Mapping Native Spaces and Lifeways

One of the most pervasive ways of erasing Indigenous spaces occurred through mapping practices. Colonial maps replaced Indigenous placenames and hid complex histories of land use under blank spaces indicating uninhabited territory.

This theme compares three sites during different time periods to understand how competing cartographic cultures recorded, facilitated, resisted, and engaged the environmental changes wrought by colonialism.

1) Colonial maps of 1600s-1900s of northern Scandinavia and North America often built on information acquired from Indigenous consultants and offer surprisingly rich evidence of enduring ways of relating to the environment as well as on survivance amid environmental and political changes. These will be studied alongside Indigenous maps and map-making traditions. From at least the 17 century on Sámi and American Indian communities collected colonial documents recording land rights and treaties and mobilized such documents to justify claims before colonial authorities. This study investigates how Indigenous storytelling and forms of archiving engaged the environmental changes unfolding around their societies.

2) In an Indigenous form of mapmaking, Sámi artist Pirak Sikku reconstructs maps of villages, showing destruction wrought by hydroelectric projects in the 20 century, maps that investigate responses to changes and visualizes survivance.

3) Working with a team of Chumash, Tataviam, and Kiz-Tongva-Gabrieleño expert partners, this project remaps Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in Los Angeles, one of the most densely urbanized regions in the United States. Los Angeles is at once imperiled by climate change through urban-suburban wildfire, drought, and food insecurity, and is home to dozens of Native communities from across the hemisphere. It’s fragile and imperiled ecosystem remains one of the world’s biodiversity hot spots. Building on TEK, the project works on three initiatives: to curate a public-facing digital temporal map of Los Angeles, initiate tribally led sustainable aquaculture and aquaponic projects, and to start Native-run community supported agriculture farms on California lands that are being returned to tribes.
Team leaders: Lakomäki.

Photo credit: Gunlög Fur