Page 204 [204]
MARIE-CLAUDE GILL-LACROIX
emphasize the manner in which the cultural geography conveyed by Lévesgue
during the Ouiet Revolution disenfranchised Indigenous populations from
their territorial sovereignty.
Missing in Morins assessment is the admission that the JBANOA led (if
not forced) the Cree and Inuit of Northern Québec to give up their territorial
interests for other rights.*° These communities received large sums of
money in order to ensure they would surrender authority over swaths of the
province’s northern territory.”° In “A Watershed of Words,” Hans M. Carlson
explains that these agreements served to transform the cultural geography of
the region’s Cree and Inuit by “alter[ing] their ability to define the cultural/
environmental context that had made sense of their unique relationship
with [the area] for thousands of years.”*' Whereas these communities were
once able to “define that land exclusively within their own language and
[...] culture,” the JBANQA integrated the region within French-speakers’
own cultural geography.” Indeed, as Carlson explains, the JBANQA meant
only white French-Québécois could subsequently “understand the land, in a
specifically scientific way, in order to make [hydro] dams possible.” As such,
the JBANQA served to reaffirm French-Québécois’ complete ownership of
the province’s territory — a territory which, as Rose and Gilbert note, French¬
speakers perceive as representative of their particular heritage.°* Not only
does this disprove Morin’s “mutual respect” thesis, it also lends credence to
this paper’s findings.*° Lévesque’s upholding of the JBANQA implies that he
definitely had a hand in constructing the manner in which Québec’s territory
was understood following the Quiet Revolution: a space belonging to French¬
Québécois. It is no wonder the mere idea of Indigenous territorial sovereignty
was deemed unreasonable by the PQ in the 1980s. It was an idea which was
simply not congruent with the French-centric cultural geography molded by
Lévesque and his party during the Quiet Revolution.
CONCLUSION
Why, in the context of the Québec of the 1980s, was the idea of Indigenous
territorial sovereignty so hard for sovereigntists to swallow? Because the
cultural geography shaped by Lévesqueand the PQ during the Quiet Revolution
® See: Hans M. Carlson, A Watershed of Words: Litigating and Negotiating Nature in Eastern
James Bay, 1971-1975, The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 2004), 63-84.
Indian and Northern A ffairs Canada, James Bay, 5.
"1 Ibid., 63-64.
92 Ibid., 64.
% Ibid. 68.
% Rose and Gilbert, Glimpses, 274.
95 Morin, René Lévesque.
90
+ 202 +