








d families must somehow be supported in their task of caring for and socializing their children and helped to gain new understandings about human differences that should not matter, such as race, and actions that are unsupportable, such as negative stereotyping and discrimination. Education continues to be a great need in the workplace, despite recent advances. Several instances of racial or ethnic discrimination have been widely reported in the media recently, involving
issues that range from verbal and physical harassment to problems of hiring, promotion, and pay. The backlash against affirmative action policy reminds us that lasting social progress is ultimately dependent on popular understandings that support that change.
Political and government leaders need to understand the key role they play in the resolution of racial and ethnic conflicts, and education can help. The preparation of informed leadership will depend on the accessibility of useful information about what the real problems are, about how schools can continue to be part of a constructive solution, and about how social policy and legislation are involved. A role for anthropologists is clearly implied in all of these potential educational sites.
But neither anthropologists, nor families, nor school teachers, nor politicians, acting alone, can turn an entire nation s history around. All must contribute to such a transformation based on education. That education must be based on dialogue, a sense of responsibility to resolve common societal problems, and knowledge of our common and group histories. Only when we begin to understand the present as directly linked to the past will we be in a position to explore new ways of thinking about intergroup relations in a free democracy.
Jose Macias is an associate professor in the Division of Bicultural Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The research reported here was supported by the University Research Committee, the Department of Educational Studies, and the Ethnic Studies Program, all units of the University of Utah. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Elizabeth Escalera-Bell in the preparation of the manuscript.
1.	All community names and personal names are pseudonyms.
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Article 43
NO CANADA?
After the referendum, a chill descends on Montreal
Gw? Lawson
Guy Lawson is a writer living in Toronto.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
 Rainer Maria Rilke ^n a frigid Monday night last November, four weeks after Quebec s referendum on separating from tbe rest of Canada, I took a walk up Montreal's main north-south street, known to the city's French inhabi-tants as Boulevard St-Laurent and 1  its English inhabitants as St. Lawrence or, as some still call it, the Mam. It is, by tradition, the segregation line of Montreal: east is L^nch, west is English. The first blizzard of winter had hit town,
and city workers were out with their plows. The snow was falling sideways. As I trudged past chic bistros, la look grunge bars, bilingual beggars ("as-tu trente sous?" fol-Wed by "buddy, can you spare some change?"), there were no visible traces of the latest crisis to tear w^ugh the city. During the refer-endum campaign, every lamppost ad been covered with posters.
Risk your job? the federalists asked; vote
Ab  n AIL SeParatists
Yes to independence becomes possible the answered. But the
morning after the vote the posters were gone, instant ephemera.
Most of the stores on the street were shabby and forlorn, low-rise buildings pocked with FOR RENT signs. Plus qa change, plus c'est la meme chose. But in the quiet of the night and the slanting snow, St-Laurent seemed to me a cultural war zone, dividing a city stuck somewhere between the past and the present, between the enervating, centuries-old French-English conflict and the cosmopolitan society of today, between the last referendum and the next one.
1 had come to Montreal in the final tense days before the vote on October 30 expecting to see a country, my country, die. When the campaign began in September the sovereigntist leader was Jacques Parizeau, the premier of Quebec, an oddly Anglophilic man from a wealthy Montreal family, with a taste for three-piece suits and pompous gestures. Parizeau promised voters that Quebec would have an economy the size of Austria's; that it would be Canada's equal, a full member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a nation entire of itself. Federalists in Ottawa and Quebec City said that separation would have disastrous financial consequences: The Canadian dollar would plummet, the stock market would collapse, businesses
would flee. In the last referendum on separation, in 1980, Premier Rene Levesque had argued, as Parizeau was now doing, that Quebec could stand alone economically. It was an argument that failed to resonate, apparently; the separatists lost, 60 percent to 40 percent.
In 1995 Parizeau was certain that another appeal to the voters  financial interests would prevail, and his government confidently selected experts to report on the economic impact of sovereignty. But in the early weeks of the campaign the reports came back, and they were uncertain at best and entirely gloomy at worst. Trying to run on a platform at once culturally conservative nothing will change; your language and way of life will be protected and socially liberal everything will change; together we will at last build a just society  the separatists trailed badly in the polls. Quebec s voters seemed unmoved by the whole idea of indepen-
:. Some federalists even talked of destroying the nationalist movement forever.
dence.
15 on October 7 control of the campaign changed hands. Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois, the separatist party that held fifty-three of Quebec s seventy-five seats in the federal parliament in
From Harper s magazine, April 1996, pp. 67-71 RennntArt bv soecial permission.
k Harper's Magazine Foundation. , 74.78.   b* the H
aii rights reserved.
22!
8. ETHNIC FACTOR: INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGES
Ottawa, became the de facto leader of the sovereigntists, and what had been under Parizeau a tedious discourse about passports and currency and deficits was transformed into a bitter struggle to forge a new nation. Bouchard had been a small-town lawyer and had learned to speak English late in life, but his American wife and his years as Canada s ambassador to France had given him a reputation, somewhat exaggerated, for sophistication and worldliness. A year earlier Bouchard had lost a leg in a near-death fight with necrotizing fasciitis, the flesh-eating disease, and his survival and recovery had come to symbolize the movement for independence. Bouchard dismissed the ominous economic reports with a wave of his hand. He ridiculed surveys showing that many voters were confused by the referendum question, which was artfully designed to imply that separation might not really mean separation. He ignored statements by Quebec s aboriginal people, who claim vast tracts of the province as their traditional land, that they would separate from Quebec if Quebec separated from Canada.
Parizeau was a technician; one of his few attempts at emotional symbolism was a mawkish poem to the Quebecois nation that he had commissioned from a committee consisting of two lawyers, a sociologist, a journalist, and a folk singer. Bouchard, on the other hand, understood anger and the power of an image: In a televised address just prior to the referendum, Bouchard held up a Montreal tabloid newspaper from 1981. On the cover was a lurid color photograph of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and current Prime Minister Jean Chretien, both Francophone Quebecers, laughing at a news conference the morning after what separatists all know as the Night of the Long Knives. During constitutional negotiations in Ottawa, the story goes, while Rene Levesque slept in his hotel bed, Trudeau and Chritien (who was Trudeau s justice minister) cut a deal with Canada s other provincial premiers to create a new constitution. For Bouchard, the referendum was about Quebec s humiliation, and putting an end to it. The rallying cry of the separatists, Maftres chez nous (masters in our own house), pricked
226
the collective unconscious. Real and imagined Quebecois history since the conquest of the French by the British in 1759 rose from the dead. A vote for Oui became a vote for  we. 
With Bouchard leading the campaign, a solitary figure leaning resolutely on his cane as he shuffled from speech to speech, the separatist cause climbed steadily, inexorably, in the polls. What had been an obscure Canadian nonstory, just another chapter in an endless saga of debate and dispute, suddenly had become world news.
By the time 1 arrived in Montreal, the federalist campaign, bewildered by the hurricane of passion sweeping across Quebec, had fallen into desperate and frenzied confusion. At the Unity Rally staged in the center of the city three days prior to the referendum, more than 100,000 Canadians, mostly English-speaking, many bused in from other provinces, waved flags and NON signs stapled to the ends of hockey sticks. People of every skin color jostled and shoved, always politely, while politicians babbled incomprehensibly over the huge loudspeakers, the feedback punctuated by one recognizable word:  Canada! ... 
