Oldal 204 [204]
OCR
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, Frenchspeakers 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 FrenchQuébécois. 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 +
