Maps themselves are also texts (Harley: 7-8). As raw material, I decided to take a map showing the projects and infrastructure planned to implement the (in)famous Plan Nord of the Charest government. The project, now called Le nord pour tous, hasn’t changed much under the new government, although its implementation has been somewhat slowed down due to the situation of the global economy.

My idea was to re-contextualize this map and to try to make sense of the territory through a native’s eye. How would a “traditional” native map of this territory, or part of it, have looked like? Perhaps like this?

A “traditional” native map challenges the European valuation of land and associated property claims. Space is organized very differently; it is more important to position people in, in relation to, and because of, the landscape (Anker: 112), than to reproduce exact and measurable graphic features.

The potential is there, but I realized that I would probably be speculating too much. I am, of course, a white woman (let’s forget my great-great Abenaki grand-ma – or what is my great-great-great grand-ma?) from the South, not knowing much about the North, not knowing enough about native Weltanschauung, nor about what a “map” might traditionally mean to a native person. Consider that before the arrival of the Europeans, Indian and Inuit languages did most likely not contain a word for “map”. So even the expression “native map” or “traditional map” has a colonialist touch. Moreover, I should probably not have drawn this “map” on a bleached and perfectly white sheet of paper (it’s recycled paper and may therefore be considered more “ecological”, but it’s most likely not “ecological” in any traditional native sense), but rather on a bark.

I ended up fearing that I would have to make a very long list of disclaimers, and that my “map” could be interpreted as a child’s drawing, or as making fun of or denigrating the lifestyle and intellectual capacities of native people.

I therefore changed my approach and tried to imagine how the first European explorers visualized the territory to be discovered. How did they map Quebec? How did they start? Perhaps like this?

Rather empty, right? That’s it, an empty space.

Since the first explorers didn’t know much about the territory (and did of course not think in terms of the political space that Quebec forms today), the “map” of Quebec should perhaps rather look like this:

Completely empty. Only a frame, an artificial frame, in which the map-drawer can inscribe whatever he or she (in that time, probably he) wants. The blank sheet, however, stands for the “potentiality, the yet unwritten laws and yet unrealized power” (Goodrich: 91). It becomes a representation of space but a space of representation (Siegert: 13).

Whether it’s the coastline, forests, mountains, rivers, native settlements, the movement of animals, mines – the map-drawer has the power to determine the scale, the focus, the relationship between the objects represented, in short to appropriate the terra nullius, the territory that is socially and legally constructed as belonging to “nobody”.

While every map, of course, starts with a blank sheet, or a bare skin, or a plain rock, the empty map in the context of a colonialist endeavor embodies the constructed emptiness of the space. In this sense, I believe that an empty, or nearly empty map of the North of Quebec is revealing of the ways in which the European settlers treated, and still treat, this territory.

Such a “map” does not reply to any questions or explain anything by itself, but it is a good way to ask different and more fundamental questions. As Moretti writes, a map “shows us that there is something that needs to be explained.” (Moretti: 84)

Work cited:

Anker, Kirsten. “The Truth in Painting: Cultural Artifacts as Proof of Native Title.” Law Text Culture 9 (2005) 91-124.

Goodrich, Peter. “The Iconography of Nothing” in Douzinas and Mead, eds, Law and the Image. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999, 89-115.

Harley, J.B. “Deconstructing the Map.” Cartographica 26:2 (Summer 1989) 1-20.

Moretti, Franco. “GRAPHS, MAPS, TREES: Abstract Models for Literary History – 2.″ New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004): 79–103.

Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye – How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.