Settler Urbanization and Indigenous Resistance: Uncovering an Ongoing Palimpsest in Montreal’s Cabot Square

Abstract

This article proposes to study a public square in Montreal, Québec, Canada, to illustrate how different processes of colonization, marginalization, and resistance take place in the city. The study of Cabot Square demonstrates the layers of Indigenous displacement and reappropriation that form the palimpsest inscribed in urban spaces. The authors shed new light on the contemporary context by studying it through the scale of a place and reinserting it in the context of settler colonialism in which social, political, and economic relations in Canada are deeply interwoven. Cities play a major role in colonial dynamics and in the processes of marginalization in a colonial division of space that places certain populations outside the spaces of power. Cabot Square is inscribed in these dynamics, but it is also a site of reappropriation, since services for people experiencing houselessness, cultural activities, and social economy projects intersect there, placing this public place at the heart of daily encounters. The study of Cabot Square as a place of diverse and often contradictory relationships, stories, and practices of urban place-making and Indigenous place-keeping reveals layers of colonialism and Indigenous resistance that overlap through history and interact to form the current cityscape in the Square and beyond. With this article, the authors aim to acknowledge the tensions and complexities of place-making within a settler-colonial context where Indigenous histories and meanings of places not only have been erased by colonial power but also kept alive as much as possible by Indigenous communities through place-keeping.