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

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