CRC

Dr. Evelyn Joy Peters - Canada Research Chair in Geography

Look at any map of urban Canada and you’ll see the ordered grid of downtown streets, the crescents and cul-de-sacs of suburbia, the monolithic blocks of shopping malls surrounded by their hectares of pavement parking lots.

It’s an image that has been superimposed over a much older map, one tied to the rhythms of sky and season, of birth, life and death. This map sets the bounds of traditional territories and takes into account family blood ties. It identifies the best places to camp, and to gather for celebrations. These locations are the most familiar, as they are where our cities stand today.

For thousands of years, aboriginal people lived by this map, which was, and remains, etched indelibly I both mind and culture.

According to Dr. Evelyn Joy Peters, this ancient map may be painted over, but it cannot be obliterated. It continues to have a profound effect on how aboriginal people live in cities, and it holds the key to understanding Aboriginal rights and title today.

“People have a sense of what ‘the city’ is. Historically, it’s been the centre of civilization, the emblem of the modern nation,” she says.

We need look no further than the spectacular and horrific destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre to illustrate the deep emotional ties we have with the modern city. These ties are the basis with which we define our place in society, but they don’t mean the same thing to every group of people. Dr. Peters explains that these ‘maps of meaning’ still have large blank spots. This is especially true of aboriginal people.

“Aboriginal people have been written out of those maps of meaning of what the city represents.”

Dr. Peters says there is virtually no published information on aboriginal peoples in the urban environment. When people look at the statistics, they discover to their surprise that half of aboriginal people live not on the reserve, but in the city. Aboriginal people are not invisible, it’s just that, comfortable in our assumptions, we do not think to look.

Filling in the blank spots is essential. Dr. Peters says there are models for ethnic communities, for black communities, for religious communities. None work for aboriginals. A new model is needed, one that can only be developed with the help of the people themselves. Dr. Peters is confident it can and well be done.

“Aboriginal people have found lots of ways of creating vibrant and effective communities in urban areas,” she says. “No culture is static, and all cultures find ways of taking the central tenets of what their culture means and adapting it to different circumstances. Why do we think aboriginal culture can’t do that?”