Abstract
This article considers journalistic cartography in relation to socioecological disasters in Indigenous territories and associated resistance movements. The authority of Western-style maps as presented in news media and elsewhere is often taken for granted—colonial cartography exerts powerful, typically unquestioned, influence upon peoples’ understandings of cultural geographies and associated land-based relationships. Such dynamics are particularly germane to consideration of Indigenous environmental and territorial concerns and associated resistance actions across Turtle Island / North America and elsewhere around the world. I present Indigenous mapping traditions and contemporary cartographic interventions as inspiring counterexamples for shifting public narratives and understanding of Indigenous territories, environmental knowledge, and related issues within news media and beyond.
Highlights
This article considers journalistic cartography in relation to socioecological disasters in Indigenous territories and associated resistance movements
Protests and public hearings related to the Northern Gateway pipeline were at their peak, and Idle No More, a socioenvironmental Indigenous and allied resistance movement (Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014), arose in the fall
As indicated in the call for papers for the Disaster Media stream of Media+Environment, contemporary news media must be considered as both representative of and influential upon broader societal beliefs and understanding—they play an important role in curating public opinion on and understanding of such dynamics (Brady and Kelly 2017; Endres 2012; Gilbert et al 2019)
Summary
Building upon Panofsky’s (1962) work in art history, López encourages us to consider the connections between the physical and structural elements of a given image, sociocultural codes that might be embedded within the imagery, and associated discourses Framing this inquiry through decolonization, Indigenization, Eisner’s (2002) three curricula, and López’s (2017) ecomedia visual literacy framework allows me to critically consider what is present as well as identify what is missing from journalistic maps of socioecological disasters in Indigenous contexts—visual representations that hold significant influence over the general public’s understanding of specific cases such as the Wet’suwet’en people’s resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline (CBC News 2020; Dhillon and Parrish 2019) described below as well as colonial geographic and cartographic paradigms and practices more generally. The implications of such dynamics and considerations for journalistic mapping practices are considered in this article
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