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

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.     

Technology and crisis: The great depression of the middle ages and the technology of the renaissance (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)

An extremely violent crisis hit Western Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages: population, prices and agricultural production declined; the stretch of cultivated land shrank when, simultaneously, wars and internal troubles shook up the new states. While the technological level remained stagnant in agriculture as well as in the textile and building industries, it progressed remarkably in other sectors, particularly those of mining and metallurgy. The interpretation of these facts is a delicate matter; however, it is possible to throw light on the lack of interest for agricultural stock, on the states’ need of metal required for both money and the ongoing wars, and finally, on the investment possibilities of the holders of new technologies.