« Bonjour, je suis là ! » A Michigander Reflects on Detroit at 325

In 2026, Detroit turns 325... older than the United States itself! But before Motown, before the assembly line, before the great fire of 1805, Detroit was simply a French word for a stretch of water: le détroit, the strait, the place where the river narrows.

In this episode of The North American Francophone Podcast, Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson traces the waves of Frenchness that shaped the city and never quite left - from Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac's 1701 landing at Fort Pontchartrain to her own family's arrival from Quebec, by way of Ontario, in 1948.

Along the way, she returns to the sage-colored walls of her childhood bedroom in Dearborn, and remembers her neighbor, asking what it means to carry a Francophone memory in a place most people "fly over."

Her forthcoming book, Michiganaise (Wayne State University Press), arrives in early 2027. Have a story to share? Reach her at thefrancophone.com.

Join the interest list for my forthcoming book Michiganaise: Tracing Francophone Identity in the Great Lakes!

Transcript

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[Intro music — solo piano]

Bonne fête, Détroit! Happy birthday, Detroit — 325 years! Calling Detroit "Détroit."

Welcome to the North American Francophone Podcast. Since 2019, I've been exploring all kinds of different French topics with you, and now that I've finally finished my book, I'm very happy to say that I'm going to be exploring a lot more with you in spoken word again on the podcast, and sharing voices of the Francophone across North America.

My name is Claire-Marie Brisson. If you don't know, I am originally from Dearborn, Michigan, and I was born in Detroit. I'm a proud Franco-Michiganaise — so, somebody who speaks French and is from Michigan — and today we're going to a place that I would love for you to discover with me. If you already know Detroit, it's going to be a great way to celebrate its birthday; but if you've never been there, or you've never been to the state of Michigan, maybe this will inspire you to visit.

We tend to think of Detroit today kind of in a single register that spans maybe 30 or 40 years — maybe 50 or 60 if you like Motown. A lot of people talk to me about Motown, they talk to me about Hitsville, U.S.A., they talk to me about techno, they talk to me about Eminem. These are all musical influences that have really shaped North America and beyond. And, of course, the assembly line changed manufacturing entirely.

Many people, when they talk to me, now start to say, "Wow, well, Detroit — that's a real comeback city." And Detroit has earned that name, honestly, because it always comes back. What do I mean by that? Well, before Motown, before we had assembly lines, Detroit burned: in 1805, there was a great fire in Detroit. Detroit was leveled — and it was actually leveled by a guy who tossed his cigar on the ground.

On the flag of Detroit there's a motto, and it's written in Latin by a French priest named Gabriel Richard — Gabriel Richard — after that great fire. And it reads, "Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus." Wow — my Latin from high school hasn't left me yet, I don't think! But: "We hope for better things" — Speramus meliora — "it shall rise from the ashes" — resurget cineribus. Detroit knows something about coming back. It's not a slogan; it's the motto of the city, it's the heart and the soul of the city.

But the idea of this city as a phoenix that rises from the ashes has a longer memory than most people give it credit for — before Motown, before the fire, before the flag, before the fort. Detroit was a French word for a piece of water. It was a way to understand what people who had been navigating water came across when they saw le détroit — the strait. And this year, that older story is having its moment.

In 2026, as Detroit turns 325 years old, we think about when the city was given the name Detroit. On July 24th, 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac — yep, that's where the word Cadillac comes from — came ashore and said, "This is the place." He founded Fort Pontchartrain — yes, that's how it's said in English, Fort Pontchartrain — and Fort Pontchartrain was on the strait. That makes Detroit, at least the Detroit we know today, 75 years older than the United States, as the United States celebrates 250 years.

And there have been tons of celebrations about that. The Detroit Historical Society has framed 2026 as kind of a quad-anniversary: 325 years of Detroit, 250 years of the country. It runs a bunch of lecture series through the end of the year, on everything from the Underground Railroad, which ran through Detroit, to the indigenous peoples of this land, to many other subjects. And in the spring, the French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan gathered at the Detroit Historical Museum to talk about the indigenous presence, the French presence, and — of course — what is still called by many Détroit in the French language. Now, in July, Rendez-vous Détroit is throwing a bonne fête — trois cent vingt-cinq, Détroit — three hundred twenty-five for Detroit. So it's a weekend of a bunch of events to celebrate what makes Detroit, Detroit.

And what's interesting about that is they're having a founders' ceremony at Hart Plaza. They're going to have a choir singing three national anthems — the American, the Canadian, and the French — and they're also going to feature optional 18th-century dress. And here's what I'd like to sit with, with you, for a moment about that 18th-century dress.

Detroit has been called many things. The peoples who lived along this waterway for centuries before 1701 had their own names for it, their own crossings and gathering places. And the French themselves first called it something really simple. There was the name of the fort — Pontchartrain — but le détroit, again, is the strait: it's a plain geographic description of the narrow channel linking the upper and lower Great Lakes. When people were there in the 18th century, it was dressed up as Fort Pontchartrain, honoring the Comte de Pontchartrain, the French minister of the marine. But nobody really cared about that honorific, right? That didn't stick.

There is still a Pontchartrain — right? We still see Pontchartrain in Detroit, and that is the Detroit pronunciation, I know. As a French speaker, hearing the words pronounced in the English-language fashion might be challenging to hear — but that is how it is called in the area: Pontchartrain. And the same is true for other streets in Detroit; I'll talk to you about that a little bit later. Many of the French names have been anglicized, and the word is still recognized by Detroiters.

But what stuck wasn't that honorific — it was the water. Détroit stuck, because it named the thing that actually mattered: to the indigenous people, to the French people, and eventually to the English. Detroit is a water city — the narrows, the passage everyone had to move through. And French didn't just pass through that strait; it was a place where the language began to inscribe itself onto the map, onto the education of the area, onto the grid that we have today — the ribbon farms that are still legible in street names downtown in Detroit today. And that's incredible, because there's something there that is framing the city of Detroit in a way that we can celebrate, we can honor, we can see today.

You can also think about Detroit in its many iterations — the costumes it's worn — something that happened once in 1701 and now is sealed behind museum glass for us to reflect on at its 325th. And what's interesting for me, as a French speaker and as somebody whose family was not in Detroit in 1701, is that I think a lot about what it means to have multiple waves of Frenchness — French presence in the region. The honorifics, the founding, the idea of the trade that existed in the city — this was all part of a larger colonial network that connected itself to places like Quebec.

And in fact, Quebec — if we travel back up the corridor to Quebec — you find the same idea in a different tongue. Quebec comes from an Algonquin word meaning the place where the river narrows, the point where the great St. Lawrence pinches in on itself. And le détroit, the strait, means the exact same thing, but in French: Quebec, where the river narrows; Detroit, where the river narrows. One name in French, one name in an indigenous language, and both describe exactly the same thing — the spot where the water narrows — precisely because it's where people gather, trade, cross, and eventually stay.

And when I think about the museum framing of that — 1701, 1801, 1901 — even by 1901, my family wasn't in that chronology, wasn't in that story in Michigan. It took until the 20th century — 1948, the arrival of my own family, by way of Ontario from Quebec — to actually inscribe themselves as part of this story. This is a living and moving story: families who kept speaking, arriving, and growing within the city of Detroit.

A lot of this is in my own book — the waves of Frenchness that came to Detroit. There was the founding, and then there were wars that asked: Is Michigan actually in Ontario? Is Michigan a part of the United States? Is it unceded land? Does it belong to the indigenous communities? Does it belong to the English? Does it belong to the French? Who owns Michigan? Who lives in Michigan? These were a lot of historical questions. And when we trace the water back, when we trace the history back of this region, we can think about existing in the multiplicities of Detroit.

Yesterday, I was on the radio — on Radio-Canada Windsor. And Radio-Canada Windsor was my connection to the French language, at least visibly, when I grew up in Michigan. And I'll play you a little clip from when I was actually on the radio. I talked about living and being a French speaker today in Michigan — because 1701, again, this is historic. We have historic existence of the French who are in the region. But that history didn't stop with the colonial period; it kept changing. And the people who arrived in Detroit — who spoke French, or spoke German, spoke Italian, spoke Greek, spoke Russian, spoke Polish — these are communities that, in the early 20th century, started to meet other speakers of Tamil, Bengali, Arabic, as the century progressed.

And that's the amazing thing about Detroit. Detroit remains a confluence of languages, of cultures, of trade. When you're in different parts of Metro Detroit, sometimes your phone even says, "Welcome to Canada." And so, let's take a quick listen to what I said in French on Radio-Canada right now — welcome us to Canada — to hear a little bit about how that was framed for the Canadian side, before I continue.

[Clip — Radio-Canada Windsor, Matins sans frontières, 20 July 2026](In French): « Et ça, c'est tracer les liens. Parce que si on dit "French Detroit" — normalement, en anglais — ça veut dire que ça porte sur l'histoire, plutôt l'histoire historique de la région. Mais moi, j'ai grandi près de la ville de Détroit en langue française. Donc pour moi, c'est comme : OK, bonjour, je suis là ! »(English translation): "And this is about tracing the connections. Because if you say 'French Detroit' — normally, in English — it means you're talking about history, the more distant historical past of the region. But me — I grew up near the city of Detroit in French. So for me, it's like: OK, hello, here I am!"

So — if you don't speak French — what I just said was, I talked a little bit about what it means for me to be here, present, today: a French speaker in North America. And something I shared was that I'm invisible if I only speak in English.

And so that's why, in essence, I even created this podcast — because I want to share this story with more people. I want to show people that, yes, somebody can be fluent in English, have grown up in English-language schooling from kindergarten all the way through college — multiple colleges, might I add — and still hold on to French. This is the reality of growing up in the United States, and it's the reality of where I grew up. Dearborn — 53% of the city speaks a language other than English at home. And that's huge. That's the community where I grew up, and that's the thread I'm pulling on today, because we have a continent's worth of waterway between French speakers, between speakers of multiple languages.

And I think that oftentimes we're bound by a single idea of the narrows. What draws us together? What brings us together? Detroit at 325 years is a great moment to remember that the map of Francophone North America was drawn in water first. It's what connects us to the Mississippi. It's what connects us to the St. Lawrence. It's what connects us to the ocean. And it also connects us to places, and spaces, and people that don't speak French.

And as I reflect on this, I reflect on something that's very personal. When I think of my home, when I think of where I grew up, I oftentimes place myself in a space — and instead of being at the river, I'm in my bedroom. Think about how many memories you have from childhood, in your childhood bedroom, right? There are so many different things you may have had as a kid — your toys, your favorite poster, something that really spoke to you as a child about what made you you. And my room — as amazing and beautiful and wonderful as it was — always carried with it the spirit of what it once was, as well.

I've always been a historically minded person. And so the walls in my room are painted sage. They're not painted sage because I said, "Oh, well, this color is going to go perfectly in this room." They're painted sage because I saw a paint chip on the wall. My walls as a child were light pink — and I saw the paint chip, and I saw a sage wall, and I said, "What is this? Where did this come from? Why is this here?" And then I asked my dad, and my dad said, "Well, that was the color that this room once was." And I said, "Well, what happened in this room when it was that color?" And my dad said, "Well, there was a Christmas tree in this room, and it was the second living room, and this is where I received my bicycle from my grandparents."

And my father's grandparents, who gave him that bicycle, were English and Italian speakers. His grandmother came over with my grandmother in 1924, and was an Italian speaker, and learned to speak English from an Irish immigrant nearby. This is the amazing patchwork of the United States, and of North America in general. So I saw that, and I said, "I want my room to be painted that color, to honor that history." And so I painted my room the exact color that my great-grandparents had painted the room.

And then, at another level — another layer — I thought back to what had existed before that, because my house was built in 1927. It's almost a hundred years old, which is amazing to me. Before it was the room where my dad received his first bicycle, it was my grandmother's bedroom. And there's a lot that's held within that one room — so many layers of history. I imagined my own grandmother reading books and studying as a student at Fordson High School, before she became the first — at least, that I know of, on my dad's side of the family — to go to college. She went to the University of Michigan. She didn't graduate, but the fact that she went — she was the first person in her family to even attend the University of Michigan — was remarkable.

And I think about her. I think about my great-grandparents. I think about them in the grander scheme of what it means to be a Michiganaise. And they found a current with the French language as well, when my grandmother met my grandfather — who had come to Detroit at first in 1948, and spoke French; he was from Quebec. So these are two beautiful cultures that found a home in Detroit — at least, in Metro Detroit. My grandfather lived in Detroit first, and then moved to Dearborn. And he lived his life speaking French as a way to communicate with my Italian-speaking great-grandparents. They understood him, he understood them. And eventually the household turned from being French-speaking, Italian-speaking, to speaking English primarily, with my dad. But as the years went on, French sort of became the anchor for my dad, and became the anchor for me, because that was the language that we still had a footing on in the community. Détroit — but also Radio-Canada — the connections to family that were not so far away, on the other side of the border.

But when I was writing my book, I was thinking about my own existence in this blurry space. I'm not somebody who can easily say, "Oh yeah, I'm Québécoise." I mean, a lot of people just call me Québécoise and I run with it. A lot of people also call me Marie-Claire, and I run with that, because they're inverting my name to something they know better. But I'm a Midwesterner with Canadian roots. I'm somebody who grew up very happily in Dearborn, and loved Dearborn, and loved Metro Detroit, and loved Michigan. I'm somebody who grew up with other people in the city who spoke languages other than English at home — and we were proud of that. Some of my friends didn't even know how to spell in the language that they spoke at home, and that was really so surprising for me — to understand that you could speak a language but you couldn't read it, or you couldn't write it. And I think that really encouraged me to just continue championing French, because it was a language that was gifted to me through my family.

When I wrote my book — Michiganaise (it sounds like "mayonnaise," right? Michiganaise) — I was also thinking of the blending in my community, from other places that are not my own. And I'm reminded of someone who was very close to me, that I lost just last year. It was my neighbor. My neighbors were named Igor and Anna Jeromsky. Igor passed on before his wife passed on last year. His wife got her master's degree from Wayne State University — which is where I got my master's degree as well, and where I'm publishing my book. And there was an amazing force to Anna. Some people call her Anne, some people call her Ana — just like with me: some people call me Claire-Marie, some people call me Claire, some people call me Marie-Claire. I answer to all of them, right?

Anna was the daughter of Russian immigrants. In fact, I might even call them Russian refugees, because her family fled in 1917. They went through China, and her parents actually had to split up. They would look up at the sky and look at the stars, and think of one another, and know that eventually they would be reunited — and they were. Her father ended up in California, her mother ended up in British Columbia, but they found each other, and they traveled through Canada first, and made their way to Ontario. But it was because of the gravitational pull of what was happening in Detroit that inspired them to cross the border. And I remember her telling me, "You know, I would not be who I am today if I hadn't grown up here." And that's so true — and I definitely would not be the person I am today without the conversations I shared with my neighbor.

She became a teacher, she was very successful, and she was opinionated. She talked about how she loved field hockey, she loved history — but something we shared in common together is, we loved jewelry together. That's something a lot of people don't know about me, but I love jewelry — I love when it's creative and fun and has beautiful colors — and so we were able to share our love for that together. And from time to time there would be a gem-and-jewelry show that would come to the Metro Detroit area, and we'd go, and there were people from all over the world who would sell very expensive jewels — and stuff that you could afford pretty well, too.

And I remember, we stopped in a booth and we were looking at beautiful necklaces, and we both saw the same thing at the same time. We saw what looked to be a Fabergé egg. Of course, it wasn't — but we looked at it, and it looked like a little egg, like a Fabergé egg, but it had something incredible on it: it had a fleur-de-lis. And we looked at each other, and she said, "It's me and you — it's you and me." I started laughing. I said, "It is — it's us." The egg that represented her Russian culture, and the fleur-de-lis, which represents so much of what I do today. And I looked at the price tag, and I said, "Absolutely not. There is no way." But as I walked on and looked at other stuff, she approached me, and she handed me a small bag, and she said, "Wear it, and remember me." And I'm actually wearing it as I'm doing this podcast episode — because I remember that, to be from a place like Michigan, there are so many different influences, like Anna, who inspired me to give my story.

A lot of historians talk about History — the uppercase H — the big stuff, the big dates, the events, the things that shaped the world. A bit like 1701, the founding of Detroit, right? That's the uppercase-H history. And then I think of the lowercase-h history — the stuff that a lot of scholars are now starting to appreciate, but the stuff that nobody really knows about. "Why would anyone care?" might be the question. I remember one time I was workshopping some of my writing, and someone just flat-out said to me, after I shared something about my grandfather, "Why should I care about this?" And that really hurt. I thought, "Geez — I mean, he's a great example for what happened in the early 20th century." And I became — not defensive, but really hurt — about the fact that somebody else wouldn't care. But it's exactly that: it's exactly the idea that, okay, maybe somebody somewhere won't care about this history — but somebody will. And somebody should listen to this history, because it matters.

And when I heard the story of Anna's parents eventually meeting up — and looking at the sky, and being separated from one another — I said, "That's a story that I hope just follows through time; that people remember that these two people eventually found one another, and created a life together — a beautiful life together — in Metro Detroit." And I don't write about that at all in my book — at all — because it's not fully my story to tell, or my story to publish. But it is something that I've been reflecting on quite a bit recently, as I think about the fact that my book is going to be coming out next spring — or even before spring, because I think it's slated for February, as the production continues. I'll know a final date soon.

But I think about Anna, and I think about how she's no longer with us. She passed on in May 2025. And how much she would have wanted to read the book — but she really didn't need to read the book, because she was there through all of it. And I've been there through all of it.

And when I reflect on the story of Detroit, I'm just one small piece in the mosaic of the city, and of the region, that has contributed to what it means to be from Michigan. And now that I live in Massachusetts for most of the time — I mean, I do spend a lot of time back home, I try to, at least — I'm struck by how little people on the coasts speak of the heartland, speak of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi; how little they speak of people who come from places that they consider flyover states. And it's true on both coasts: somebody from New York talks about Californians just like Californians talk about someone from New York. It's the coastal mentality. And there's nothing wrong with that — but it's just different for a Midwesterner. It's different to share these stories.

So I hope that, with some of the things that I'm doing with my forthcoming book, Michiganaise, and also the talks I've been giving across the country, it opens a conversation about the Midwest. And it opens a conversation, importantly, about the Francophone speakers in North America who are not just in places like Quebec or Louisiana, but are dotted across North America.

And that makes me return to something else. Languages are the human ways that we communicate our memories to one another. I think that's very precious. Anna would serve me coffee from her beautiful samovar, and she would serve me cake with it, and we would sit and we would chat. She would serve me a honey cake — and she had a word for it in Russian that I can't remember, but it was very special to her. It was evocative of memories that she had — of the many glass bottles that she kept in her window. Many of those bottles were originally her mother's — and the colors, and the light, and the scent, and the memory that she had next to her mother in the kitchen; the memory she had as a child. These are memories that we hold, and we cherish, and that we share through language.

And in a world where we have AI, we have STEM, we have technology really taking center stage — those things, of course, are changing our world at a rapid pace. And there's nothing wrong with studying math, there's nothing wrong with becoming an engineer — in fact, I love engineering. But there is something that we need to keep in our heart, and it is the human in the story: the human, the centering of the human, in the way that we approach history, in the way that we approach what we do — so that we build empathy between one another. We understand one another, and we think about the smaller histories that we all carry together.

I'm sure, as you listen to this, you could tell me a story right now — sitting with me in this fireside chat that we're having — and I would love to hear it. I really, genuinely would love to hear it. Because when we think about our memories, we're sharing a part of ourselves, and we're bringing that part of ourselves to others — to give discovery, to share joy, to share pain. And it's that, when I think about Detroit at 325 — 325 years that we've called that specific place Détroit — I think about all of the histories, the multiple histories, that exist in that space.

And when I reflect on that, it makes the task of being a historian feel insurmountable. But at the same time, it makes the task of who I am today — when I teach my language courses at Harvard, 100% in French — it's also a way of starting to translate history into another language, and to slow down. Something we rarely do — and especially on the coasts in the United States. I'm looking at you, Boston; I'm looking at you, New York. People don't like to slow down on the coasts. They're always fast, they're always doing something, they're always moving, they're always changing.

When I think about history, and I think about time, and I think about what we can contribute to one another — when we reflect on, "Oh, Detroit at 325, the same year as the United States at 250" — what does that mean? It means we need to slow down. We need to think about how we're communicating together. We need to think about how we share our own stories. And how learning another language — if you don't know French; of course, I'm not trying to market what I do to you whatsoever — but if you don't know how to speak another language, it helps you to slow down, and to think about how you communicate history, stories, memories, and how you preserve them.

In a certain sense, learning another language is learning to walk again. It's learning to share differently, it's learning to slow down the cadence — smelling the roses, looking at the sky differently, taking the time to think about how we talk about history, stories, and our own experience in the world.

And that leads me to an invitation. As I now have more time, after finishing my book, I'm going to be sharing some stories that I've had just sitting on my computer — that I've shared with others, but I'd love to hear yours. What are the stories that you wish you could share? And how do we create a sense of community, when some of the people who have a Francophone memory speak English, some of the people who have a Francophone memory speak French, and some of us are fragmented across different distances, spaces, and places that maybe you have never visited before?

And so, as a Franco-Michiganaise — as somebody who really is a blending and a blurring, that "mayonnaise" like Michiganaise — I invite you to discover a little bit more about the places where multiple languages, including French, are spoken in North America today, and to share your story with me.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can always find my website, thefrancophone.com, and send me an email. Send me a message — and let's continue sharing, as we celebrate Detroit at 325, and beyond.

Thanks for listening.

[Outro music — solo piano, reprise of the intro theme]