Indigenous Cartography Research Articles

Indigenous Cartographies: Pervasive Games and Place-Based Storytelling

With the rise of pervasive games in the last two decades, peaking with Pokémon GO, questions surrounding the perceptions, use, and ownership of public space have rapidly emerged. Beyond commercial and public uses of city spaces, how are such experiences attentive to local, regional, cross-cultural, ancient, and persistent notions of place? How can locative and pervasive experiences respond to local and Indigenous understandings of place? Perhaps most decisively, what is the compatibility of ancient and Indigenous stories of sustainability set within rapidly obsolete frameworks of the latest mobile devices? In considering these questions, this article reviews the current literature on Indigenous pervasive games and discusses an augmented reality audio-game that features Australian First Nations’ stories of land, river, and sky. Players of the game are transformed into wayfarers as they move across the landscape to uncover alternate and pre-settlement cartographies bringing new insights to familiar territory.

Indigenous cartographies and mapping abundance

Indigenous cartographies developed in Indigenous homelands in response to the distinctive relationships each Indigenous community had with its respective environments. Oftentimes, these cartographies are embedded in important cultural practices and maintained through mentored learning processes. The spatial knowledge recorded and shared in these systems encourages an attitude of environmental care and sustainable accountability. Returning to these systems has been instrumental for Indigenous communities who are reconnecting with their ancestral wisdom. Including these perspectives in classrooms by adding the articles from this special double edition to reading lists will expand the depth of discussions geographers have about Indigenous research and their responsibilities (as opposed to roles) to the process.

The Importance of Contemporary and Historical Indigenous Cartography and Toponymy with Indigenous Contributions to Euro/American/Canadian Cartography

The Importance of Contemporary and Historical Indigenous Cartography and Toponymy with Indigenous Contributions to Euro/American/Canadian Cartography

Walking, knowing, and the limits of the map: performing participatory cartographies in Indigenous landscapes

Post-representational cartography views maps as inherently unstable and unfinished, always in the making and thus singularly open for refolding and re-presentation. This perspective on maps calls for greater attention to the performances, negotiations, and contestations that occur during the ongoing production of maps, particularly in cases where maps are developed during collective, collaborative, and participatory processes in Indigenous landscapes riven by conflict and struggle. In the following, we examine the role of walking for the continual (re)making of participatory maps, specifically engaging with work in Indigenous methodologies to consider how an emphasis on performativity in map-makings may foster a post-representational perspective on Indigenous cartographies. We understand walking as map-making, a form of knowledge production generated by performative and situated storytelling along paths and in places filled with meaning. Drawing on a critical understanding of ‘invitation’ and ‘crossing’, we build on our experiences from participatory mapping projects in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil to explore the ways in which the material, performative crossings of bodies through Indigenous landscapes may inspire new forms of knowledge production and destabilize Cartesian cartographic colonialities.

The Importance of Indigenous Cartography and Toponymy to Historical Land Tenure and Contributions to Euro/American/Canadian Cartography

Indigenous maps are critical in understanding the historic and current land tenure of Indigenous groups. Furthermore, Indigenous claims to land can be seen in their connections via toponymy. European concepts of territory and political boundaries did not coincide with First Nation/American Indian views, resulting in the mistaken view that Natives did not have formal concepts of their territories. And Tribes/First Nations with cross-border territory have special jurisdictional problems. This paper illustrates how many Native residents were very spatially aware of their own lands, as well as neighboring nations’ lands, overlaps between groups, hunting territories, populations, and trade networks. Finally, the Sinixt First Nation serve as a perfect example of a case study on how an Aboriginal people are currently inputting and using a GIS representation of their territory with proper toponymy and use areas.

Informatic tactics: Indigenous activism and digital cartographies of gender-based violence

ABSTRACT The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’ digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like #ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways that users interact with data through hypermediated visual systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space, through various methods of layering, compositing and linking. Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead, with relational Indigenous knowledges.

To what extent can online mapping be decolonial? A journey throughout Indigenous cartography in Canada

In this paper, we describe and reflect upon our journey through Indigenous online mapping in Canada. This journey has been planned according to an academic goal: assessing the potential of online cartography for decolonial purposes. To reach this goal, we have followed methodological directions provided by Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith to review 18 Indigenous web‐mapping sites across Canada. Supported by a series of ten interviews, this content analysis enabled us to sketch some of the contours of contemporary Indigenous cartography. On one hand, Indigenous communities largely control the data that are shared on these websites. They also partially control the way these data are represented through the mobilization of digital storytelling technologies that are better aligned with Indigenous ways of envisioning relationships to places than conventional maps. On the other hand, they do not have much control over the technological aspects of these projects, for which they remain heavily dependent on non‐Indigenous partners. Throughout this journey, we noticed that women's voices remained marginal in most of these mapping projects, but we also identified evidence supporting the idea that these voices are starting to play a vital role in the on‐going effort of decolonizing mapping processes.

Fixing the territory, a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Indigenous mapping is a powerful political tool for long‐marginalized populations to create visibility and establish land claims. In the case of Argentina, a country that was built on a denial of the presence of Indigenous peoples in the national territory, the emergence of these maps stemming from participatory processes coincided with the recognition of these communities' territorial rights in 1994. However, this mapping of Indigenous territories freezes extremely dynamic and complex socio‐spatial realities just as it inflects their representations. In this paper, I reassess the weight and the role that Indigenous cartographic representations play in the evolution of these populations' spatial capital. Paradoxically, they give rise to more contradictions than they clarify. These paradoxes demonstrate the varied relationships different generations maintain with their territory, just as they concern its structure and its cartographic form. Therefore, based on the case of the Wichí of the Argentinian Chaco, this paper contributes to the understanding of contemporary issues of indigeneity by adopting a critical approach to Indigenous cartography. Whereas in Argentina cartographic knowledge is undergoing a process of decolonization, this does not apply to the legal system or to society as a whole.

Floating Island Reflections: Relationalities from Oceania and Manna-hata

Author(s): Na'puti, Tiara R. | Abstract: This response engages archipelagic thinking and etak/moving islands theories to rhetorically analyze Robert Smithson’s Floating Island (2005) in relation to other poetic and experiential artifacts. It considers how Indigenous cartographies and oceanic concepts maintain connections, movements, and relationalities that traverse waterways from peoples and places of Manna-hata and Oceania alike.

Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations

Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations

Bringing Indigenous Kamchatka to Google Earth: Collaborative Digital Mapping with the Itelmen Peoples

This project is part of the Innovations in Ethnographic Mapping and Indigenous Cartographies project, funded by a Google Research Grant, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the Arctic Social Sciences Program, and the US Fulbright Scholar Program.

English

Indigenous cartography existed in various forms in pre-colonial Africa. Unfortunately, the indigenous cartographic heritage of the continent suffered a major setback during the period of imperialism and colonialism. A foremost threat to the traditional cartographies of the African people has been the colonization and deformation of original local geographical names. As an enduring legacy, toponyms are revered by the people for their cartographic, cultural, ethnographic, social, historical, linguistic, economic, political, spiritual, intellectual, scientific and geographical significance. The distortion of the toponyms is a serious threat to the indigenous cartographic heritage and cultural identity of the people. This paper, therefore, x-rays the importance and indigenous cartographic role of African toponyms. The processes of place-name deformation in Africa and the cartographic implications of such deformation are discussed. The paper equally identifies place name decolonization, which is currently going on in some African counties, as an essential strategy for reinstating, preserving and promoting the indigenous cartographies of Africa. Some probable challenges to the decolonization process are also identified. The paper charts the way forward by outlining a number of steps that could be taken to restore the continent’s distorted place-names to their original form, for the preservation of indigenous cartography in post-colonial Africa. Key words: Indigenous cartography, toponym, Africa, place-name distortion, decolonization.

How to Map with Ink: Cartographic Materials from Colonial Oaxaca

Material technology played a key role in the making of indigenous maps. This article analyzes the use of ink to explore the chemical and botanical practices used by native painters and Spanish officials to make and authenticate maps. This underexamined aspect of indigenous cartography enhances our understanding of a painter's technical skills, allowing us to gain insight into the complex process of selecting and preparing a variety of organic and inorganic ingredients to illustrate them. Spanish scribes and regional judges used their own formulas to make ink, applying the liquid substance to review and annotate maps to fit legal protocols. Combining a sample of maps from Oaxaca with botanical histories, chronicles, and orthographic treatises, this article traces the use of ingredients such as rocks, plants, liquids, roots, and soil as they made their way from the physical world to the hands of an Indian painter or a Spanish official who skillfully transformed them into ink. The interaction between different substances contributed to the distinct style and function of indigenous mapmaking.

Legal Issues in Mapping Traditional Knowledge: Digital Cartography in the Canadian North

Digital cartography offers great potential for mapping the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities. This is particularly so because of the close relationship between such knowledge and traditional lands. Yet the mapping of traditional knowledge also raises distinct legal and ethical considerations which should be at the forefront in the design and implementation of indigenous digital cartography projects. This paper examines these considerations through the lens of digital atlases jointly created by Inuit communities and Carleton University’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC).

Cartography II

The goal of this second report is to review how social media are changing the way we collectively map the world. To reach this goal I review different collective mapping practices that characterize the social media era. First I examine the situation of community mapping in the context of new cartographic processes and technologies, with a focus on indigenous cartographies. I then review the use of volunteers in the production and representation of geospatial knowledge, with an emphasis on crisis mapping. Finally, I discuss how map-making in the social media era reflects major trends in terms of power relationships that occur between the state, its citizens and the private sector. These trends reveal the replacement of the state as the main reference for the collection and dissemination of cartographic data, by a combination of private interest and individually volunteered contributions. Just as the specific interests of the nation state have largely helped to shape the reality produced by paper maps throughout the centuries, this new convergence of interests is now helping to shape the reality produced by digital maps through geosocial media.

Introduction: Indigenous Cartographies and Counter-Mapping

Introduction: Indigenous Cartographies and Counter-Mapping

Off the Map, Beneath Our Feet

The imaginary consolidation of America as a sovereign nation-state situated on a state-centric international topography was and remains predicated on spatializing practices bound up with the ongoing eradication of indigenous people(s) and simultaneous effacement, or at least repression, of the violence of the (neo)colonial encounter. The American nation-state is founded on the all-but-forgotten bodies and worlds of indigenous peoples and is continually secured by a narrative constellation that reduces the decimation of people(s) to a clearing of space on which a sovereign nation could be constructed or within which it could evolve. This article will trace the various techniques of decimating indigenous cultures and bodies that facilitate efforts of nationalist historiography that reduce indigenous cartographies to mere space situated within a narrative trajectory of American national unification.

Vestígios indígenas na cartografia do sertão da América portuguesa

Nos três primeiros séculos da colonização da América portuguesa, a cartografia indígena auxiliou no processo de decodificação do espaço convencionalmente chamado "sertão" pelos adventícios. Agentes de colonização da capitania de São Paulo (bandeirantes, soldados, povoadores, burocratas, comerciantes e aventureiros) mapearam cuidadosamente os territórios interiores. A situação colonial, entretanto, impôs uma nova orientação do espaço, bem como classificou os grupos étnicos em categorias distintas, fixas e homogêneas. Nesse processo de conquista da Coroa portuguesa, os grupos indígenas foram gradativamente eclipsados dos mapas, e seus territórios, expropriados.

Belated Foundations

The ethnoecocidal eradication of indigenous bodies, cultures, and cartographies in the United States, although not without resistance and remainder, gradually transformed densely textured networks of peoples and places into a cleared and open space upon which a nation could be imaginatively and materially composed. However, securing these lands as unambiguously “American” required an elaborate extension of these violent and amnesic cartographic practices. A reading of the US Declaration of Independence and discourses surrounding the US Constitution is used to demonstrate this, with the point of documenting the incessant forgetting requisite for contemporary American self-representations to hold sway and the violent ramifications that are thereby enabled.

Special issue: Indigenous cartographies

Special issue: Indigenous cartographies