‘Process Toponymy’: A GIS-Based Community-Engaged Approach to Indigenous Dynamic Place Naming Systems and Vernacular Cartography

Abstract

This paper discusses the aim and the process of designing a community-engaged open-access GIS toponymic platform, based on Indigenous Evenki place names. Most projects on Indigenous toponymy available online are either oriented towards professional use among scholars or serve as enclosed repositories of Indigenous knowledge. Toponymic atlases remain the most common form of documenting and representing Indigenous place naming systems. Yet, temporal and geographic comparisons of place names have clearly demonstrated that, along with a conventional understanding of Indigenous place names as stable and conservative, there is a dynamic model of place naming to be found in nomadic societies, when the names are not only passed through generations but also modified and created. This finding required a number of methodological approaches regarding how researchers might collect and represent geospatial concepts and place names in nomadic societies, with the use of GIS technology. Our project attempts to approach this issue by creating an open digital platform that combines GIS with Indigenous vernacular cartography, place names, and a great variety of data regarding the meaning and use of toponyms, their evolution, and change. We call this approach a “process toponymy” and advocate for applying a semiotic approach to documenting and representing Indigenous place names’ knowledge via GIS-based platforms.