I have always felt that there is an affinity between First Nations communities and French Canadians. Many First Nations people have French-Canadian ancestry, and a good number of French-Canadians have some distant First Nations ancestry. My DNA anaylsis says I am 99.5% European and 0.5% Native.
In any case, I was pleased to see that the Métis Nation of Ontario, has put its Root Ancestors Project online for the public. However, my enthousiasm was short-lived. I will be honest, I am dismayed at the outright anglicisation of many of the French given names and family names. It seems that colonialism is alive and well. I think it does more honour to our ancestors if we at least acknowledge the ethnic or linguistic nature of their names. While it might have been politically correct to speak of “Michael” Labatte and Joseph “King” in the 1800s, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they be called Michel Labatte and Joseph Roy in the 21st century. Unfortunately, the MNO’s genealogical project is a throwback to a time when genealogists such as Fr. Christian Dennisen, who wrote a seminal dictionnary on French Canadians of the Detroit River region, systematically anglicised names so that Jacques Baby became James Baby and Étienne Campau became Stephen Campau. On the OMN’s site, the venerable Bonneville becomes the rather dubious “Bonnerville”. It is also odd to see a name such as Thomas dit Tranchemontagne rendered as Tranch Montagne.
Furthermore, while it was once difficult to spell French names properly with the requisite accents, that is no longer the case. Technology now allows anyone with a keyboard to write Lespérance, Lafrenière, François, Bélair and Laramée with the greatest of ease. Clearly, since they write Métis with an accent everytime, one would think that the people at OMN could manage to spell the names of people such as Moïse Vallée and Trefflé Cascanette properly.
Moreover, the information would be more useful and interesting if they actually made the reader aware of some connections. For example, there is a document on the descendants of Joseph Roy aka Joseph King and Josephte Prisque Legris, and another on the descendants of Marie Prisque Legris and Louis Desjardins, but nowhere does it say that both Marie and Josephte were daughters of Prisque Legris and Marie Landry. Joseph Prisque, their brother, married Julie Cadieux, who is in the Cadieux document, but nothing links these three siblings on the site. The information is presented on cumbersome, static PDF files. It would be much more interactive if there were dynamic links that allowed readers to climb or descend family trees as they saw fit. Additionnally, the site lacks an overall searchable index of names. If you are interested in Prisques, you have to go through each genealogy or document and hope you don’t miss one.
I am glad this genealogical information is available, albeit in a bare-bones format, but I can’t help but think that it will lead to the spread of anglicised names for French-speaking ancestors. I hope that the OMN will change its policy on how it writes French names. Indeed, I would like to see them put up a French version of their site. What better way to honour their French-speaking forebears and to pay tribute to those in the province who still speak la langue de Molière?