Public conference: "French Canadians in the Midwest" January 20, 2011

This program is part of a series on French Canadians in the Midwest that began in December 2010 and will continue through March 12, 2011 with a Spotlight exhibition, a series of public talks, a seminar, and teacher resources. It is made possible in part by generous support from the Québec Government Office Chicago and by the Consulate General of Canada, Chicago.

Medieval France in Middle America
Speaker: Carl J. Ekberg, Illinois State University
Friday, January 21, 3:30 pm

French Canadians who settled in Illinois during the eighteenth century carved out distinctive, ribbon-like fields for their farms, which are still clearly visible on Google Maps. Surprisingly, their patterns of land usage, settlement, and agriculture derived not from their Québec neighbors, but from medieval practices in northern France, and they were unique in colonial North America. Compact villages, open-field plowlands, and communal pasturing areas characterized every French-Canadian settlement in Illinois, from Cahokia and St. Louis in the north to Kaskaskia and Ste. Genevieve in the south.

More than just a way of raising crops, common fields defined a cultural identity for French Canadians in the Midwest that knitted together social, legal, and agricultural institutions, and occasionally irritated non-French Canadian Americans. In the early nineteenth century, Indiana’s first governor noted, “You may behold at one and the same time a hundred plows going, under one inclosure, which belongs to the French, who cultivate in common. Their customs are often very ridiculous and grating to the feelings of an American.” Despite his disapproval, French Canadians shaped the Midwest profoundly, as its landscape still attests.

Carl J. Ekberg is Professor Emeritus at Illinois State University and the author of many books, including the standard history of the French in Illinois: French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times.

Curators' Talk and Gallery Walk
French Canadians in the Midwest Spotlight Exhibition
Curators: Matthew Rutherford, The Newberry Library, and Carla Zecher, The Newberry Library
Friday, January 21, 5:00 pm

The co-curators of the French Canadians in the Midwest Spotlight exhibition will give a talk and visual presentation about how they created this exhibition of Newberry Library materials, including some that did not make it into the show. Join them afterwards in the gallery for an informal tour.

Matthew Rutherford is Curator of Genealogy and Local History at the Newberry Library; Carla Zecher directs the Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies.

A reception will follow their talk.

The French Canadian Diaspora in the Great Lakes Region
Speaker: François Paré, The University of Waterloo
Saturday, January 22, 10:00 am

Between 1860 and 1960, a stunning 20% of Québec's total French-speaking population of five million people left the province, many in well-documented waves of economic migration to Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Others chose to go west instead, and settled in Western Canadian provinces or the American Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). As such, French Canadian immigrants form a major diasporic group shaping the history, the economy, the toponymy, and the overall immigrant culture of the Midwest. Examples from the French Canadian diaspora in the Saginaw Valley and Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in Northern Wisconsin will be used to illustrate the talk.

François Paré is Chair of French Studies at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of many books about French Canadian literature, and in 1993 he won the Governor General's Award, Canada's most prestigious prize for intellectual or artistic achievement.

Immigration and Migration in the Midwest
Panelists: Daniel Greene, The Newberry Library; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Michigan State University; Carla Zecher (chair), The Newberry Library
Saturday, January 22, 11:00 am

Two historians and a literary scholar will reflect on the French in the Midwest in light of their own work on the history of immigration, migration, and Native American encounters with Europeans in the Midwest. A discussion with the audience will follow their comments.

Daniel Greene is Interim Director of Research and Academic Programs and Director of the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library and a historian of ethnicity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Susan Sleeper-Smith is Professor of History at Michigan State University and author of Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Carla Zecher is Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, and a literary scholar of the French Renaissance and the literature of contact and conquest.

Using the Internet to Find Your French-Canadian Ancestors
Speaker: Louise St. Denis, National Institute for Genealogical Studies, Toronto
Saturday, January 22, 1:30 pm

Genealogists in search of their French-Canadian ancestors should be aware of three invaluable sources for their research: the Catholic Church, whose staff meticulously recorded baptismal, marriage and death information; the many volunteers who transferred that information to book form; and people who created websites and search engines that enable finding this information. Discovering French-Canadian ancestors can be very easy if you know where to look. This lecture will describe the most valuable sources available online and how to use them.

Louise St. Denis is Managing Director of the National Institute for Genealogical Studies' online certificate program at the University of Toronto. She is also an international speaker, author, and publisher of genealogical materials.

Official Website: http://www.newberry.org