Département de géographie

This special issue grew out of a specific moment in time. It was conceived at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2010, at a moment in which geographers, including cultural geographers, were growing increasingly interested in 'ontology.' 1 That year, Sarah de Leeuw, Emilie Cameron, and Jessica Place had organized a series of sessions entitled 'Geographies of Response' that aimed to bring together scholars interested in rethinking conventional understandings of power and resistance in colonial contexts. The various papers that formed that session (including one by Caroline Desbiens, co-editor of this special issue) aimed to explore the ways in which the responses of Indigenous peoples to historical and ongoing colonization might be thought of outside of the binaries inherited from European philosophy, in which Indigenous peoples appear as either victims of colonization or heroically resistant. The papers and discussions were interesting and lively, but what struck us, as the conference unfolded, was the stark contrast between the ways in which ontology was being discussed in sessions aiming to unpack the intellectual and political merits of an 'ontological turn' in the discipline, and the ways in which the ontological was being mobilized by scholars primarily grounded in colonial and decolonizing studies. For the latter group of scholars, concepts like 'being,' connection to land, culture, and tradition, have long been eyed with suspicion. Building on decades of activism and critical scholarship, the affiliation between race, nature, humanism, and empire has made critical scholars wary of mobilizing any kind of 'essential' Indigenous nature or experience in their work. 2 To invoke Indigenous ontologies, for these scholars, is to tread on intellectual terrain that is heavily shaped by colonial inheritances and interests. It is not so much that critical colonial scholars do not acknowledge that Indigenous ontologies are distinct; rather, they are wary of how Indigenous knowledges, beliefs, and practices are represented and mobilized within colonial structures of knowledge production, and have thus tended to shy away from directly engaging Indigenous ontologies as subjects of research. While some scholars have approached the notion of Indigenous ontologies with caution, others have found themselves turning to accounts of Indigenous knowledges and practices as evidence of ontological pluralism and as sources of new modes of thought. Indeed, whereas in previous years the sessions sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the AAG

Ce texte cherche à dépeindre la duplicité du « Plan Nord » en matière de développement. Le Plan Nord présente en effet deux visages : si l’un d’eux affiche une image du développement axée sur les dimensions culturelle et sociale et permet d’envisager le Nord comme un chantier interculturel, l’autre visage, en contrepartie, accuse un regard essentiellement économiste et capitaliste du développement et prône l’exploitation rentable des ressources premières. Dans notre perspective, principalement géographique, les promoteurs et les acteurs du Plan Nord sont en voie d’imposer les vues « sudistes » sur le Nord et restent avant tout aveugles aux pistes de dialogue culturel qui se présentent à eux. Il s’agit là surtout d’un vieux scénario à la veille de se répéter.

Plan Nord, Two-headed Monster and Other Geographic Chimeras
This paper aims to depict the Plan Nord’s duplicity with regards to development. The Plan Nord shows two faces: whereas one of them explores the cultural and social dimensions of development so as to conceive of the North as a vast cross-cultural field, the other face, by contrast, focuses on an exclusively economist and capitalist vision, which encourages the profit-based exploitation of natural resources. In our perspective, which is chiefly geographical, promoters and actors of the Plan Nord run the risk of imposing once again a “southern” view of the North and not engaging in the path of cross-cultural dialogue. This is history repeating itself.

El “Plan Norte”, monstruo de dos cabezas y otras quimeras geográficas
Este texto busca describir la duplicidad del “Plan Norte” en materia de desarrollo. El “Plan Norte” presenta, en efecto, dos caras. Mientras que una de ellas presenta una imagen del Norte centrada en las dimensiones cultural y social, y permite verlo como una obra intercultural, la otra, en contrapartida, resalta una mirada esencialmente economicista y capitalista del desarrollo, y propugna la explotación rentable de las materias primas. Desde nuestra perspectiva, principalmente geográfica, los promotores y los actores del Plan Norte van camino de imponer las visiones del Sur de Quebec sobre el Norte y hacen oídos sordos a las pistas de diálogo cultural que se presentan. Esto insinúa un escenario antiguo, ya conocido, a punto de ser repetido.