Indigenous Cartography

Maps are the most relevant contribution of geography to the interpretation of human presence in space. Cartography of Africa is a central issue in the global order. The continent projects importance in most different themes, including the dynamics of the continental economy and its insertion with the regionalization. The cartographic production centered on the African experience is largely unknown. Commonly it is omitted due to the almost atavistic disqualifying perspective surrounding the continent, its peoples, and cultures. Therefore the Africa Map demands fair debate and recognition. In May 1961, when the continent was witnessing the emergence of a veritable flood of independences, the UN Economic and Social Council initiated the United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Africa. Intending to standardize geoinformation on the continent, the Regional Map of Africa is one of the most relevant developments of this initiative. Approved in February-March 1976 at the 26th Ordinary Session of the Council of Ministers of the Organization of African Unity, the Regional Map of Africa is, by definition, a spatial representation of great importance to scholars on the continent. This paper incorporates a debate about a multifaceted set of perspectives and influences, evaluating Africa's regional cartography mainly in geography, history, and anthropology fields, addopting Africanity as an umbrella concept.

As wondrous lands are represented as “wastelands” to make way for urban and industrial development in Hawaiʻi, kūpuna or elders and cultural practitioners are currently building a movement across the islands to mobilize moʻolelo (stories and histories) in huakaʻi aloha ʻāina, (physical and spiritual travels to view and remember celebrated and sacred places) in order to protect them.  On these huakaʻi, moʻolelo have critical decolonial effects as they articulate an ʻŌiwi moʻoʻāina economy of abundance that restores “wastelands” to ʻāina kamahaʻo (wondrous land) and ʻāina momona (abundant land).  In this essay, I focus on a 2010 community struggle to protect the birthplace of the kupua (supernatural hero) Māui in Lualualei valley from a developer’s proposal for a light industrial park. The Concerned Elders of Waiʻanae organized the Huakaʻi Kākoʻo no Waiʻanae environmental justice bus tours to share the Māui moʻolelo and build a broad base of support for their struggles, enabling wonder to grow into direct action.  I discuss the ways that Indigenous and critical settler cartographies map the wonder of the Māui moʻolelo on the ground, and I look to narrative conventions of moʻolelo that compare and connect distant places, helping to grow affinity activism.

Employing the teachings of Indigenous cartographic practices to trouble the Western epistemologies of subdivision that underpin private property development, Candace Fujikane's Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future charts out an unabashedly hopeful vision for futures that exceed the dictates of capitalist accumulation. Abundance, as Fujikane shows throughout, is not an ungrounded future wish, or a hazily-defined otherwise that we must collectively imagine. It has already been mapped out for us by Indigenous peoples—in her example, Kanaka Maoli—who have long thrived according to fundamental philosophies of cultivation and relationality.

Indigenous peoples around the world face similar challenges pertaining to their ancestral territories in planning, protection, policy, and advocacy. For Maori, of Aotearoa New Zealand, issues related to mana whenua, mana moana, demarcation and the protection of ...

Indigenous peoples around the world face similar challenges pertaining to their ancestral territories in planning, protection, policy, and advocacy. For Maori, of Aotearoa New Zealand, issues related to mana whenua, mana moana, demarcation and the protection of ...

In 1910 the Russian scholar Bruno Fridrikhovich Adler (1874-1942) published what was arguably the first modern global survey of ‘indigenous’ cartography or, more precisely, it was the first survey of its kind to reference what is now Tanzania.  The object of the following research note is twofold: to provide an English translation (Part B) of a Russian source that is not generally accessible to Africanists, at the same time as wrapping it in a more extended historiographical context (Part A). The transalation only encompasses the African section of Adler's article.

This essay explores three genres of Native storytelling and their echoes in contemporary literatures of removal. The Five “Civilized” Tribes—the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations—have not only been shaped by the memory of removal but also by the process of telling it as history, of feeding an American appetite for tragedy, which maps their displacement on its material, cultural, and political axes. In the U.S. historical imagination, removal thus exceeds the bounds of event and condition to form an aesthetic within the larger arena of trauma discourse. By invoking each genre and its alter-species figures, Five Tribes authors enact a decolonization strategy that takes aim at this removal aesthetic as well as the colonial Eurowestern cartographic consciousness that undergirds it, which construes Indigenous people and non-human animals as lacking any sovereignty in a U.S. landscape. By articulating Native ecologies and place-making practices, authors unravel Eurowestern models and attend to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls “a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power” (p. 98) as reflected in popular representations of removal, specifically the Trail of Tears. At stake in contemporary stories for Five Tribes communities is a process of remapping home spaces under the historical and present condition of removal, a cartographic act that expresses Indigenous knowledge, thereby countering aesthetics of removal.

The only known map of Mexico City painted with the collaboration of indigenous artists, the Mapa Uppsala (c. 1540) depicts the city and surrounding Valley of Mexico. This essay counters previous characterizations of the map’s formal composition as one that has
fully espoused European cartographic modes. This essay contextualizes the Mapa Uppsala within the extant corpus of pre-Hispanic and early colonial cartographies to demonstrate that a closer analysis of pictorial conventions and structures can shed light on how and why the artists might have consciously selected particular pictorial
strategies.

El único mapa conocido de la ciudad de México pintado con la colaboración de artistas indígenas, el Mapa Uppsala (c. 1540) representa la ciudad y el valle de México que lo rodea. Este ensayo contrarresta las caracterizaciones previas de la composición formal del mapa como una que ha adoptado modos cartográficos europeos. Este ensayo contextualiza el Mapa Uppsala dentro del corpus existente de cartografías indígenas para demostrar que un análisis más detallado de las convenciones y estructuras pictóricas puede arrojar luz sobre cómo y por qué los artistas pueden haber seleccionado conscientemente estrategias pictóricas particulares.

ABSTRACT The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city’s takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537–1541. This revised date, combined with the map’s high degree of topographical and chorographical precision, means that the map offers a snapshot of the city’s urban development and ecological changes at an earlier point in its history than has been acknowledged.

The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city’s takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537–1541. This revised date, combined with the map’s high degree of topographical and chorographical precision, means that the map offers a snapshot of the city’s urban development and ecological changes at an earlier point in its history than has been acknowledged.

This essay looks at indigenous mapping initiatives from the prism of documentary cinema and its activist potential. It starts from the assumption that critical geographers as well as film studies scholars have seldom focused on cinematic cartography in relation to indigenous land claims. Whether funded by national institutions, or individual initiatives of Indigenous artists, moving images – and animation in particular – are means to historicise and complicate the notions of borders and land ownership. The essay is two-fold: focusing first on the reappropriations and subversion of official state maps by Indigenous films; then on alternatives to Western cartographic representations, using cognitive mapping to formulate a more embodied conception of space and the land.