Goscinny and Uderzo's Gaul is just a part of a whole fictionnal Ancient World where characters have roman names that end in -us, gaulic names that end in -ix and germanic names that end in -ic. Speech bubbles with different fonts render different languages in a very imaginative way. The duo made their little guy travel around the World, even into places that were not known at the time (cartoon history is like cartoon physics). There was Asterix in Britain, Asterix in Belguim, Asterix in Switzerland, Asterix in India...
...but the closest Asterix got to Canada was Asterix and the Great Crossing where, ouf for fish, Asterix and Obelix pull a pre-columbian transatlantic contact and and up in what can be theorized to be Newfoundland (because the vikings happen to drop by at the same time!). The natives that Asterix meet there are more or less of a blend of all the natives ever shown in westerns. Pretty un-politically correct by today's standards, even for a "gros nez"-style cartoon where everyone is parodied but I'll give Goscinny and Uderzo credit here; they were drawing this all the way from Europe, they have an excuse for ignorance that we, canadians don't have on people that live right near us.
I like to imagine the Asterix treatment fully applied to Canada, make those fictionnal natives a blend of their past and modern canadian culture, with names that end in -a (like Donnaconna), who play hockey, (the vikings are in town, here comes another 3-0 gold medal!), like maple syrup and speak with a Quebec accent, but rendered in one of those "exotic" fonts...
Hold on, there! With all that's been said and done with native culture that thing could be seen as insultive. I'm not saying that thing should be drawn tomorrow, by anyone, or ever. The World is not ready for it. But the reason I brought it up is because our native canadians are still there and are much closer to us than the Gauls are to modern France and yet while the french say "Our ancestors, the Gauls", canadian kids still learn in school that everything canadian, all of their roots and history came with Champlain's ship in 1604. Yeah, we are taught a little bit about the natives in history school, almost by guilt. That was not Canada, yet, that was just the people before us...
And yet, look at all the canadian stuff that comes directly from the natives or was heavily inspired by them, from hockey, to maple syrup, to snowshoes to the animals on our coins! Even our multiculturalism is closer to their system of tribes than european nation-sates and any canadian who can say he does not have one drop of native blood is either a fresh immigrant or pretty stupid. In some areas of New-Brunswick, the line between "white" and "native" is pretty blurried; you can literally go speak to someone with very aboriginal-like face and get an answer with an Acadian accent that puts La Sagouine to shame. Yet, we are told that Canada is that thing that grew on top of native culture, an european transplant to this continent but culturally and even genetically (if that means something) things are not all native and white. There's a lot of in-between that was just ignored. All that apartheid-like regime of reserves and status cards seems suddenly pretty random (on top of being inhumane), measuring and separating and "managing" something that's pretty hard to define.
Really, what does separate us from the natives that doesn't separate Asterix from modern France after all? What is an identity? What is a country? Language, so dear to Quebec separatists? Not only did Asterix not speak the same language as modern french people, their language comes from Gaul's invaders. Asterix didn't have the same religion as modern France either (historically, the "eldest daughter of the Catholic church" by Toutatis!). Racially, France saw a few invasions of its own (Vikings, Franks, Huns, Visigoths, and that's just the biggest ones, the latest one was called World War II and our two cartoonists were there to see it.) and yet they don't consider it the radical, complete anihilation of a national entity and its replacement by another, but an evolution, a continuum rather than two distinct things, one without a future and one without a past.
What is a country? Is it a government?
A government is there to pretend to be the State, the nation and yet between ethnicity, religion and language, it is possibly the thing that changes the most often. Between Asterix and modern France, Gaul had romans, a right handful of merovingians kings, a left handful of carolingian kings, 16 Louis'es, two Napoleons and five republics. The dynasty of monsieur l'État c'est moi ("I am the State") lost its head in 1789 and yet that country never stopped considering itself France.
I never knew Julius Cesar, but I know from Asterix that he was a tougher S.O.B than Harper and yet he too screamed "You too, my son!" one day. The tar sands industry will have its moment like that, good riddance! People who want power over the World and have so little power over themselves come and go. They are overthrown, outsmarted or bascically commit slow suicide by ambition but nations go on forever, no matter what is thrown at them. What Canada is now, all that is unique to us, our very national soul no matter our skin color was already there at the dawn of time, way before Cartier set foot here and "gave" it its name. It will also be there long after the mining companies, the oil companies, capitalism itself, the RCMP and the parliament buildings will have lost all meaning, perhaps punchlines in the cartoons of the future, like Ceasar.
Those assholes are stealing, hijacking our identity as a nation the same way the king of France said "I am the State". Hey, Canada, that's us, the people, not politicians or capitalists! To say otherwise is to surrender something sacred to those thugs and when aboriginal culture is in danger, it is fully Canada's culture that is in danger, not an obscure precursor of it.
In the meantime, that artificial division between two kinds of canadians, "settlers" and "natives", is buying them some serious time...
