Étienne Rivard

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.

Colonial Cartography of Canadian Margins: Cultural Encounters and the Idea of Métissage

Essential to the fur trade and to colonial expansion into Canada, metissage considerably marked Canadian history by creating new cultural spaces – Metis geographies – between Aboriginal and European societies. My objective here is to investigate the role of colonial maps – from the French regime up to the late nineteenth century – in the mental representation of these specific Metis geographies and in the development and evolution of the idea of metissage. The idea of metissage reveals colonial ambivalence. The idea is, in fact, built upon the dialectic between recognition and denial, the latter mostly fed by discourses of anti-metissage. Although colonial officials were often forced to acknowledge Euro-Indian metissage at colonial margins, they never completely accepted the idea that “primitive” and European cultures could be mixed. Metissage was acceptable insofar as it was marginal (socially and spatially speaking) and did not endanger the spread of “civilization.” Maps represent colonial ambiguity tow...