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MAITRES CHEZ QUI?...
how the PQ shaped the geography born out of the Quiet Revolution. Special
attention will be paid to the works, thoughts, and speeches of René Lévesque.
It will be argued that by framing French-Québécois as colonized and
consistently ignoring the province’s Indigenous inhabitants, Lévesque and
the PQ effectively created a cultural geography able to thwart the mere idea
of Indigenous territorial sovereignty.”
In order to demonstrate the above argument, the following pages will be
divided into four sections. The first section will provide a brief overview of
cultural geography as the theoretical framework for the current paper. Jackson
and Cosgrove’s ‘new’ approach to cultural geography will be outlined here.
Section two will employ primary sources to demonstrate the manner in
which the PQ, in particular its leader, framed French- Québécois as colonized.
Primary sources will also be used in the third section to demonstrate how
Lévesque often ignored the province’s Indigenous peoples during the Quiet
Revolution. Section four will consider how these discourses may have affected
Québec’s cultural geography. Together, these sections will reveal the reasons
as to why the PQ of the 1980s could not foresee a future where Québec’s French
and Indigenous populations could simultaneously be maitres chez eux.'*
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY: BROADLY AND IN QUEBEC
Following the teachings of Carl O. Sauer," the field of cultural geography began
in earnest around the year 1925." Sauer’s understanding of cultural geography
led him and his followers to become known as adherents of the ‘Berkeley
School, which concerned itself with culture’s material aspects." In particular,
the Berkeley School studied the manner in which humans could impress their
“Territorial sovereignty” is used here and in the remainder of this paper as a shorthand for
Stephen D. Krasner’s own definition of “sovereignty”: “the assertion of final authority within
a given territory.” Said “assertion of final authority” is said by Krasner to be the “the core
element in any definition of sovereignty.” (Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: An Institutional
Perspective, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (April 1988), 86).
Maitres chez eux, meaning masters in their own home, is a play on words based on the slogan
maitres chez nous, meaning masters in our own home. The latter was oft-used by Québécois
with aspirations of sovereignty. The slogan was extracted from the work of historian Lionel
Groulx in 1937. It gained particular prominence in the 1960s among Québécois “frustrated
by conditions of English economic domination in a province where most citizens were
French” (Kaplan, Maitres Chez Nous, 416-417).
Cosgrove-Jackson, New Directions, 95-96.
Marie Price and Martin Lewis, The Reinvention of Cultural Geography, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, Vol. 83, No. 1 (March 1993), 3.
1° Ibid., 95-96.
7 Ibid., 95.
s 191"