Governmental Rationalities and Indigenous Co-Governance: James Bay Cree Co-Existence, from Mercantilist Partnerships to Neoliberal Mechanisms
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abstract
Despite the long, widespread, and often harrowing successes and enduring effects of colonial governmentalities, it is important to consider the often diverse, fragmentary, hybrid, and contradictory, but also sometimes enduring mutual effects of the forms of governance of the non-state societies which colonial governance engages. Such forms of non-state governance do not derive from the logics of colonial governmentalities. They require additional forms of analysis than those that are common in the study of governmentality in European history or its application to colonial rule. In this chapter I critically re-examine a regional colonial governance history and presence by considering other logics of governance and how these forms engage colonial governmentalities. I explore the relationships and the diverse and sometimes hybrid governance visions and practices that have developed between an Indigenous People, the James Bay Cree, and Canadian and Quebec governance institutions in northern Quebec. Cree people have been tied to European nations and to world markets since the seventeenth century. More recently, they have been drawn into new national and globalizing relations by the joint impact of expanding state administrations, large-scale natural resource developments, and nationalist movements in state polities, as well as by engagements that they have initiated with encapsulating societies. I analyse how diverse and changing co-governance processes have emerged in these engagements. I explore how Cree visions of kin and relational governance, tenure partnerships with animals and a living land, and historical and experienced co-governance with colonial state authorities, have not led to a widespread Cree incorporation or envisioning of nation state governmental rationalities as their own. Their forms of non-state governance do not conform to the modernizing, resisting, accommodating, or self-governing subject visions of colonial discourses and societies. Nor do these forms of governance conform to the frameworks for analyzing governmentality per se. Colonial relationships are unequal, subordinating, exploitative, painful, and controlling. But they are nevertheless shown to continually exist alongside a messy changing mix of active contestation, negotiation, and coexisting governance and co-governance.
