Michiganaise: Tracing Francophone Identity in the Great Lakes (Wayne State University Press, 2027)
In 1948, Claire-Marie Brisson's grandfather Ernest crossed into Detroit from Canada. His immigration form listed him as Canadian by nationality, French by race. Neither term captured what he actually was: a North American Francophone whose family had lived on this continent since 1664, whose last French-born ancestor had fled La Rochelle to escape religious persecution, and whose identity had been forged in the river valleys, mill towns, and industrial cities of North America.
Michiganaise: Tracing Francophone Identity in the Great Lakes traces four centuries of French-speaking life in Michigan and the broader Great Lakes region. It begins where any honest history of this land must: with the Anishinaabe nations whose knowledge of these waterways shaped everything that followed. From there, it moves through French colonial settlement, the ribbon farms that still pattern the landscape around Detroit, the French-language newspapers and mutual aid societies that held communities together, the folktales told in a dialect now nearly vanished, the radio waves that bound Detroit and Windsor into a single Francophone soundscape, and the digital networks through which dispersed communities are finding each other again today.
The book introduces the concept of "landed archipelagoes," which the author describes as dispersed Francophone communities separated by distance yet connected by shared language, memory, and cultural institutions.
Michigan is one island in that constellation. Understanding it means following the currents that connect the Rouge River to the St. Lawrence, Dearborn to Québec's Beauce region, the nineteenth-century printing press to the contemporary podcast.
Part family memoir, part cultural archaeology, Michiganaise asks what it means to belong to a place whose history runs deeper than any single name for it. It is also a meditation on what survives when a language goes quiet -- not in monuments or official policy, but in names, silences, recipes, and stories passed across kitchen tables. Language need not be spoken to shape belonging. This book is proof.