Monthly Archives: June 2017

Terra Incognita

Recently, in response to complaints from First Nations communities in Canada, Google Maps and Google Earth have added some 3,000 tracts of indigenous homelands to their digital imaging of North America. As reported in a recent issue of The Guardian, this undertaking represents a continuation of an effort begun in the United States and Brazil for the systematic, cartographic recognition of Native space. (Read more).

In order to correctly map these regions, Google partnered with tribal cartographers like Steven DeRoy, of the Ebb and Flow First Nation community, a settlement near Lake Manitoba. DeRoy and his fellow collaborators feel that such a visual acknowledgement of Native spaces is long overdue. For them, to appear on Google Earth is to achieve a kind of recognition, a first step towards ending some 500 years of cartographic erasure for Indian peoples in the western hemisphere.

“It’s unfortunate that indigenous people have been excluded from the maps and it’s taken a long time just to have that recognition”

Steven DeRoy

European cartographers since the Middle Ages have always treated those places in the world where they had not been as terra incognita, “unknown land.” Aside from the problem that most territories labeled this way were home to peoples to whom the land around them was very much known, early map makers often suggested that such spaces were inherently “wild.” The most common way of marking these regions can be seen in this detail from an 11th-Century Anglo-Saxon map. “Hic abundat leones,” the cartographer warns, “here are lions in abundance.”

For their part, the mapmakers who described North America simply translated the Medieval and Renaissance conventions into the standard idiom of the time. In his 1750 map of North America, Robert Sayer assiduously detailed the land east of the Mississippi with proper  references to the colonial powers that claimed them. When he reached the northern Rockies, however, he abandoned all hope. The land of hemisphere’s northwest quadrant was simply “parts unknown.”

Spaces like these epitomize what the great geographer J. B. Harley meant when he spoke of “cartographic silences,” those aspects of mapmaking “which arise from deliberate policies of secrecy and censorship.” With the creation of Indian Territory in 1830, the U.S. government began to work to make manifest its own cartographic silencing by force marching indigenous peoples into a non-state space virtually devoid of due process and self-government. This project reached its logical apex with the reservation system of the 1870s, and culminated in the 1887 Severalty Act, a piece of legislation that reduced treaty lands to individual tracts of between 360 and 680 acres. When all of the enrolled members of a tribe had claimed the tracts they were due, there was “left-over” land, and it was sold as “excess” to non-Indian claimants.

Map of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota showing allotment tracts.

As Indian lands moved from the “wild” to “parts unknown,” they grew dimmer on the cartographic page, until, by 1890, they look a lot like any other European settler land in the American west. 

The efforts of  indigenous cartographers and their collaborators at Google thus represent a significant step forward in the recognition of indigenous homelands as occupied, their human communities contiguous with those of the European settlers around them. There might be “lions” in some of these tracts of land—bear and caribou, at the very least—but the people living there are now visible as sovereign nations in their own right. Even if federal law continues to ignore their right to un-ceded land, the maps trace its contours, reminding us that there we will find Native peoples in abundance

Remembering the Choctaw Gift

In March of 1847, members of the Choctaw Nation in Scullyville, Oklahoma started a fund-raiser for the people of Ireland, who were suffering through the dreadful Famine. The $170 they raised that day and sent to the Irish has been calculated to be the equivalent of over   $ 4,000 today—an amazing act of generosity from a community just ten years after their own removal from their homelands to the east by the US government.

Today, June 18, 2017, the town worthies of Cork, Ireland—along with their fellow citizens and a 19 member delegation from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma—will dedicate a sculpture the Irish people have erected to honor the Choctaws’ gift.

Cliodhna Russell, writing for the Irish online publication thejournal.ie, reports that the sculpture, ‘Kindred Spirits,’  was made by Cork based sculptor Alex Pentek after the city of Cork commissioned it in 2013 to commemorate the donation:

“It has nine 20 foot eagle feathers arranged in a circle shape reaching towards the sky, representing a bowl filled with food.”

The town will host a celebratory unveiling today at 2 PM, led by Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton and  Joe McCarthy, East Cork Municipal District Officer.

It was Joe McCarthy who perhaps best articulated what that gift in 1847 meant to his community: “The Choctaw people were still recovering from their own injustice, and they put their hands in their pockets and they helped strangers. It’s rare to see such generosity. It had to be acknowledged.”

In an 1850 publication, Sketch Book, an artist known only as LLDB drew an image of Irish men, women, and children waiting in line for a meal made possible by the Choctaws’ gift.

The National Library of Ireland houses this book and offers these comments about its provenance: “Entitled “Beggars and peasants assembled for Indian meal, July 1847”; signed ‘LLDB’, it is an image of people queuing for food at Poulacurra House (it is It is unclear where the location of the house was – there is however a place called Poulacurra in Glanmire, Co. Cork).

 

Today, the people of Cork are doing much better, and to commemorate their Choctaw friends’ help, they have dedicated much more than a monument to generosity; they have made a statement of repatriation, offering a portion of their own homeland to the Choctaw Nation.

“Kindred Spirits” (Cliodhna Russell, thejournal.ie)

 

 

 

 

Depatriation

Cedar Mesa Moon House, Bears Ears National Monument.

American Indian history is littered with euphemisms masking atrocities committed by the federal and state governments under their cover. Beginning with “removal,” that benign-sounding word for forced marches and starvation, the settler communities that invaded Indian Country have deployed a wide array of terms to describe what are now generally acknowledged to have been policies aimed at destroying tribal communities and their traditions—the Dawes Act, Relocation, Termination.

The latest word to enter the vocabulary of those who would carve out more sacred grounds and treaty land for their personal use is perhaps the most galling. That word is sovereignty.

During the 2015 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge  in Oregon, members of a group called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom invoked sovereignty in the form of state’s rights to justify their actions. They said the federal government’s management of western lands was illegitimate because their own “ancestral rights” to cattle grazing usurped any federal claims (Read more).

Over the course of the protracted negotiations to end the Malheur occupation, the Burns Paiute Tribe, which once held land that included the refuge, called on the militants to end the standoff. From the point of such tribal communities, this bastardization of the concept of sovereignty is absurd. Yankton Dakota Sioux writer Jacqueline Keeler put it this way:

As a Native American, I find [their] late-nineteenth-century claims of “ancestral rights” presumptuous, since by law all remaining pre-emptive rights in [the states] belong not to late arrivals like [them] but to tribes that have lived in the region for thousands of years (Read more).

Unfortunately, the “ancestral rights” types have the ear of the new president. During the Obama administration, more lands were returned to the Native nations than in the terms of the three previous presidents. Now, the current Commander in Chief has signed an executive order instructing the Interior Department to review all national monument designations, paying special attention to the Bears Ears National Monument in San Juan County, Utah.

Members of Utah’s congressional delegation started lobbying the new administration soon after November’s election, asking it to reverse course on Bears Ears. Indian Country Today reported at the time that “a White House official justified this action, saying, ‘Past administrations have overused this power and designated large swaths of land well beyond the areas in need of protection.’”

The term I would use for these efforts is depatriation.

That is because repatriation and the renewal of cultural protocols presupposes a homeland where remains may be re-interred and ceremonies restored. The word’s etymology suggests a post-classical Latin reference to returning something or someone to the homeland, the country of one’s father. Yet it is given in a feminine form—patria—and thereby refers to a motherland as well. Thus, the word is, first and foremost, about land. It represents a landed definition of ownership, consanguinity, identity, association.

There is also the question of power. About 50 percent of San Juan County is Native American, yet just nine percent of business owners are Indian, according to the U.S. Census. It is also one of the poorest counties in the state. “It’s all about control,” said Mark Maryboy, a member of the grassroots Utah Diné Bikéyah, which initiated the effort to make Bears Ears a national monument.

Of course, not all tribes or tribal members agree. Darren Parry, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation vice chairman, has said that the designation is not in the best interest of the Shoshone. Navajo Republican County Commissioner Rebecca Benally agrees, and has formed a group called Stewards of San Juan County. Ms Benally feels that the tribes are being “used” by environmentalists and that the monument’s boundaries extend too far into county lands that could he used by tribal members for grazing.

While these complaints deserve a proper hearing, it is also worth noting that the most outspoken supporters of rolling back President Obama’s designation are no less suspect of manipulating tribal politics and “using” Native people than the environmentalists Rebecca Benally opposes.

It’s all about control.

Mark Maryboy

San Juan County Commissioner Bruce Adams, a Republican rancher, is a case in point. As part of his support of the rollback, Adams distributed cowboy hats emblazoned with the message: “Make San Juan County Great Again.” It’s a witty take on the president’s campaign slogan, but just 200 days into this administration, it is a phrase that should give us all pause.

Bruce Adams (“Indian Country Today,” Kim Baca)

We have now experienced what “great” means for the new president, and it does not appear to have anything to do with helping rural counties like San Juan. It does, however, promise corporate interests more access to extractive resources, tax breaks, and relaxed environmental regulations. None of these would seem to offer farmers and ranchers any shot at “greatness.” More mining and drilling means less grazing land. Less oversight means more tainted ground water, more erosion. Nor are the corporate interests at all local. If they employ locals, they do so only sporadically, as suits their immediate needs. They rarely reinvest in the local infrastructure or participate in community activities. They build temporary roads to and from their mines and wells, hire itinerant workers, and cut and run when the mines are payed out and the wells run dry. Their profits go to place like Panama and the Cayman Islands, while rural people like those of San Juan County, both Anglo and Indian, are left to clean up the mess.

This is not sovereignty, it is fealty, a word that should strike fear in the hearts of anyone with a desire for freedom and local control. It is not at all euphemistic. It means exactly what it says: “a feudal tenant’s sworn loyalty to a lord.”