Mobility, or nomadism, is one of the determinants of québécois identity. This mobility can be traced back to the beginnings of New France where the migrants added to their nomadic heritage the influence of an immense new land and the mark of the Indian inhabitant. Both tradition and economic relations help explain this culture trait. Fur, timber, mining and the construction industry succeed each other as major activities, inciting migratory fluxes which become transformed into a tradition of mobility. This nomadism, at once necessary and voluntary, was denied by a national élite which created a peasant identity and sought to ensure incorporation of the population by the Church and its stabilisation through colonisation schemes. Thus the denial of 'american-ness'. There is continuity in both the mobility itself and in its negation. The Québécois are not a people who occupy space, rather they move within it. They occupy time. The elite contents itself with symbols of permanence in a space that it does not control. For the mass, 'place' is kinship and family wherever it may be in America.