Negotiating nation: Native participation in the cartographic construction of the Trans-Mississippi West

Abstract

Since the 1970s, historians of cartography have resituated the map as a form of discourse that contains power, rhetoric, and value. Unlike the critical investigations into Euro-American maps, however, explorations of Native maps have remained positivist activities: attempts to find “authentic” Indian world-views. It has become a truism that Indian understanding and depictions of place were incompatible with cartographic representations of the expanding American state. In this interpretation, the creation and circulation of a map of America inherently meant the erasure of indigenous ways of understanding their place—literally—in the geographic creation of the American republic. Yet for much of the nineteenth century, nothing in the process of mapping the expanding American state inherently excluded Native people. This article argues that Indian names and naming practices were essential to the cartographic creation of the American west. By analyzing the toponyms inscribed on what a specialist for cartographic history at the Library of Congress has called the “most important map of the American West prior to the Civil War”, this article will demonstrate how this essential process of state-building was a reflection of both Euro and Native American mapping practices and typified the syncretic nature of how the American West was mapped.