(Re)purposing cadasters: When mapping ecclesiastical archives advocates for Indigenous land rights.

Keywords: cadasters, archives, land, indigenous
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

In Canada, the dispossession of Indigenous lands has greatly benefitted the catholic
church. It remains one of the biggest landowners today, with an estimated $3.3 billion in
assets from property in 2019 (Grant & Cardoso, 2021). Not all congregations chose to hold on
to the land however, some sold it to settlers to fill their coffers. This is the case of the
Seminary of St Sulpice, a society of diocesan priests whom the king of France gave 539.9
km2 of land by 1735, forming the Seigneurie du Lac des Deux Montagnes. In their land registries, the
Sulpicians painstakingly recorded every property transaction they made with settlers for more
than 300 years. These records served as powerful inventories of data used by the Sulpicians to
claim Indigenous territories, to erase Indigenous presence, to attract settlers. I propose
repurposing these data to give them new life and new meanings in the present. This proposal
aligns with post-representational cartography theorists (Del Casino & Hanna, 2006; Kitchin &
Dodge, 2007; Caquard, 2015; Rossetto, 2015), who rethink cartography through mapping
processes and practices. They propose that a map is a mutable object that can be made and
remade continuously. This is an exciting prospect; by returning these ecclesiastical archives to
the Kanehsatakeró:non, the mapping process creates new circumstances in which to render
their own territorial perspectives.