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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"
