Weaving stories of Tiohtià:ke: participatory mapping with Indigenous youth from Montreal’s urban community

Abstract

This paper presents a counter-mapping process with Indigenous youth in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal which aimed at vizibiling their stories, experiences, and knowledges in relation to the urban space. By using a process of participatory mapping focused on their territorialities, the objective of this project was to co-create new knowledges and perspectives of the city while respecting Indigenous spatial epistemologies and ontologies, and their orality. This participatory process also aimed at a storying process (San Pedro et al. 2017) that allows the weaving of individual stories into a common narrative that includes relationships to places, to land, to people and between all participants (Grande et al. 2015).
The process took place between 2019-2021 through workshops and interviews, and since the fall of 2021, 8 youth formed an advisory committee for the creation of a final map. On March, 2022, they gathered to craft a final narrative of the collective map. This paper will present the final map, which is a multimedia production, in the form of a Website, that honors the storying process of the youth, and the resulting collective narrative in its nonlinear, interconnected and circular nature. The final map is not georeferenced, but rather relies on arts and audio excerpts, to share a common narrative and to restore and re-story (Mahuika 2015) Indigenous presence in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.