Contesting certainty: Contemporary treaty making and the Temagami Waterway Park

This project offers an ethnography of the politics and polemics of a particularly controversial element of the pending land claim settlement in Temagami, Ontario: The decision to establish a Waterway Class Provincial Park encompassing both aboriginal and non-aboriginal jurisdictions of the "Land Claim Area". Ontario has identified the park as being a mechanism for achieving what is widely considered the crux of contemporary treaty making processes in Canada: "certainty". However, aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples often have disparate visions of what is meant by "certainty". In this thesis, I explore the compromises and consequences of rendering "certainty" the centre point of aboriginal-state negotiation in Temagami. I suggest that the quest for certainty is an emergent form of 'governmentality', by and through which non-aboriginal governments are attempting to commensurate aboriginal visions with their own. I argue that while commensuration has been an implicit and inchoate procedure of neo-colonial rule, it also allows the Crown to circumvent and deflect the challenges that aboriginal rights claims are thought to pose to state sovereignty.