Appreciating difference? A view from Indigenous rivers

While the Saint‐Laurent river is considered to be the cradle of Québécois society, many other great rivers are found across the province—other cradles of civilizations, indigenous to the continent, notably the Chisasibi and the Manicouagan. These rivers played a key role in the Québécois movement of affirmation and modernization in the twentieth century. They are valued by many people in Quebec for their hydroelectric output rather than for their cultural richness and significance for the Eeyou (Cree) and Innu Nations. Since the 1990s, I have been able to study Quebec's historical geography from the standpoint of these rivers thanks to the expertise of Eeyou and Innu knowledge holders. Using the concept of decolonization as a practice, I explore how this has impacted both my work as a geographer and my cultural identity as a Québécois woman.     

Producing North and South: a political geography of hydro development in Québec

Since the 1970s, the tapping of James Bay's hydroelectric potential has been synonymous with the tapping of divergent national imaginaries for native and non-native people in Québec. Exploitation of natural resources in the region has activated different narratives of political identity for each community. I explore this evolving political context by examining how, for each group, water has emerged simultaneously as a physical entity possessing economic value and a social artefact supporting the consolidation of national boundaries. I do so by analysing three phases of changing relationships around resource management, namely: hydroelectric development on the La Grande river in the 1970s; the Cree opposition to Great Whale in the 1990s; and the recent agreement concerning a new relationship between the two parties. In each of these phases, nature has been both the symbolic and material tie that binds different national identities and materialises their boundaries. While these are not boundaries in the traditional geopolitical understanding of the term, the forging of an equitable framework of development in the region depends on the recognition of nature as a historical and political formation that answers to different sets of national preoccupations.