Relational Bilingualism and the Prairie Imaginary: Rereading Martin Jérôme’s Souvenirs d’autrefois (1916)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article revisits Souvenirs d’autrefois (1916) by Martin Jérôme, a little-known memoir written by a Métis politician and public servant in early twentieth-century Manitoba, Canada. Far from a nostalgic recollection, the text is analyzed here as a civic intervention, a political, cultural, and linguistic act that anticipates contemporary debates on multilingual coexistence and linguistic justice. To interpret Jérôme’s work, the article introduces the concept of relational bilingualism, a framework that foregrounds language as a lived, asymmetrical, and historically embedded practice shaped by memory, place, and affect. Unlike institutional models based on legal symmetry, relational bilingualism emerges through negotiation, vulnerability, and community transmission. Through close reading and historical contextualization, the article positions Jérôme alongside other contemporaries such as Lionel Groulx, Donatien Frémont, Adrien-Gabriel Morice, and A.-H. de Trémaudan, mapping the intellectual and ideological field of francophone Western Canada. The final sections explore the enduring relevance of Jérôme’s vision for present-day debates on official bilingualism, digital archives, education, and Métis media. Manitoba, often seen as peripheral, appears here as a microcosm of global struggles around memory, reconciliation, and linguistic pluralism. Comparative perspectives from postcolonial contexts such as Algeria, Lebanon, or New Zealand help frame Jérôme’s narrative as part of a broader inquiry into how minoritized communities sustain language and identity in multilingual societies. By tracing the entanglements of language, land, and memory, this article argues that Jérôme’s bilingual modernity is not only historically significant, but theoretically generative: it offers a grammar of relational belonging that resonates beyond Canada’s borders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".