“Le Devoir” invites you to take the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, the season continues with an incursion into Northern Quebec.
More than ever, the North is making its mark on the world map, for economic, geopolitical and environmental reasons. Science, the arts, the media, activist movements and tourism are all taking an interest in it on regional, national and international scales.
Large-scale policies such as the Plan Nord in Quebec, in its various versions, demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for the wind, hydraulic, mining and forestry sectors in the North, as well as for the benefits of their exploitation on road, port, air and rail transport.
However, the economic and political interests that motivate this attention to the North leave little room for the challenges of living and cohabiting within the ancestral territories of Inuit Nunangat, Nuchimiyuschiiy (Naskapis), Nitassinan (Innu), Eeyou Istchee (Cree), Nitakinan (Anichinabés), Nitaskinan (Atikameks Nehirowisiwok).
Representing more than 70% of the surface area of Quebec, Nunavik, Côte-Nord, Eeyou Istchee Baie-James, Abitibi-Témiscamingue and the northern part of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean are home to nearly 200 indigenous and non-indigenous communities, small, dynamic towns, numerous portage routes and trails that crisscross the territory, as well as a range of seasonal establishments (camps, chalets, caches) or temporary establishments (construction camps).
Lentils
The North is rich in its geography, its cultures, its natural and human heritage, its unique interculturality, in addition to being driven by strong mobility. To understand its transformations, the populations who inhabit it and the territories they occupy must constitute the preferred lenses through which we learn from the past, understand the present and glimpse the future of the North.
This intention clashes with the vision of “masters in our own country” formulated by Jean Lesage and through which the South appropriates, in a manner that is both literal and imaginary, rivers, territories, spaces that it considers to be conducive to Quebec’s entry into modernity, for its economic, political and cultural emancipation within the confederation and internationally.
In short, a territorial ontology that is difficult to reconcile with that of the Nordic populations, where what we call “at home” refers to relationships of belonging to nature, intrinsic to culture, toponymy, migrations and seasonal mobility, genealogy and social, ancestral and family relationships.
Thus, in the legacy of an outdated centre-periphery model, and despite major advances in self-government, with the Eeyou Istchee James Bay regional government and the Kativik Regional Administration, for example, the North continues to be considered a periphery providing natural resources. This is while ignoring the living environments that have been shaped there for millennia, “as much by the journey of our ancestors as by the buildings of our contemporaries,” as Caroline Desbiens, from the Department of Geography at Université Laval, points out.
Nordicity
To change the paradigm, the proposal of Louis-Edmond Hamelin, a geographer of northernity, puts forward the idea of a “total Quebec”, advocating the virtues of coexistence in a perspective of “political plenitude”.
This territorial vision requires a real opening towards the North, a rethinking of the geopolitical foundations of Quebec itself, leaving room for a space perceived, imagined, represented by those who inhabit it from the north to the south.
A united territory where the associative, empathetic, collaborative spirit and where territorial leadership emancipates itself beyond the usual colonial borders, through differences, conflicts, tensions, debates.
Such a position obliges us, individuals, communities and organisations from the South and the North, to review the concept of territory and to note that the divergences within it constitute significant obstacles to the sustainability of living environments. The same territory can therefore be shared without its peoples necessarily having the same territorial relationships of belonging, appropriation or claims as references.
Despite its idealistic character, the idea of a “total Quebec” places geography, the science of territories, as a central discipline for understanding North-South dynamics.
A discipline of interconnectivity between natural and cultural environments, between the living and the non-living, aiming at the (re)conciliation between different spatial and temporal scales, merging empiricism and theorization, geography can contribute to a better understanding of these complex socio-territorial relationships. It allows us to approach Nordic issues not sectorally, but by means of a holistic, global and integrative approach. It achieves this by studying the humanity-nature relationships, as well as the cultural and identity relationships maintained with the territories.
Interfaces
It is through these disciplinary foundations that geographers are challenged by the interface zones between the northern and southern regions. Geographers have also developed, over the centuries, various cartographic approaches that can become important levers of expression, analysis and negotiations.
Because the geographical discipline goes well beyond the simple description of landscapes, the identification of natural resources and the production of knowledge in the service of the colonial enterprise, an image from which it still suffers. It is one of links and which invites dialogue.
For there to be dialogue, we must respect all the voices and knowledge systems challenged by Nordic issues, know how to appreciate them and promote their mutual recognition within the territories, to better pass them on to posterity.
The decompartmentalization of indigenous knowledge, local knowledge and academic knowledge will promote a dialogue that is more in line with the aspirations of northern communities. However, this work of decolonization is far from complete. It will advance by developing a relationship of reciprocity with the territories and their living environments and by making room for the human and more-than-human voices of the North, its guardians. By treading the ground, by taking the roads of the taiga, by tasting the berries very red — cranberries, uishatshiminana in Innu-aimun, or Vaccinium vitis-idaea in Latin — by appreciating the bright colours of lichens, listening to the ice that contracts as winter sets in, listening to hunting stories, soaking up local art, playing bingo to the sound of community radio, celebrating at a pow-wow or festival. In short, by developing a relationship of reciprocity with the territories and their living environments and making room for the human voices of the North, its guardians.