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Planet Montreal "People often say, 'There are so many immigrants here all of a sudden,'" says Suzanne la Ferrière. But she takes a decidedly different view: without Montreal's long history of immigration, we would never have been on the map. La Ferrière works for L'Autre Montréal, an organization that has been putting together alternative city tours for 15 years now--with a distinctly activist dimension. L'Autre Montréal is offering five different tours through August and September, but this weekend's tour is perhaps the best of their season's offering: La Courtepointe montréalaise takes people on a historical tour describing the settlement of Montreal's cultural communities, chronicling the waves of immigration that came here, the neighbourhoods they built and their contributions to the city. La Ferrière says the idea for this tour first came during the peak of intercultural tensions the early 1990s, following the police shootings of Anthony Griffin and Marcellus François. Still, she notes, "the tour is not a sermon about the evils of racism. We get into the question of why different groups settled here. Once you ask that question, you basically end up learning a brief history of the planet, as lived through Montreal's neighbourhoods. It makes you realize we're not as isolated as we sometimes think."
La Courtepointe montréalaise begins in Griffintown (the black community's former stronghold) and moves through various neighbourhoods efore ending in Parc Extension where, according to 1991 census figures, 92 per cent of the population is of neither British nor French heritage. One day only: Sunday, Aug. 3. Meet at Carré St-Louis at 9:45 a.m. Cost: $12. Info: 521-7802. Philip Preville
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