By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
It was November 15, 1976, and Quebec voters had just brought to power the first sovereigntist government in the province’s history. In the coming years, thousands of English-speaking Quebecers would leave the province to escape what for them had become an untenable political climate; Law 101 and the 1980 sovereignty referendum were just a few years away. Brendan O’Donnell was sitting in a Montreal tavern with his brother Kevin, thinking about what it all meant for the English-speaking community. Lord Durham famously mocked French-speaking Canadians as a “people without a history;” the O’Donnell brothers were worried that with the rise of Quebec nationalism, the same fate would ironically befall the English.
“He [Kevin] said no one had written a definitive history of English-speaking Quebec. If someone wanted to write a history, they would need secondary sources,” Brendan O’Donnell said.
In the intervening years, O’Donnell, who now lives in Stanbridge East, has compiled an exhaustive bibliography of works on English-speaking Quebec. Over the course of his career with Parks Canada, he travelled widely and spent his free days in university libraries, noting every work he could find that referenced the history of English-speaking Quebec – “from the University of British Columbia to Memorial University in Newfoundland.”
First published in print, the bibliography went online-only in 2009; now hosted by the Quebec English-speaking Communities Research Network (QUESCREN), it contains over 14,000 titles in multiple languages.
Next month, the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) will honour him with the Marion Phelps Award, given annually to a person who has made outstanding long-term contributions to the preservation and promotion of Anglophone heritage in Quebec.
“It’s an honour to receive the award for this project,” he told the BCN. “It’s not a book that explains Quebec history; it’s a tool for researchers.”
O’Donnell is a longtime volunteer at the Missisquoi Museum, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this spring. He observed that no museum or university department is dedicated to sharing the history of English-speaking Quebec as a whole. “We tend to work in silos – we talk about Irish and Jewish and Italian Canadians in Quebec, and about English Quebec literature, but no one has really taken an interdisciplinary approach to English Quebec history. There is QUESCREN, but there’s no faculty of English Quebec studies. There’s the QAHN quarterly magazine [Quebec Heritage News] but there’s no peer-reviewed scholarly journal. There are the small regional museums such as the Missisquoi Museum which do a lot of work on English-speaking Quebec, but there’s no museum specifically dedicated to English-speaking Quebec history. One of the things I’ve been hoping this project will spawn is a discipline called English Quebec Studies [encompassing] the Italian, Jewish, Irish and Black anglophone communities, and people in the Pontiac and the Gaspé and the Townships, their history as well.”
QAHN president Matthew Farfan said advocating for the preservation of anglophone history is “a constant battle” in today’s Quebec – a battle to which O’Donnell has dedicated countless hours. “We have to be vigilant and make sure our community is reflected in the history of modern Quebec,” he said, alluding to the history museum in Quebec City proposed by the Coalition Avenir Quebec government, where the place of English-speaking communities remains unclear. “It’s really important to recognize people, especially volunteers, who are a huge part of preserving that history.”
QAHN will present the Marion Phelps Award and the Richard Evans Award (given to an organization or group that has made a significant contribution to the preservation of anglophone heritage) at a ceremony at the Maison Forget in Montreal on June 29. For more information about attending, email home@qahn.org.