Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec by Julie Burelle (review)

Encounters on Contested Lands is an impressive, important book that contributes to a wider reckoning with the representation of the Indigenous people of Canada as part of that nation's settler colonial history. Julie Burelle's work addresses the complex issue of identity and representation through an analysis of contemporary film, performance, and activism. She takes the 1990 Oka crisis as a starting point to address competing claims of sovereignty by the European French-language settlers and the Indigenous peoples of Québec. Burelle then looks back to the notorious Durham report of 1839, which portrayed the descendants of Nouvelle France as having "no culture," through the Duplessis era of the 1950s and the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Québec's struggle for sovereignty reaches a climax, as described by Burelle, in the 1980 referendum and the conflicts around the creation of a Canadian constitution in the 1980s. This history of the French settlers and their struggle for self-determination might seem to allow for connection to and even alliance with the history of violence and oppression against Canada's Indigenous peoples, but as Burelle convincingly sets forth, this history has instead resulted in complex and particular forms of appropriation and competition.

The Oka crisis was the consequence of a land dispute involving the municipal government of Oka, which approved real-estate development on the unceded ancestral territory of the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke. Shaney Komulainen's iconic photo of the standoff is the first of Burelle's encounters. Her cogent analysis explores the representation of a vulnerable settler colonial identity (the soldier's youth, bare face, shorter stature) threatened by a seemingly powerful Other (masked, taller, impossible to identify). Following Wendy Brown's theory of identity as "wounded attachment," Burelle interprets the settler Québecois soldier as inviting identification with a wronged and vulnerable group struggling for rights. In her introduction, she also admirably defines important terms for her discussion—the difference between First Nations and Indigenous, for example, and terms like Québecois de souche (souche translates as "root," allowing the settler population to claim a form of indigeneity)—before introducing the structure of her work. The first two chapters analyze theatre and film works by prominent Québecois de souche artists. The next two look at the artistic work of Indigenous artists and political activists in Québec that unsettle colonial narratives. The fifth and final chapter broadens the conversation beyond the Indigenous peoples of Québec by juxtaposing an adaptation of an ancient Mayan performance text and a legal dispute between the Kumeyaay nation and the University of California, San Diego.

Chapter 1 is a detailed analysis of Québec actor and writer Alexis Martin's ambitious and imaginative staged history of Québec, Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (2012). While Burelle's analysis acknowledges the strengths of this work as an entertaining history of serious intent (it was widely acclaimed by critics), she identifies how Indigenous peoples are staged within it as "figures of transit," there to represent a past whose value lies in its disconnection from contemporary Québecois de souche subjects, who are in danger of being assimilated into Americanized consumer society (37). Martin adapts an Indigenous metaphor, "a land where the cold is so great … that words lie frozen," to describe the way that his contemporaries have forgotten their roots (the phrase plays on the word souche) (31). In the idealized past staged by Martin, Indigenous peoples and the settlers of Nouvelle France existed in harmony, especially compared to the English settlers. Burelle points out that while these early benign encounters have a historical basis, the golden age did not last long. Martin restages a myth of consent, and Burelle aptly compares it to the Play of Neptune, staged in Port Royal in 1606, which portrayed Mi'kmaq chieftains welcoming the settlers and blessing their appropriation of land.

Burelle shifts her analysis to film in...