Thread by @DeondreSmiles

It's time for this week's #IndigenousGeographies thread--a short one on Indigenous cartographies!

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A refresher from previous threads: geography, and by extension, cartography (the art of making maps), has long been part of the colonial and imperial project. Why? Understanding and categorizing space was viewed as essential to governing and subjugating.

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Take this, for example—a 1973 map showing the then-current system of homelands or 'Bantustans' in South Africa. The system was designed to ensure that the most valuable land and resources were within 'white' South Africa, while the homelands were drawn to be non-contiguous.

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This ensured that South Africa had uninterrupted access to Black labour while denying Black South Africans the right of citizenship. In fact, the NP government systematically stripped citizenship away from Black South Africans to be replaced with 'homeland' citizenship.

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The use of cartography to dispossess and colonize in Africa is not new--the 1884/85 Berlin conference was another example, where lines were arbitrarily drawn on a map, ignoring ethnic/cultural/linguistic boundaries that already existed.

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Of course, imperial cartographies also found a bedfellow in environmental determinism, as seen in this map, the "Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World"--no surprise that Europe and its settler colonies are viewed as civilized.

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The advent of geospatial technologies such as GIS has made cartography much easier today. However, it can also increase community risks, including how militaries and intelligence agencies have re-embraced cartography in ways that can harm Indigenous communities.

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Similarly to last week's thread, Indigenous mapping practices are considered supplementary or peripheral to 'modern' mapping ideas or techniques. But we'll also take a look at some of the ways that Indigenous communities have, and still do, make maps.

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In her recent paper, "Indians Don't Make Maps", my friend (and GIF Labber) Annita Lucchesi talks about three forms of maps that Indigenous peoples have been making for generations, up to the present day:

-Ancestral mapmaking
-Anticolonial mapmaking
-Decolonial mapmaking

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Ancestral mapmaking: maps made pre-colonization and post-colonization by Indigenous cartographers who rejected colonial techniques and categories in their mapmaking.

See the example below: a 'wood map' depicting islands and coastlines off Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).

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Anticolonial mapmaking: Mapping that documents genocide and the effects of colonization on the land.

Example below: A map depicting the locations of residential schools, day schools, and Indian Hospitals in Canada from 1620 to 1996, when the last school closed.

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Decolonial mapmaking is the reclamation and re-creation of Indigenous worlds, focusing on the big and small details, such as the relationship between language and place. In this, modern geospatial techniques coexist with long-standing Indigenous pedagogies/epistemologies.

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Further reading:

“Indians Don’t Make Maps”: Indigenous Cartographic Traditions and Innovationsm, by Annita Lucchesi:



(13/)escholarship.org/uc/item/3fg389…

"Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings", by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Natchee Blu Barnd, Annita Hetoevėhotohke’e Lucchesi, Sharon Dias, and Wil Patrick:



(14/)utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.313…

Mii iw (that's it).

See you again next week!

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