Michel Bouchard

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• B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Northern British Columbia

The “woke movement” is now under fire globally. Seeking to right social injustice and battle racism, the woke movement has laudable intentions, but its implementation can exacerbate social inequalities. In the case of Canada, a social movement seeks to ferret out “Pretendians” or those White individuals deemed to be falsely assuming, and thus appro...

The Métis of Canada were included as an Aboriginal people in the Constitution Act of 1982, but in the intervening decades we have observed a great disparity in the political and legal treatment of the various Métis communities by the federal and provincial governments. The Métis of the Ottawa River are a telling case, reflective of the disparities...

The Métis of Canada were included as an Aboriginal people in the Constitution Act of 1982, but in the intervening decades we have observed a great disparity in the political and legal treatment of the various Métis communities by the federal and provincial governments. The Métis of the Ottawa River are a telling case, reflective of the disparities...

We think of Métis as having exclusively Prairie roots, but what about their presence in Quebec? The province doesn’t recognize a historical Métis community within its territory, and the Métis National Council contests the existence of any Métis east of Ontario. Quebec residents who seek recognition as Métis under the Canadian Constitution therefore...

Les Métis ont longtemps été cantonnés à l’ouest du Canada dans l’imaginaire collectif. La question demeure d’actualité selon le refus de certains de reconnaître la présence historique de Métis au Québec. Dans Bois-Brûlés, il est proposé que les Métis émergent plutôt au sein d’une diaspora formée de nombreuses communautés se trouvant sur l’entièret...

Long before the Davie Crockets, the Daniel Boones and Jim Bridgers, the French had pushed far west and north establishing trade and kin networks across the continent. They founded settlements that would become great cities such as Detroit, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, but their history has been largely buried or relegated to local lore or confined...

Medieval scholars have demonstrated that the term gens (plural gentes), largely identical in usage to the modern term nation, was in use by the end of the first millennium. This article seeks to explain how and when nation came to replace gens in medieval Europe. The emergence of the concept of nationhood in Central and Eastern Europe must also be...

Awed by Mickey Mouse and the animation of Walt Disney in the 1930s, the Soviet Union quickly became a world leader in the field of animated films. At its apogee, thousands of illustrators toiled to produce a myriad of films, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the industry fell into disarray. In the 1990s, the animated film industry came cl...

French-speaking communities in Western Canada were being pushed to the verge of linguistic extinction, but in recent decades, constitutional changes and Supreme Court rulings have given French communities the right to French-language schools. It is hoped that schools can buttress identity, thereby encouraging language retention. We examine the impa...

The anniversary of the onset of the War of 1812 has been marked by an expenditure of tens of millions of dollars to commemorate the conflict. More importantly, this event’s commemoration exemplifies the “curation” of Canadian nationhood—a neologism expressing the subtle politics involved in the representation of past events. This recent investment...

War monuments are abundant in Russia; they are part of the landscape, while defining the terrain. Calling to the past and bringing forth memories, they define belonging, commemorating the past while shaping the future. Remembering a war is a political act and, in remembering, we define our place in our community, country and the world. Such is the...

Much has been published theorizing the origins of states, but ethnography has lagged behind in developing the conceptual tools to theorize the state, generally preferring to study the margins of states or “stateless” societies, even though they were enmeshed in or colonized by states. In recent decades states seem to have been bypassed by an intere...

Résumé Cet article examine l’histoire d’un peuple et d’une langue. D’abord connu par son nom « Perm », il fut ensuite appelé « Zyriène » et maintenant « Komi » depuis le début du 20 e siècle. Le déclin de la langue komi va de pair avec l’ascension d’un autre peuple, dit « Slave » ensuite « Roussin » et enfin « Rousskii » (Russe). Le cas komi n’est...

The age-old tradition of feasting the dead has been maintained by Russian populations for well over five centuries. Graveyards hold a special place both in traditional Orthodox faith and in the lives of Russians and others in the city of Narva, Estonia. The tradition of feasting the dead for three, nine and forty days after death, can be traced unb...

It is rare to find an analysis of nationalism that does not invoke Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, first published in 1983 and then reprinted in 1991. Although the term has caught the imagination of many researchers, the concept of the ‘imagined community’ is based on a number of questionable premises. The first problematic assertion is t...

1990). И все же, несмотря на то, что трактовка нации как модернового го-сударственного конструкта превратилась в научную ортодоксию, раз-даются голоса сторонников “еретической” точки зрения, согласно ко-торой нации начинают складываться в Средние века. В качестве наи-более очевидного примера средневековой нации обычно приводится Англия, но ревизион...