Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec

In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Quebec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Quebecois de souche-the French-speaking descendants of white European settlers who understand themselves to be settlers no more but rather colonized and rightfully belonging to the territory of Quebec.

Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Quebecois de souche as metis, with protest marches led by Innu activists; the Indigenous company Ondinnok’s theater of repatriation; the films of Yves Sioui Durand, Alanis Obomsawin, and the Wapikoni Mobile project; and the visual work of Nadia Myre. These performances, Burelle argues, challenge received definitions of sovereignty and articulate new ones while proposing to the province and, more specifically, to the French Quebecois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Quebec’s future and remember its past.

The performances insist on Quebec’s contested nature and reframe it as animated by competing sovereignties. Together they reveal how the
colonial present tense
and
tense colonial present
operate in conjunction as they work to imagine an alternative future predicated on decolonization. Encounters on Contested Lands engages with theater and performance studies while making unique and needed contributions to Quebec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.