Analyzing entangled territorialities and Indigenous use of maps: Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok (Quebec, Canada) dynamics of territorial negotiations, frictions, and creativity

Abstract

This paper highlights the relevance of analyzing entangled territorialities and Indigenous use of maps in order to better understand what Lévy describes in terms of “spatial capital”—the socio‐economic dynamics and power relationships maintained and negotiated between the stakeholders interacting within the Indigenous forestland. More specifically, it discusses the entanglement dynamics of land tenures coexisting today within Nitaskinan, the ancestral territory claimed by the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok. Within Nitaskinan, members of the First Nation negotiate the continuity of their practices, occupation, and use of ancestral hunting territories with state institutions, logging companies, and non‐Indigenous members of civil society who have interests in the land resources. All these stakeholders implement different territorial regimes that interact and sometimes conflict. Based on concrete ethnographic examples, the analysis presented here focuses on the compromises, frictions, resistance, and creativity that are part of territorial coexistence between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people.

Indigenous Mapping: Reclaiming Territories, Decolonizing Knowledge

“…Some First Nations in Canada or tribes in the United states have their own economic and technical resources, and degrees of political-administrative autonomy that allow them to hire cartographers directly, or to have their own mapping service. They can then more easily control the potentially confidential dimension of the geographic information and maps they produce (Gagnon 2020;Éthier 2020). However, this is not the case for the majority of Indigenous peoples around the world, who depend economically and financially on the assistance of external actors to produce their maps.…”

Introduction to the special section on Indigenous spatial capital: Incorporating First Peoples' knowledges, places, and relations into mapping processes

“…The paper by Benoit Éthier (2020) links the issue of land claims with the notion of territorial entanglement which characterizes most Indigenous realities today. As Françoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier (2017, 5) emphasize, “Understanding how entanglements are lived in various parts of the world can illuminate how Indigenous knowledge and practices are reshaped by encounters with modernity and neoliberalism, by reified oppositions between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous and by the proximity of other practices and engagements with customary lands.” Éthier carries a detailed analysis of these “encounters” between the Atikamkekw Nehirowisiwok and the Québécois, in the context of territorial negotiations with provincial and federal governments.…”