A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation

ions was the removed, bureaucratized, and disembodied conception of abstract space that, Mitchell argues, is constitutive of modern state effects. The Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en were therefore obliged to negotiate with the structuring e f fects o f this normalized abstract space—what might usefully be called a pedagogic space of “the people”—at a number of different levels. Negotiating in the Space of the People At the most microgeographical scale, there was the actual spatial layout of the courtroom. The court’s architecture, like that of courtrooms all over North America, reflected the adversarial and individualistic nature of courtroom exchange with an oppositional positioning of questioner and witness and an isolated, individualizing witness stand. This divisive courtroom arena was, as Timothy Solnick (1992) has pointed out at length, a very difficult space for the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people to enter into as collective nations. Part of this difficulty was also practical, and concerned the way the trial was moved from Smithers, a small community in the heart of the claimed territory, to Vancouver, more than 1200 kilometers away. The Chief Justice, working with a modern western concept of justice applying equally, everywhere within the abstract space of the state, could easily argue that Vancouver would be a more convenient location for the trial. His reasoning may have been predicated on his personal needs, but the abstract system provided his authority, and it was hard for the First Nations to contest the move within the rubrics of Canadian law. This meant that while the Chief Justice submitted that he was inconvenienced as a judge by the Smithers location—“I frankly admit that I do not have the endurance to continue a case as difficult as this one for any appreciable time outs ide Vancouver” (Monet and Skanu’u 1992:50)—he freely ignored the inconvenience, cost, and hardship imposed on the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en by moving the trial away from their own communities. Not only did all those testifying have to travel at great expense to a city far from their families and support networks, they also had to pay for lodging in the city and to negotiate the modernist monolith of the Vancouver courthouse. Far from Smithers, the location of this building, along with its alienating scale, its strictly monitored spaces, and its expensive environs, effectively barred the strong social support Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en witnesses had received A Map That Roared 471