Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network

Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / July 1, 2025 / Local history, Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, Quebec City, Ruby Pratka, Sillery, Valcartier

Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Heritage preservation groups in Sillery and Valcartier are among the 15 organizations across the province that have received funding from the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) through the SHARE grant program, a Canadian Heritage-funded initiative to support projects “sharing the diverse history of English speakers in the province,” Sherbrooke-based QAHN announced last week.

SHARE program co-ordinator Julie Miller said she was “very pleased” about the diversity of the selected projects, which span the province from the Outaouais to the Gaspé, via the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships, the historically bilingual Pontiac region in Western Quebec, and Quebec City.

The Société d’histoire de Sillery (SHS) has received funding to contribute to the creation of a vast, bilingual archive of Quebec culinary history, from a multicultural, local perspective. “It’s an immense project to do an inventory of what exists in terms of culinary history, particularly anglophone and Indigenous culinary history – the Fédération Histoire Québec is doing a project on the scale of Quebec. We’re going to focus on the anglophone history of Sillery,” said SHS president Jean-Louis Vallée. The project will centre around inventorying, digitizing and translating recipes and stories about ingredients, traditions, communities and companies that have left their mark on local cuisine, writing articles which make those stories accessible to the general public, and indexing the content to make it easier to search. Vallée also said the SHS planned to conduct oral history interviews with older members of the anglophone community, to discuss culinary traditions and memories around food and cooking.

“Sillery has an interesting anglophone history that we haven’t made a lot of room for in the past 20 years,” Vallée said. “The population was 50-50 [francophone-anglophone] in the 19th century, and I don’t think we had a francophone mayor until the 1930s. There was a strong proportion of people of Irish ancestry, but every cultural community came here with its cooking methods and its recipes.”

Author Rose-Hélène Coulombe, a retired civil servant and self-described “memorialist” who has written three books on the culinary history of Quebec, is one of the project’s co-ordinators. She said the Sillery project will be the first step in expanding the wider project, dubbed Patrimoine ~ Identités, to the anglophone community. “We will have articles, recipes, updated recipes, talking about products and food that are key to identity,” she said. “We are working with students as well; I have a student who has done an article on the history of pouding chômeur, on how we used to use buttermilk, that sort of thing.” The ultimate goal, Coulombe and Vallée said, is to create a provincewide archive, using Sillery as a pilot project.

The Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier Historical Committee has received funding to finish a documentary about Valcartier Elementary School, to mark the school’s 75th anniversary. The project began shortly before the pandemic and was paused due to public health measures. “We finally finished the interviews last spring,” said historical committee president Debbie Chakour. “We have multigenerational families and seniors sharing their experiences. It was easy to find families where three generations went to the school. One of the seniors we spoke to was the daughter of a teacher; she was actually born in the school building and lived there as a baby!”

Chakour said the small school was deeply linked with the local English-speaking community and the growing bilingual community on the nearby military base. “Twenty- five years ago, there were about 50 kids; now there are closer to 120, and they almost sit on top of each other. They may need to build a new school in the next few years, which is another reason why we want to document it. Let’s celebrate the memories while we have them!”

Chakour hopes the film will be completed by the end of February, 2026. “The deadline is the end of March, but you can’t really do anything in March in Valcartier because there are too many Irish things going on,” she said.

Miller said there will be a third round of SHARE grant funding distributed to heritage projects in February 2026. Organizations must be members of QAHN to apply for funding. To learn more, contact her directly at julie@qahn.org.

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National history museum project voted into law

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / October 30, 2024 / Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, First Nations Education Council, Indigenous, Institut Tshakapesh, Musée des civilisations, National History Museum of Quebec, Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, Quebec City, Quebec English-speaking Communities Research Network, Ruby Pratka

National museum project voted into law

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

A third major museum will open in Quebec City in spring 2026 if all goes according to the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government’s current plans. The Musée national d’histoire du Québec will open in the Camille-Roy Pavilion of the Séminaire du Québec, near the Notre-Dame-de- Québec Basilica-Cathedral.

Premier François Legault and Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe announced the project at the Musée de la Civilisation du Québec (MCQ) in April. At the time, Legault said the new museum would trace the story of the Quebec nation “from the First Nations, who were here before us and helped us” to the present day.

The project, which was voted into law by the National Assembly earlier this month, initially drew criticism from Indigenous and anglophone groups for its focus on white, French-Canadian historical perspectives.

However, after 14 hours of hearings in front of the National Assembly standing committee on culture and education, First Nations Education Council (FNEC) executive director Denis Gros-Louis said he believes “we got the train back on track.”

The FNEC, the Assembly of First Nations Quebec–Labrador (AFNQL) and the Institut Tshakapesh submitted a joint brief laying out recommendations for how the project could better incorporate Indigenous perspectives. CEPN representatives also testified before the committee last month.

The brief called on the committee to ensure that Indigenous perspectives, educational approaches and artifact conservation practices were built into the project and that Indigenous groups were regularly consulted.

“There were 14 hours of discussion before the committee and in 10 of those hours, First Nations and Inuit issues were discussed at some point,” Gros- Louis said.

“We [the CEPN, the APNQL and the Institut Tshakapesh] have always worked together to make sure that teachers have access to relevant content [about Indigenous people] because the content [in textbooks] is old and clichéd. It’s our main purpose to make sure things are well thought out and relevant.” Gros-Louis said he believes the Indigenous groups’ recommendations “will be part of the DNA of the project.”

He said he saw the museum as “a great opportunity to talk about [Indigenous] teachings and spirituality and ceremonies … where does the word Quebec come from? What does it mean when someone says they are from a clan? We have had great political leaders, and artists, and major achievements, like how we got our own schools back [after the residential school era]. We want [museum goers] to see Indigenous people as coming from a different culture and language, [but] not as UFOs or as a threat to the [Quebec] nation.”

The Quebec English-speaking Communities Research Network (QUESCREN) and the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) also submitted memoranda, although neither was asked to speak before the committee. “Given our preoccupations, we thought it was really important to ensure that the notion of the Quebec nation, or let’s say the collectivity of Quebec, include realities of English-speaking Quebecers, among others,” said Concordia University historian and QUESCREN co-ordinator Lorraine O’Donnell. In the group’s memorandum, co-authored by O’Donnell and fellow historian Patrick Donovan, they noted that one in five Quebecers speaks English at home and the English presence in Quebec dates back to 1668. They called on the government to go beyond stereotype-driven “tokenism” when telling the stories of English-speaking Quebecers and their interactions with the francophone majority and other groups.

“English speakers are often reduced to the image of a minority of conquerors and privileged people. Although there was indeed a small English-speaking elite holding a dispro- portionate share of power, the majority of English-speaking Quebecers are descendants of immigrants from modest origins who arrived well after the conquest of 1759,” they added. Like Gros-Louis, they said they saw the project as an opportunity to improve mutual understanding.

“I’m confident that at the very least, [committee members] took note of the fact that our brief was submitted and took a look at it,” O’Donnell added, saying it was “heartening” to see that groups like the Fédération d’Histoire du Québec had also called for improved representation of minority groups.

The MCQ is expected to play a central role in the development of the new museum; no one there was immediately available to comment.

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