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

Winner, 2019 John W. Frick Book Award
Winner, 2020 Ann Saddlemyer Award
Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book Award for 2020
Mention Sp?ciale, Soci?t? qu?b?coise d'?tudes th??trale

In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Qu?bec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Qu?b?cois 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 Qu?bec.

Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Qu?b?cois de souche as m?tis, 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 Qu?b?cois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Qu?bec's future and remember its past.

The performances insist on Qu?bec'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 Qu?bec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.