Surveying the Present, Projecting the Future: Reevaluating Colonial French Plans of Kanesatake

Historians are unable to reconstruct or recover Indigenous maps from every Native community in the early modern era. NAIS methods offer techniques that allow scholars to tease out Indigenous presences in documents that appear to be exclusively European in manufacture and in meaning. Comparing two eighteenth-century French (plans( of Kanesatake offers insight into French conceptualizations of empire and, equally important, illuminates the negotiation between French imperial aspirations and Indigenous sovereignty. Moving beyond the illustrative use of visual material to take documents such as these plans as serious sources in their own right, this article recovers the dialogic processes between Indians and Europeans that produced such records. By bringing multiple renderings of a single place into conversation with one another, it also invites reflection on the threads connecting the works themselves with the repositories that house them and probes whether certain colonial fictions continue to be upheld because such images are still seen as the property of European states that claim to have produced them. Only by taking visual sources on their own terms and paying attention to their Indigenous presence can early Americanists begin to confront and address such historical inaccuracies.