. Summer residents could be stand-offish, superior in wealth and education. Their distance was compounded by an inability to speak or comprehend French. But local Metisians worked arm in arm with their French-speaking neighbours for generations, serving together in the military, working for CN or in the bush camps and sharing the challenges of running local businesses and making ends meet farming.  

Wilfred Bovey was the first writer in Canada to show an interest in French-Canadian culture. Although a lawyer and not an academic, he was associated with McGill for most of his career, first as administrative aide-de-camp to McGill president, Sir Arthur Currie, and then as director of Extramural Relations and Extension. He summered in Metis his entire life and developed a special appreciation for the French-Canadians he met here.  

From the ivory tower of McGill, Bovey penned Canadien in 1932 and The French Canadian Today in 1938, two seminal works in the study of French-Canadian culture. They are among the first academic studies in a field that would become known as Canadian Studies. Bovey’s studies examined French Canada’s culture on its own merits. Shedding the anti-Catholic bias common in English Canada at the time, Bovey examined the long history of French presence on Canadian soil and the evolution of its social and political culture.  

Bovey wrote an extended article on the Gaspe region that appeared in the National Geographic magazine in 1935, the first to portray the region for a popular American audience. In his National Geographic article, Bovey concealed his knowledge of the region from his readers, choosing a dispassionate presentation as if he were discovering the Gaspe for the first time, not letting on that he had grown up on its shores and knew its paths and people as well as anyone.