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MARIE-CLAUDE GILL-LACROIX Parti Ouébécois (PO), Lucien Lessard, traveled to Listuguj in order to hold talks with the community’s band council.* An encounter between Lessard and a Listuguj Chief has gained particular infamy since the documentary’s release: Listuguj Chief: You French-Canadians are asking for sovereignty here in Québec. You are saying it’s your country and you want to be independent in your country. Were surprised that you don’t understand us Indian people and our sovereignty on our land. Lucien Lessard: You cannot ask for sovereignty because to have sovereignty one must have one’s own culture, language, and land.’ Obomsawin has described Lessard’s comments as “dreadful.”° As accurate as her description may be, this paper is not interested in deriding Lessard’s beliefs. Obomsawin does a fine job of explaining Indigenous peoples’ own cultural, linguistic, and territorial claims in Incident at Restigouche. Rather, this paper will seek to understand why a member of the PQ would be so obtuse regarding the idea of Indigenous territorial sovereignty within Québec. It was PQ founder, René Lévesque, who stated in 1977 that nationhood is characterized by “a clearly defined territory, [...] history, [and a] common language and culture.”’ Lévesque fervently believed Québec met all of the above requirements.* So much so in fact that he and his party orchestrated a referendum meant to ascertain the people of Québec’s willingness to separate from the rest of Canada in May 1980.’ As evidenced by the events in Listuguj, Lévesque and the PQ did not extend beliefs of sovereignty to the Indigenous communities located within the province’s borders.’ Why was that? More precisely, why were the PQ andits supporters so unwilling to accept Indigenous peoples’ possible territorial sovereignty in the 1980s? In order to answer this question, this paper will examine the effects of Québec’s Quiet Revolution on the province’s ‘cultural geography.!! Jackson and Cosgrove’s particular concept of cultural geography will be instrumentalized to better understand This section of the film is from 29:30 to 33:13 in Obomsawin, Incident at Restigouche. This encounter is described from 30:48 to 31:25 in Obomsawin, Incident at Restigouche. The term is used from 30:48 to 30:57 in Obomsawin, Incident at Restigouche. René Lévesque, Quebec: A Good Neighbour in Transition, Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. 43, No. 9 (1977), 283-284. 8 Ibid. ° See David H. Kaplan, Maitres Chez Nous: The Evolution of French Canadian Spatial Identity, American Review of Canadian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1989), 421; Louis Balthazar, Les nombreux visages du nationalisme québécois, in Alain-G. Gagnon (ed.), Québec: État et Société Tome I, Montréal, Les Éditions Québec — Amérique, 23-40, especially the section titled ‘Les traits du Nationalisme Québécois Majoritaire.’ 10 Lessard sanctioned the raids in accordance with the wishes of Lévesque (see 29:40:0030:25:00 in Obomsawin, Incident at Restigouche). “Cultural geography is a relatively new field dedicated to studying how culture affects geography and vice versa. For more information: Denis Cosgrove — Peter Jackson, New Directions in Cultural Geography, Area, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1987), 95-101. Nn uw + 190 +
