D'une part, et considérant leur idéal d'objectivité envers la réalité géographique, ainsi que leur dépendance envers l'information autochtone, les cartes coloniales ne peuvent éviter d'enregistrer la manifestation naissante de la géographie métisse dans les marges coloniales. Les cartes reflètent l'essence même de l'ambivalence coloniale relativement au métissage. Le métissage était acceptable aussi longtemps qu'il restait socialement et spatialement marginal et qu'il ne mettait pas en danger la marche de la « civilisation ». Bien que les autorités furent souvent dans l'obligation de reconnaître le métissage euro-indien dans les marges coloniales, elles n'acceptèrent jamais entièrement l'idée qu'on puisse mélanger les cultures « primitives » et européennes. Reposant sur le rapport dialectique entre la reconnaissance et le déni – ce dernier étant motivé par des discours anti-métis –, l'idée de métissage fut marquée au sceau de l'ambivalence coloniale. L'objectif de cet article est d'explorer le rôle joué par les cartes coloniales – entre le Régime français et la fin du XIX e siècle – dans l'inscription mentale des géographies métisses et dans le développement et l'évolution de l'idée de métissage.

Résumé: Condition sine qua non à la traite des fourrures et à l'expansion coloniale au Canada, le métissage a considérablement coloré l'histoire du pays en créant de nouveaux espaces culturels – des géographies métisses – entre les sociétés autochtones et européennes. On the other hand, because they are sociocultural constructions, maps are components of the discourse of anti-métissage while Métis geographies were sometimes visually silenced, at other times they were cartographically erased. On the one hand, given their intent to be objective accounts of geographic reality and their dependence on the geographic information provided by Aboriginal peoples, maps record, at the margins of colonial reach, the nascent manifestation of Métis geographies. Métissage was acceptable insofar as it was marginal (socially and spatially speaking) and did not endanger the spread of ''civilization.'' Maps represent colonial ambiguity toward métissage. Although colonial officials were often forced to acknowledge Euro-Indian métissage at colonial margins, they never completely accepted the idea that ''primitive'' and European cultures could be mixed. The idea is, in fact, built upon the dialectic between recognition and denial, the latter mostly fed by discourses of anti-métissage. The idea of métissage reveals colonial ambivalence. My objective here is to investigate the role of colonial maps – from the French regime up to the late nineteenth century – in the mental representation of these specific Métis geographies and in the development and evolution of the idea of métissage. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires.Įssential to the fur trade and to colonial expansion into Canada, métissage considerably marked Canadian history by creating new cultural spaces – Métis geographies – between Aboriginal and European societies. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon.

Cartographica journal women mapmakers