Abstract EN:

On April, 1st 1999, the creation of a third territory called Nunavut led to a reorganisation of the internal boundaries of Canada. After some 30-year negociations, Nunavut has become a territory with a strong identity, but with no ethnic meaning. The land is peopled up to 85% by Inuit natives who follow their own policy. To understand the way the Inuit have built Nunavut and now experience and dream it on a day-to-day basis, our investigation led us to a conceptual, epistemological and methodological inquiry. We first questioned the research methods that were used by our predecessors and some basic concepts underlying Western geographical notions such as that of "territory". In achieving a form of political territory, the Inuit had to fit their own conception of the territory -based on a cosmogony in which the Earth is the mother of men- to the Western ideological model of territory. By acknowledging the right men have upon the Earth, the Nunavut political territory disrupts the foundations of the inuit sense of place. When they chose to belong to Nunavut, the Inuit community of the Belcher islands turned their back on the social and spatial networks that connected them to Nunavik. They decided instead that their essential spatial identity should be linked to the core territory of Hudson Bay and James Bay. This example shows that the creation of Nunavut led to the expression of a foundational sense of place. This was mainly possible because of the way Inuit leaders negotiated with the Federal, by instilling their own cultural values at each step of the negotiations. Nunavut materializes the adjustment of a territorial model by a native ideology of space.