Indigenous Cartographies

Characteristics of Indigenous Cartographies

From this diversity, common characteristics emerge that reflect the common characteristics of indigenous knowledge systems generally. Indigenous cartographies are characterized by performativity, the inextricability of the spiritual from geographical experience and expression, an emphasis on storied place names, and the incorporation of physical landscape and community memory as a cartographic archive.

When viewed through nonindigenous eyes, it may be difficult to recognize some of those practices as mapping because they stand apart from Western or Euro-American expectations of how maps work and what maps should look like. For decades, this restricted vision limited nonindigenous awareness of such traditions to a few popular examples, such as the bone carvings of coastlines made by Inuit peoples and the tide charts created from sticks and shells by Marshall Island sailors for teaching traditional navigation techniques.

In the 1970s, largely through the works of G. Malcolm Lewis and Louis de Vorsey, building on the early work of Bruno Adler, a cartobibliographic record for American Indian mapmaking began to take shape in map history. This early work analyzed the accuracy of linear, Euclidean measure in Native maps in comparison with European maps. While this analysis qualified less measurably accurate examples as primitive, cognitive, or maplike, the revelation that some indigenous maps do contain such measurability overturned the perception that Native people had no concept or skills of distance measurement. The Columbian Encounter conferences and symposia of 1992, including the first traveling exhibition devoted to indigenous cartography, encouraged further scholarship, shifting attention to Native peoples’ contributions to colonial cartographies such as the Hudson's Bay Company maps, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the relaciones geograficas of New Spain. Through both archival study and visual analysis, scholars examined the unacknowledged processes by which Native cartographies were transformed into printed, European maps as part of the colonial project, driving the European printed map market while simultaneously erasing their own ancient geographies.

Theoretical Perspectives

These symposia coincided with, and were thus influenced and enriched by, the critical theoretical breakthroughs in geography during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Brian Harley called on geographers and historians to deconstruct the Euro-American map, to uncover the power relations inherent to the positivist epistemology of Western cartography, and to explore the indigenous epistemologies silenced by the colonial cartographic tradition. Barbara Belyea, also through a close reading of Foucault, called for indigenous maps to be evaluated on their own terms rather than through comparison with a European “standard.” Robert Rundstrom further widened the theoretical critique by focusing on the transmission of knowledge itself. If nonindigenous culture is inscriptive, emphasizing the storage of information in objects for later use, and indigenous culture is incorporative, emphasizing the process of communicating knowledge itself, then maps as objects could no longer be a useful approach to the study of indigenous cartographies. A processual approach, Rundstrom wrote, would be a more culturally relevant and inclusive framework for Native map histories.

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