Caroline Desbiens

Indigeneity and ontology

This special issue grew out of a specific moment in time. It was conceived at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2010, at a moment in which geographers, including cultural geographers, were growing increasingly interested in ‘ontology.’ That year, Sarah de Leeuw, Emilie Cameron, and Jessica Place had organized a series of sessions entitled ‘Geographies of Response’ that aimed to bring together scholars interested in rethinking conventional understandings of power and resistance in colonial contexts. The various papers that formed that session (including one by Caroline Desbiens, co-editor of this special issue) aimed to explore the ways in which the responses of Indigenous peoples to historical and ongoing colonization might be thought of outside of the binaries inherited from European philosophy, in which Indigenous peoples appear as either victims of colonization or heroically resistant. The papers and discussions were interesting and lively, but what struck us, as the conference unfolded, was the stark contrast between the ways in which ontology was being discussed in sessions aiming to unpack the intellectual and political merits of an ‘ontological turn’ in the discipline, and the ways in which the ontological was being mobilized by scholars primarily grounded in colonial and decolonizing studies. For the latter group of scholars, concepts like ‘being,’ connection to land, culture, and tradition, have long been eyed with suspicion. Building on decades of activism and critical scholarship, the affiliation between race, nature, humanism, and empire has made critical scholars wary of mobilizing any kind of ‘essential’ Indigenous nature or experience in their work. To invoke Indigenous ontologies, for these scholars, is to tread on intellectual terrain that is heavily shaped by colonial inheritances and interests. It is not so much that critical colonial scholars do not acknowledge that Indigenous ontologies are distinct; rather, they are wary of how Indigenous knowledges, beliefs, and practices are represented and mobilized within colonial structures of knowledge production, and have thus tended to shy away from directly engaging Indigenous ontologies as subjects of research. While some scholars have approached the notion of Indigenous ontologies with caution, others have found themselves turning to accounts of Indigenous knowledges and practices as evidence of ontological pluralism and as sources of new modes of thought. Indeed, whereas in previous years the sessions sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the AAG 500229 CGJ21110.1177/1474474013500229Cultural GeographiesEditorial 2013

From passive to active dialogue? Aboriginal lands, development and métissage in Québec, Canada

Over the last decade, northern Québec (Canada) has been the stage of tremendous changes regarding the active role played by Aboriginal peoples in matters of planning and territorial development. This gradual rise, if incomplete, of the Aboriginal agency greatly impacts, as we shall argue here, on the identities and territorialities of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, through new policies, legislation, treaty processes, institutions (public or private) devoted to development, territorial governance or the increasing number of cross-cultural partnerships and investments. The goal of this paper is to offer a critical portrait of the recent changes affecting the relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in northern Québec, and discuss the limits of the cross-cultural dialogue in which they are engaged. This argument is an attempt to show how development and planning are rich grounds for understanding the state and the economy as ontological. It will be illustrated through the recent emergence of the Québec government’s Plan Nord (‘Northern Plan’), an ambitious program of development, and the treaty process involving three Innu First Nations in the regions of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and Côte-Nord. Conceived of as a dynamic form of cross-cultural dialogue shaped by power relations, the concept of métissage (hybridity) grounds our analysis and highlights the challenges of multicultural territorial planning. If Québec is presently engaging in a renewed cross-cultural dialogue with First Nations, the final result of this dialogue, however, remains uncertain.

Nation to Nation: Defining New Structures of Development in Northern Quebec

Abstract In February 2002, the Crees of Quebec and the Quebec government signed a new agreement that was designed to implement new structures of economic development in northern Quebec. The document, known as “La Paix des Braves” (Peace of the Braves), was characterized as a “nation-to-nation” agreement and promises greater participation by the Crees in the management and exploitation of natural resources on the territory. Starting from the premise that the Crees and the Québécois do not simply compete for the resources of James Bay but can be said to define and firm up the boundaries of their respective nation in and through the use of these resources, this article explores the close intertwining of colonialism, culture, and the economy in James Bay, as well as its potential impact on the new agreement. First, it analyzes how the Crees and the Québécois have articulated nationhood in relation to land and resources, particularly over the past three decades. Second, it examines how these discourses are informed by a third national scale, that of Canada. The intersection among nature, nation, and economic development in northern Quebec is a key example of how resources are embedded in complex national geographies that are shaped across a broad historical span. Although sustainability is often defined in terms of the needs of future generations, this article calls for greater attention to past colonial and political relations in defining structures of development that ensure the renewal of resources.

French Economic Geography: Introduction to the Special Issue

philosophy. The works of Lefebvre, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu, among others, have been translated, and the key texts are regularly featured in bibliographies. Despite the popularity of these thinkers, the methods and approaches of French geography, particularly of French economic geography, are not necessarily well understood or well represented in the research of Anglo-Saxon geographers. The goal of this special issue is to present a range of work that is under way in French economic geography and to highlight part of the academic tradition that this work

Something straight in our landscapes: looking at the ‘Lemieux effect’ in Quebec nationalism

The production of the painter Jean Paul Lemieux is examined in the context of Quebec nationalism and its quest to define a Québécois territoriality. Prior to the independence referendum of 1995, the separatist Parti Québécois produced a ‘Declaration of sovereignty’ which was circulated throughout the province both in a text and video format. Focusing on territory rather than ethnicity, the language of the declaration sought to move away from francophone cultural politics to build a more inclusive platform for the nation. This movement toward a territorial nationalism was disrupted by the landscape imagery of the video, which was released simultaneously with the text. Composed almost exclusively of long, static, horizontal shots, the video of the declaration conveys the territory of Quebec as an empty space devoid of people and history. Looking at Jean Paul Lemieux’s use of a similar - yet differently coded - visual language in his own landscapes, I explore the complex process of collective authorship and response that enables the imaging of communities.

Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications

period from 1948 to the early 1990s, Agnew identifies three ‘‘geographical regimes’’ in which Italian politics tended to be regionalizing (1948–1963), nationalizing (1963–1976), and localizing (1976–1992). These geographically differentiated patterns of election results demonstrate the dominance of regional and local, rather than truly national, political parties in Italian republican politics. A rather more complex picture of historicalgeographical contingency emerges from the study of two local provinces of Tuscany, Pistoia and Lucca. In Agnew’s view, these represent two territorial subcultures that underpinned much of the Italian political culture until the 1990s: the ‘‘red,’’ or Communist, and the ‘‘white,’’ or Catholic, subcultures, respectively. This localistic study reinforcesAgnew’s idea of a dynamic, place-based politics. However, it seems to me that while Agnew’s place perspective allows us to destructure national politics on local and regional scales, it does not tell us how to go froma local-regional to a national scope of vision. Is the national simply the sum of different place-based locales articulated at a national level through political parties? Are there two different (geo)political visions and logics at play? Agnew does not address those questions. To me, this has much to do to with the fact that eventually his ‘‘mapping politics’’ focuses more on electoral politics than identity politics. Lacking an answer to those and other questions, Agnew’s place perspective, while a rather well-shaped approach for understanding the former, still seems to me to require further specifications if it is to be used as a cognitive tool for also understanding the (de)construction of (geo)political identities and narratives, which generally assume major visibility and power at a national scale. In his final chapters, Agnew takes into account the rise of the Northern League as a regionalist party, which replaced the Christian Democrats in the 1990s in many northern Italian constituencies. He also outlines some general observations on the geographical processes of vote-switching and party replacement. In addition, he addresses the geographical imagery of the Northern League, dealing with the political symbolism, rhetorical narratives, and territorial identity associated to the concept of PadaniaFthat is, the idealized region of northern Italy envisaged by the supporters of Northern League as their true and only fatherland. Agnew uses the case of the Northern League and Padania to inform general considerations on the self-conscious invention of political units and the malleability and multiplicity of political identities. Finally, he addresses the ways in which new major parties operating since 1992 (Forza Italia, Partito Democratico della Sinistra, Alleanza Nazionale e Lega Nord) have come to ‘‘imagine’’ Italy in terms of the geographical scales at which they operate. For obvious reasons of time, Agnew does not, however, deal with two recent important political facts: the constitutional reform that has come to devolve significant powers to local and regional institutions; and the participation of the Northern League in the present Berlusconi-led cabinet (only briefly mentioned in a note). Preceding this large, place-based, ‘‘electoral’’ corpus are two interesting initial chapters. The first deals with the impossible but fascinating search for an Italian national landscape ideal (i.e., an image of the national territory with which all citizens might identify). The second deals with the use of the backward/modern metaphor as a tool for understanding Italian politicsFa use about which Agnew is very skeptical. Even though the south does not receive treatment equal to those of northern and Central Italy, Agnew’s survey is very accurate, enriched by a wide knowledge of Italian literary sources and by many figures that help the reader to geographically visualize electoral data. This book is definitely worth reading, not only by those interested in modern Italian studies, but also by all scholars devoted to ‘‘mapping politics.’’