Prioritising indigenous representations of geopower: the case of Tulita, Northwest Territories, Canada

• Main Author: Perombelon, B
• Other Authors: Powell, R, Thornton, T, Daley, P, Coulthard, G
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Ontology of space and place; Geopolitics of Architecture; Semiotic geopolitics; Ethnography of geopolitics; Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge; Critical geopolitics; Speculative realism; Arctic Social Sciences; Decolonising academia; Postcolonial geopolitics; Philosophy of space and place; Decolonial methodology; Subaltern geopolitics/geography; High modernism in architecture in the Arctic; Emotional geopolitics; Anthropology of space and place; Postcolonial theory; Progressive research method; Progressive geopolitics; Urban geopolitics; Speculative geopolitics; Non-representational geopolitics; Cultural geography; Theory of decolonisation; Polar geography; Political geography; Political economy of development in the Arctic; Northern Amerindian Anthropology; Postcolonial geography; Decolonial geopolitics; Geography of capitalism in the Arctic; Geopower; Psychoanalytical geopolitics; Environmental geography; Popular geopolitics; Indigenous geography/geopolitics; Arctic; Canada; Northwest Territories; Sahtu Region; Tulita
• Online Access: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71e14c26-d00a-4320-a385-df74715c45c8

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories’ Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in ...