It is a story as improbable as it is true. In 1827, a group of six Osage Indians arrived in France. On their arrival, they are welcomed with as much curiosity as enthusiasm and even have the honor of meeting King Charles X. But little by little, they are forgotten, abandoned and their situation becomes precarious. Impossible for them to return to the United States. Here they were wandering the roads of France until November 1829. Exhausted, hungry, three of them – Little Chef, Grand Soldier and Femme Faucon – arrived in Montauban, in Tarn-et-Garonne, where the former resident resided. bishop of French Louisiana. Immediately, the prelate, the mayor and the entire population mobilized and financed their return to America.
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Two centuries later, the episode has not been forgotten. An association, called Oklahoma-Occitania, was created in 1989 and regularly organizes meetings between Osages and Occitans. The town of Montauban itself is twinned with Pawhuska, the main town of this Indian tribe. An exceptional friendship which has just been the subject of Francis Fourcou’s film, A bridge over the ocean.
In the meantime, the Osages experienced an exceptional destiny. Originally from Missouri, they were moved in the second part of the 19th century to the rocky and difficult to cultivate lands of northern Oklahoma. But destiny is sometimes a joker. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, we discovered in the basement of their reserve… one of the largest oil deposits in the United States! The Osages become immensely rich… and jealous of white people. In the 1920s, several dozen murders took place on the reserve. They will go unpunished until the newly created FBI puts an end to it.
This last episode inspired Martin Scorsese’s latest feature film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Coincidence? The American director’s film was released almost at the same time as that of Francis Fourcou. Two films with disproportionate resources but which ask the same question: that of the resistance of threatened languages and cultures.
“Fight for the survival of our cultures”
Of course, the two situations are not comparable in every way. “The violence of the social situation, of racism, the state of the language, the genocides which affected the American Indians have nothing to do in intensity with the condition of the Occitans of today”, readily recognizes Francis Fourcou. On the other hand, a parallel can be established regarding the question of cultural appropriation. In the United States, white Europeans virtually wiped out Indian civilization. Here, Ile-de-France has imposed its own on the entire territory. This is also the analysis of Osage chief Jim Gray: “We had the same experiences,” he assures us in A bridge over the ocean. You have become part of France. We became part of the United States. We know what it’s like to fight for the survival of our cultures.”
The linguistic situation is more dramatic in the United States since the Osage language had only three native speakers in 2002. But awareness has grown. An alphabet was developed, bilingual schools opened, courses for adults set up. Today, the language has around 500 speakers. It’s not huge, but the slope has reversed dramatically. In France, the situation is the opposite: although Occitan is in decline, it still has several hundred thousand regular practitioners.
The most curious thing, however, is elsewhere: while these two films address similar themes, they do not provoke the same reactions in us. In Paris, we readily feel sorry for the American Indians, these martyrs of history victims of ruthless white colonizers. About Scorsese’s film, the film critic of The Obs thus ecstatic before “the power of his charge against the genocidal racism of the pioneers”. On the other hand, we despise the defenders of France’s minority languages, considered at best as lovers of old-fashioned folklore, or even dangerous communitarians threatening the Republic. Reintroduce regional languages? “Its equivalent in zoology would consist of reintroducing the dinosaur in the La Défense district,” assured the philosopher Michel Onfray in The world in 2010.
That said, it would be too easy to simply denounce the wicked French State and the indifference of the French intelligentsia towards our internal cultural diversity. Because it is also up to each person to act according to their own measure. With great honesty, the novelist Benoît Séverac recounts the misadventure that happened to him during a trip to Indian soil. “I met the inventor of the Osage alphabet and he asked me: ‘Are you interested in my culture because it is a victim of white hegemony, a bit like you in Occitania with the Parisian centralism? Thank you. But what are you doing for your culture? Do you speak your language?'” Taken aback, Benoît Séverac was forced to respond in the negative. “It was a shock, a trigger,” he remembers. “I was rushed. And the interview was over.”
Back in France, he enrolled in Occitan lessons. Today he speaks it.
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In Quebec, French is losing ground to English. The government therefore decided to put an end to a policy which subsidized students who came to study in English before leaving. With the millions of dollars thus recovered, La Belle Province wants to invest in the French-speaking university network and welcome more French-speaking international students.
Oh my Lot, the brand of the Department, and Lot of flavors, a cultural event in Grand Cahors, are in the sights of the FRancophonie AVenir association. She filed requests before the administrative court of Toulouse. At issue, according to her: non-compliance with article 14 of the Toubon law which stipulates that “the use of a brand […] of a foreign expression or term is prohibited to legal entities under public law as long as there exists a French expression or term of the same meaning.
Led by Laure Anne Johnsen and Mathieu Avanzi, the participatory project Your Vocals aims to collect voice messages shared on the WhatsApp application in order to study the French actually spoken by French speakers. To find out more and participate, you can visit this website: www.vosvocaux.ch and click on this link from your phone.
From its teaching by the Abbot of L’Epée to its recognition as a language in its own right in 2005 through its ban by the Congress of Milan in 1880, the online site Cheminez, “the media of languages and cultures, from here and elsewhere”, looks back on the long history of sign language in France.
Questioned by the MP Northern RN Pierrick Berteloot, the Ministry of Justice has just reiterated its veto: no question of accepting “diacritical signs” (which distinguish) in civil status, such as the tilded n of the Breton first name Fañch or the acute accent of the Occitan first name Artús and the Catalan first name Martí. If the ministry takes refuge behind a decision of the Constitutional Council of 2021, it must be remembered that it itself adopted this position in 2014, when Christiane Taubira was Minister of Justice.
“The demand of ‘regional minorities’ in France since 1945, in Occitanie and elsewhere”: it is on this theme that a university conference will be held on December 7 and 8 at the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier, on the Saint Charles – conference room 2.
In anticipation of the arrival of tourists from all over the world to attend the great sporting event, foreign language training is currently being implemented by Paris 2024. On the program: English, German, Italian and Spanish.
This heartfelt cry from a Quebec athlete quickly went viral in Canada. Sion rant had a huge impact in Quebec and relaunched the debate on the place of the language of Molière in Canadian society.
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