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Originally Posted by VANRIDERFAN
I'm still surprised that people are amazed at the amount of French names for regions and towns on the Prairies. Do history courses in Quebec touch on the subject of New France and its exploration of the interior of North America? Or is it like the rest of Canada and kind of glossed over?
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It is most definitely covered but as part of the history of exploration. One of my kids is actually doing a project on Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who founded Louisiana, right now.
But they don't really cover much about the history of the peoples left behind, like the Franco-Manitobans, Franco-Ontarians, etc. For kids who are into history they'll hear about the Manitoba schools question and Regulation 17 in Ontario, and of course the deportation of the Acadians starting in 1755 is covered. But except for the Acadians (who have pretty high visibility in Quebec), it's almost as if all of these people vanished (were assimilated), kind of the same way that francophones vanished from those areas where they modestly settled in the central U.S.
In fairness, French is pretty discreet in most places you go outside Quebec. Even if I just go to Ottawa everything seems pretty wholly English from store signage to the service you get to conversations between strangers. Yeah there is some French here and there but if you are not very attuned to these matters it's easy to think that bilingual road signs are for Quebec tourists or because it's the capital, and any French you overhear is simply people from Gatineau who schlepped over the bridge to shop in Ontario.
If you dig deeper you discover the francophone side of the city, but it's a bit of a matter of luck, or you have to be the type who goes looking for it.
I doubt that those students from Baie-Comeau would have clued in to the francophone reality of Manitoba, had their hosts not explicitly taken them to St-Boniface (or St-Pierre-Jolys or... etc.) so they could see their "western cousins" in the flesh...