The Gogards

Survival International, the world's foremost organization for the defense of indigenous rights, lists several dozen uncontacted tribes, the vast majority of whom are located in the Amazon rainforest or in the highlands of New Guinea. There are a few such groups scattered across Indian Ocean islands and in Southeast Asia. But curiously Survival fails to mention the one remaining uncontacted (or nearly uncontacted) tribe in North America: the inhabitants of the settlement called 'Gog', 30 kilometers or so from the town of Magog in the Canadian province of Quebec. 

No one is sure how or when they got there, and while all attempts to enter into direct communication with them have resulted in violent resistance, over the centuries some basic information has been obtained as to their linguistic and genetic identity. 

The 'Gogards', as they are called, speak a variety of French, an archaic langue d'oïl dialect that can be traced to the County of Anjou in northwestern France, and whose principal phonetic features --including the only known case outside of Africa of a double-closure obstruent consonant, otherwise known as a 'click'-- are believed to have died out in Europe by the late middle ages. 

Some other features of their dialect are noteworthy as well. While the Québécois are often known to redouble the là that they append to common nouns, e.g., C'est un beau cheval là-là (That there's a good-looking horse), the Gogards will repeat the suffix four or more times, as a form of emphasis: C'est un beau cheval là-là-là-là-là (That there's a damn fine horse!). When it comes to swearing, they could not be more different from the Québécois, who have borrowed terms from the Catholic mass to express what ought not be expressed: Tabarnak! (tabernacle), Câlice! (chalice), 'Stie! (a contraction of hostie, or host), etc. The Gogards know nothing of this and instead swear by invoking the names of some of the most familiar features of the natural landscape, sometimes stringing together several such features in long genitive phrases, e.g.: gasôn d'herbbe de feüylles de buÿsson d'ârbre! (compare the metropolitan French: Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde!).

You may have gathered by now the significance of the riddle posed by the Gogards: they speak a dialect of French that died out long before the age of European exploration, and in their swear words there is some evidence that they left northern Europe even before the rise of Christianity, as it is not the appurtenances of the Christian God that they take in vain, but rather the very most common manifestations of vegetal nature. What is more, there is an apparent reference to these people in the journals of Quentin Quenau, who sailed with Jacques Cartier in what was supposedly the first European expedition up the St. Lawrence River in 1534. Quenau writes in an entry from July 21 of that year:

Nous estions fort surpris de voyr, sur les rives du grand Fleuve, des gens habillés comme des Chrestiens, qui parloient une sorte de françois, mais qui, à toutte evidence, ne vouloient point parler avec nous. 

[We were very surprised to see, on the banks of the great river, people dressed like Christians, who spoke a sort of French, but who, from what we could see, had no desire to speak to us.]

So the question imposes itself on us: just who are these Gogards? Since the 1950s archeologists have been aware of scattered pre-Columbian artifacts in northeastern North America suggesting a European provenance, such as the so-called 'Maine penny', a silver coin dated to the reign of an 11th-century Norwegian king. There are many other objects that have popped up since then --the Delaware brooch, the Carolina runestone-- but all of them are held to be controversial at best, and utterly fraudulent at worst. The truth is there is precious little material evidence for pre-Columbian contacts between Europeans and continental North America.

Beyond material objects, though, there is much indirect evidence coming from oral traditions on both sides of the ocean. It has long been known that Basque fishermen had detailed knowledge of North Atlantic sea routes centuries before Columbus set out, and some fairly reputable scholars have argued that Athabaskan oral traditions indicate that there were likely Basque encounters with Native Americans going back as early as the 14th century. But for the most part none of the scholars who have investigated the material and cultural evidence for pre-Columbian encounters have been prepared to take seriously the elephant in the Americanists' room, the single most powerful bit of evidence for distant contacts across the ocean: to wit, the Gogards themselves, who stand as  living testimony to extensive trans-Atlantic exchange dating back to at least the high middle ages. 

In part the reticence can be explained by the near-impossibility of gathering any direct information about the Gogards, as they have brutally murdered every outsider who has ever tried to enter their community, beginning in 1534 with Quentin Quenau himself, whose blood-caked and disemboweled body was mounted on a wooden spike outside the fortification of Gog, with a sign around his neck that read: Laÿssez-nous trankilles. 

Yet over the centuries some brave souls have managed, though it cost them their lives, to penetrate the Gogard community and to share with the outside world a bit of what they learned. There was for example the R. P. François-Xavier Laflamme, S.J., who in 1936 published the first and only Dictionnaire français-gogard. It is thanks to Laflamme's pioneering work that we know anything at all about the particularities of the Gogard dialect. The Jesuit scholar had been a defender of a pseudoscientific and ultranationalist theory he called 'pan-Cajunism', according to which the original inhabitants of North America were Francophone, indeed according to which French is the primordial language of all humanity. As Laflamme explains in the introduction to his Dictionnaire:

The Godless Soviet communists have their Japhetic theory of language, as defended by the academician N. Ya. Marr and his associate Kolin Makginsky, who say that the primordial words from which speech itself is born are 'hand' and 'labour', and thus that the quintessential expression of human language is nothing other than the phrase 'rabota rukoi', or what in our language is called 'travail à main', and in English is known colloquially as a 'hand-job'.

Laflamme continues: 

The Moslem Turks for their part have the so-called 'Sun language' theory, according to which it is a variety of archaic Turkish from which all languages descend: when the ancient Turkic Sumerians looked up and beheld the Sun, so it is claimed, they emitted an awe-struck 'agh!', and thus was language born. But what these theories both miss is the primordial character of the French language, which, as I have established in my extensive analysis of its numerous dialects throughout the world, antedates all other languages in human history, and indeed can alone claim to be pre-Babelic.

Laflamme argued that the most ancient homeland of the French language, and thus of humanity itself, was the bayou country of southern Louisiana. The Jesuit was not troubled by the historical fact that the Cajuns only arrived in that region in the mid-19th century, having been expelled by the British from the Canadian maritime provinces. He claimed that this was a pure fabrication, that in fact Cajun French was the most archaic form of the language in existence, and that the supposed borrowings from Choctaw --bayou, chaoui, etc.-- in fact went the other way, from Cajun into Choctaw. Laflamme maintained that Gogard was in fact a tiny vestigial pocket of indigenous North American French, like Cajun, that had managed to survive in spite of the tininess and isolation of Gog thanks to that community's ferocious hostility to outsiders.  

It is not known how Father Laflamme succeeded in infiltrating the community. What is known is that he made at least three visits over the course of the 1930s, and that after his last, in September, 1938, he was found by a group of stick-ball-playing boys, naked and bloodied, in the parking lot of a casse-croûte on the outskirts of Magog, barely clinging to life. The boys reported that just before expiring the brave priest uttered only one cryptic word: tunnel.

For years there was intense speculation about how the Gogards could possibly sustain their community, generation after generation, in the absence of any exchange with the outside world. Laflamme's final exclamation helped fuel the theory that the inhabitants of Gog had built underground tunnels extending all the way to Magog, from whose stores and restaurants they, so the theory went, pilfered all the food and clothing and medical supplies they needed. Indeed, if the theory were true it would explain the extraordinarily high burglary rate in that otherwise low-crime, family-oriented city. 

The casse-croûtes and pharmacies of Magog had been regular victims since at least the 1920s, but the most hard-hit of all the local businesses was the Kentucky Fried Chicken, locally known as Poulet Frit à la Kentucky that first opened on rue Saint-Patrice in 1983. As regional manager Jean-Pierre Cyr explained to the local TV news after an early raid: "They took pretty much everything. Not just the frozen chicken pieces, but the mashed-potato mix, the biscuit dough, the coleslaw tubs, the crouton baggies, the dressing packets. I mean everything."

After over a hundred such raids, the PFK was forced to close its doors in 1996. Another one opened further out of the city, on rue Bellevue, but soon that one too fell to the raiders. Rumours of the Gogards' responsibility had reached a fever pitch when, in 1998, for the first time, the Canadian authorities obtained decisive evidence that the PFK products were indeed disappearing behind the spiked wooden walls of the community at Gog. Aerial photographs had turned up what appeared to be a great mound of chicken bones in a central yard of the settlement, and further soil analysis on its outskirts showed high levels of titanium dioxide, sodium nitrite, and hydrolized soy protein, all known ingredients in a number of the fast-food chain's products. 

This stepped-up snooping by the authorities came in the wake of a series of tragic disappearances in the Southwestern Quebec region. Who can forget the pictures of two-year-old Vincent Duchastel that began appearing on milk cartons in the summer of 1997, followed by dear little Colleen Dennehy, up with her family from Vermont? By the first summer of the new millennium their bones, along with those of a handful of other children, had been dredged up on the banks of Lake Memphremmagog, showing signs of blunt injury and, some forensic analyses suggested, of having been sucked right clean before disposal.

You can imagine, then, my trepidation when, in the summer of 2001, I, a fresh, 29-year-old recruit of the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, was given the assignment of making contact with the Gogards. Why on earth did they ask me? I couldn't even speak French, let alone Gogard French. I was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. My name is Dylan, for crying out loud. I was certain I would not get out alive.

I'll never forget the morning we drove out to Gog from the regional office in Sherbrooke. My boss Nadeau, sitting next to me in the back seat of the SUV, busied himself hooking me up with wireless mics, drilling me on what I was and was not supposed to ask. At some point he reached into a large paper bag and pulled out a bucket of KFC. Or PFK. Whatever. "When you get within shouting distance of whoever they send out to meet you, offer him this."

There was a dirt trail of about a mile or so leading slightly upwards through a meadow spotted with birch. When I arrived near the top of the incline I saw the wall of great logs surrounding Gog, like some medieval Siberian fortress. A man was standing outside of the wall, as if waiting for me. He was wearing a bowler hat, like a woman in the Bolivian Andes, and a leather tunic like some 11th-century workman. He had on checkerboard Converse hi-tops, and festive Bermuda shorts. He was, in short, completely unplaceable in time and space. 

"Je vous ai apporté du PFK," I shouted. ["I've brought you some KFC."]

"Va-t-en," he called back.  ["Get outta here."]

"C'est la 'Méga Bouffe'." ["It's the 'Super Meal Deal'."]

He made a face as if to suggest he was interested, and I stepped a bit closer.

"Je suis venu pour vous poser quelques questions sur la disparition de Colleen Dennehy," I called out. ["I've come to ask you some questions about the disappearance of Colleen Dennehy."]

"Buÿsson de fleurre d'ârbre de poisson des nuâges de soleyl!" he shouted back. ["Fuck off you cocksucking shithead!"]

I could see I wasn't getting anywhere with this direct approach, so I attempted to do as I had been instructed and to engage him on the profound question of Gogard origins. My boss was yelling into my earpiece to make sure I pronounced everything just right. (What an asshole.)

"Parlez-moi de vos ancêtres," I called out. "Est-ce qu'ils sont autochtones dans cette région, ou est-ce qu'ils sont arrivés d'ailleurs? [Tell me about your ancestors. Are they indigenous in this region, or did they come from somewhere else?]

"Peu ymportte," was his reply. ["Doesn't matter."]

"D'où est-ce que ça arrive que vous parlez français?" ["How is it that you speak French?"]

"Peu ymportte."

It was at that very moment that I felt the sting of the dart piercing my shoulder, and I saw the man in a top hat in his perch above one of the great logs preparing to launch another from his blow-gun. I turned to run and felt another stinging in my right calf. I could tell the darts were poisoned, but only some time later would I find out that the Gogards had learned to extract toxic levels of sodium nitrite from their KFC in order to use it as a weapon. The government doesn't want to admit it (it doesn't fit nicely with the story of all the medals they gave me before my honorable discharge in 2008), but I know that's what's behind the pancreatic cancer I've been fighting for the past two years. 

Anyhow I stumbled into Nadeau's arms and was rushed to the hospital, and now I have the peculiar distinction of being the only person in recorded history to have survived a direct encounter with the Gogards. Yet they remain as much of a mystery as they were when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence waterway almost 500 years ago. 

Over the past decade popular opinion in Quebec society has become deeply polarized on the Gogard question. There are many, particularly in the small towns and countryside, who continue to blame them for the disappearances of children throughout the Southwestern region (which continue unabated), who would like to see the authorities crack down and be rid of the menace once and for all. "Who cares if they speak French?" a certain Manon Deslauriers of Chicoutimi told Radio-Canada during a special 2011 report on popular attitudes towards the Gogards. "It's Gogard French. I mean, they eat children. What kind of Francophones eat children?" 

At the same time, a popular movement has arisen, particularly in the metropolis of Montreal, in defense of the integrity of the Gogard community, insisting on a firm hands-off approach and an unwavering respect for their right to live their lives unmolested by the outside world. Even in the best-case scenario, it's going to remain a difficult balance. I recently read an article in the Montreal Gazette (I hear they still print that piece-of-shit rag; anyhow I only look at it from time to time online) about some American profiteers who are now leading 'Gogard Safari Tours' where they take oblivious tourists up to the very spot where I was struck with poison darts, and titillate them with stories of cannibalism and savagery. So far, the Gogards have left these idiots alone, but who knows what tragedies await us? 

Anyhow, I'm done with all of that. I'm in Houston, enduring my chemo, reading Laurence Sterne. I only wrote this up because you asked me to tell you, my dear friend Neil, what it was that happened to me those many years ago, what it was I did not wish to speak about. Well, there you have it. 

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Comments

[Antti Nannimus]

Hi Dylan,

Please ask Cathy to inform Justin that any obligation to Neil or whomever else is redeemed in full. However I still wonder, and what hasn't been made clear, is whether or not the Gogards depend for their sustenance on sufficient availability of either няк or nâk in their regional recipes for Poulet Frit à la Kentucky? It couldn't possibly be much good without it.

Have a nice day!
Antti

[Stephen Menn]

Excellent--always pleased to see another imaginary tribe, they're my favorite feature. You've clearly put both your study of the Jesuit Relations and your immersion in New Jerseyan to good use. And the topical reference to Makginsky is, as the apparently apocryphal monarch told Sir Christopher Wren, artificial and awful.

[Antti Nannimus]

Hi,

I wish a portable, hard-bound [leather], collected, volume of The Imaginary Tribes could be made available, because many readings are needed to discern the multiple levels of meaning. Unless, of course, there are actually no levels, and I'm an idiot.

Have a nice day!
Antti