This article examines the role that place naming has played in the rescaling of the Pacific waters along the Canada/United States border as the “Salish Sea.” Drawing upon archival materials and a series of semi‐structured interviews, we argue that the scalar framing of such waters as a delimited spatial “unit” was dependent upon the performative reiteration of citational practices that were employed over a period of two decades to discursively assemble these fluid multiplicities into a cartographically bounded space. Although one of the ostensible aims of this geographical designation was to acknowledge the longstanding presence of Coast Salish peoples in the region, the naming of the Salish Sea has also had the political effect of reinforcing neocolonial relations of socio‐spatial dispossession by further entrenching the powers of the state as the final arbiter of geographical naming conventions. Décoloniser la carte ? Les enjeux politiques de la toponymie et le transfert d'échelle de la mer des Salish Cet article étudie le rôle que la dénomination de la « mer des Salish » le long de la frontière canado‐américaine a joué dans le changement d'échelle des eaux du Pacifique. Des documents issus de fonds d'archives et une série d'entretiens semi‐dirigés servent d'appui pour défendre l'idée selon laquelle la conception scalaire de ces eaux en tant qu'unité spatiale délimitée découlait de la réitération performative des pratiques citationnelles adoptées depuis deux décennies afin de traduire de manière discursive cette abondance aqueuse dans un espace cartographique circonscrit. Bien que l'un des objectifs apparents de cette appellation géographique fût de reconnaître l'ancienneté de l'établissement dans la région des peuples Salish de la côte, l'appellation de la mer des Salish a eu comme impact politique de renforcer les relations néocoloniales de la dépossession socio‐spatiale en consolidant les pouvoirs étatiques comme arbitre final des conventions existantes en matière de toponymie. Mots clés : décolonisation, performativité, mer des Salish, toponymie, échelle
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