This article revisits Souvenirs d’autrefois (1916) by Martin Jérôme, a little-known memoir written by a Métis politician and public servant in early twentieth-century Manitoba, Canada. Far from a nostalgic recollection, the text is analyzed here as a civic intervention, a political, cultural, and linguistic act that anticipates contemporary debates on multilingual coexistence and linguistic justice. To interpret Jérôme’s work, the article introduces the concept of relational bilingualism, a framework that foregrounds language as a lived, asymmetrical, and historically embedded practice shaped by memory, place, and affect. Unlike institutional models based on legal symmetry, relational bilingualism emerges through negotiation, vulnerability, and community transmission. Through close reading and historical contextualization, the article positions Jérôme alongside other contemporaries such as Lionel Groulx, Donatien Frémont, Adrien-Gabriel Morice, and A.-H. de Trémaudan, mapping the intellectual and ideological field of francophone Western Canada. The final sections explore the enduring relevance of Jérôme’s vision for present-day debates on official bilingualism, digital archives, education, and Métis media. Manitoba, often seen as peripheral, appears here as a microcosm of global struggles around memory, reconciliation, and linguistic pluralism. Comparative perspectives from postcolonial contexts such as Algeria, Lebanon, or New Zealand help frame Jérôme’s narrative as part of a broader inquiry into how minoritized communities sustain language and identity in multilingual societies. By tracing the entanglements of language, land, and memory, this article argues that Jérôme’s bilingual modernity is not only historically significant, but theoretically generative: it offers a grammar of relational belonging that resonates beyond Canada’s borders.