Heroes and Voyagers

By James LaForest

After years of writing, these past couple of years I have encountered persistent writer’s block. It is not for lack of interest. It came on when I left social media about 2 1/2 years ago. I didn’t want to be trapped in the social media cycle. When I left Facebook I reached out to “friends” saying that I had “met” hundreds of people online over the years and I’d love to keep in touch with anyone who might like to as well. One person has remained in contact. Another person I reached out to acted as though I was a scammer. It was a lesson. Social media is entertainment, much like DNA testing.

Keeping abreast of the Franco Metis world, I’ve heard occasionally from fellow travelers about various goings on. For example, the trade in Woke politics has threatened the livelihood of a professor I know who takes the wrong opinion on the presence of Métis ethnogenesis in the Great Lakes region. While some academics are busy decolonizing their curricula, others are writing about the Métis families of early Detroit through the lens of Gender studies, layering absurdity upon absurdity. That’s academia for you.

My own early academic background was in Classical Studies. Coming from a family in which university education was rare, chance let it fall to me to take up a course of study that by the 80s was largely forgotten and considered irrelevant. There was only a handful of students in the program. What was once the natural course for future lawyers, clerics, businessmen, generals, etc, was now the domaine of academic dinosaurs. Someone once said I was born in the wrong century.

To paraphrase a great thinker, there was a time when we looked to the Classics as a society, to get our ideas of civilization. And you all know what we mean by the Classics: Latin, Greek, Ceasar, Cicero, Sparta, Aeschylus, and all that. You would have to be stubbornly Woke to not know what is meant by the Classics. No, not Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway. Not Bronte and Hugo. And certainly not the raft of dead 20th century lugnuts who’ve left nothing more than cynical, pornographic, violent trash tomes as their canon. Post Modern narcissism is not literature. It’s garbage.

The young men and women who voyaged to Quebec 400 years ago were remarkably strong and brave people. And when they prayed, they prayed in Latin. Well-read people today are fond of calling the early European settlers of the New World illiterate colonizers, as if to demean them for their crimes and supposed stupidity. How many Wokesters today have ever translated a line of Ceasar, much less prayed in Latin?

Their “illiteracy” aside, you have to be formed in the mold of the Classical heroes to brave the open oceans and a virgin land with nothing but grit and determination. What hatred some moderns have for the great exploits of the Voyageurs, routinely rowing thousands of miles and having the wits about them to learn enough of the Odawa and Kaskaskia tongues to buy furs and exchange tobacco. Illiterates indeed. Moderns hate them, because they could never be them. So they must be cancelled, all these hundreds of years later, as supposed murderous White colonizers who raped and pillaged Turtle Island. Slavers who killed all of brother beaver.

And what of the formidable women, who are routinely denigrated as prostitutes that were picked up off the street, given a chest of supplies and sent to Quebec to breed. Such are the reductive exercises of people who dream up calumnies to sell their ignorant ideas in the form of articles and books. The joke’s on us though. They get tenure, free money for life. Anyway, the academy is their prison. The Daughters of the King were the mothers of nations. Not only the mothers of the French Canadians, but also the Métis and a large number of Americans as well. Now those European fashions they brought, and which many young Indian women adored, are also signifiers of despised colonialism. The very objects by which communication and harmony among tribes was facilitated are scorned today, tainted by their European origins.

The odyssey of the men and women of New France is a glorious chapter of history. In the model of the great exploits that took Roman civilization to the far corners of what we call Europe today, they brought a new world of French culture and Roman faith to hundreds of primeval communities along thousands of miles of waterways.

Even then this begs a further expansion of the idea of the immortal ancients, for the Roman and Greek had ancestors too. The Etruscan, the Phoenician, the Indo-European. The great expanding hunters of land who poured forth from mountains to the east and north. “Colonizing” Old Europe, with its weak Gods, who could not stand up to the onslaught of the fierce warriors, they brought, like their descendants, new languages and new technology. They blended. They rose and fell, and left their traces in our blood, down thousands of years of ancient wandering to us.

Roman generals married among the elites of Germanic tribes and Gallic royalty. And when the empire faded, they hang on in their agrarian estates and passed their traditions down hundreds of years. How many of their progeny were scoffed at and beheaded in The Terror? What woke monstrosities await the sons of liberty and the descendants of the Voyageurs who still wade along the shores of their rivers, catching a humble fish, teaching his son about the strength of their line and the habits of the river. If there seems to be no escape, remember that the Classics, much older still, preserve in poetry the primeval exploits of the raider ancestors of the ancients. We are their heirs and our veins run with the blood of the heroes and voyagers of the Classical world who will outlive the weaklings who purport to lead and educate us today.