Mapping Native America: Cartographic Interactions Between Indigenous Peoples, Government, and Academia: Cartography and Indigenous Autonomy

By borrowing an appropriate book title for our preface (Lewis 1998; Short 2009), we want to emphasize to readers that interactions between people regarding maps imply encounters. These books bring together three major players - indigenous peoples, government, and academia -, who, as participants in the mapping of indigenous America, have encountered each other, their knowledge and skills, and their cartographic products. Not that all three producers have entered equally into the creation of a great many maps, but that in direct and indirect ways mappable information has emanated from any of them independently or in association. Our contributors have variably recognized the role of maps in recording Native America and those responsible for the cartographic quantum. Such maps tell their own story over and above the interpretations given of them, but the producer or producers play important roles in not just the quality but the objectives in providing geographic information and/or producing maps. Let us add a few words about our perception of maps and the way in which cartography becomes a player in its own rights. Unto themselves, maps depict a piece of reality, sustain a record, and even tell or enhance a story. They reveal environmental truth and raise questions about nature and man's past, present and future. And they help identify and define homelands, borders, ecological niches and the like. But maps may also report in error, obscure, overlook, hide, or even falsify evidence in the natural or man-made environment. As bearers of symbolic information, maps combine elements of art and science and thus are applied products. Their efficacy depends on their purpose and design, as well as on their sources and accuracy; to some extent, on their timeliness, and, reasonably so, on the ability of users to interpret the data. The existence of maps does not presuppose their utility. All of these characterizations, one way or another, can be applied to the cartography of Native America -- to indigenous lands, peoples, cultures, and administration. A quantum of maps readily serves the researcher who would want to explore the cartographic history of native or indigenous1 territoriality, land transfers, reservations and resources. A wide range of maps provides researchers with collateral information that may or may not enhance a capacity to find and secure lands for native communities. Maps have recorded the encounter of indigenous villages and identification of native territories, the delimitation of treaty bounds of land cessions and reservations, the internal division of tribal lands into individual allotments (severalty on Indian reservations), and the critical mapping of land claims and minimal restoration of former territory and protection of sacred places. Later maps and air photos, satellite imagery, and other spatial data (GIS) explore the management of native lands held in trust by the federal government. This list is somewhat endless, for maps as tools and records -- benevolent or malevolent -- have assumed a major role in the administration of Native Americans.

About the Author :
Daniel G. Cole is the GIS Coordinator of the Smithsonian Institution (SI). He has worked in this position since 1990, and since 1986 has served as the research cartographer at SI. He was the geographic editor of all manuscript chapters for the Handbook of North American Indians: compiled, designed, and supervised production of nearly all maps in the series published after 1986. He also serves as GIS, cartographic and GPS consultant to other scientists, exhibit staff and illustrators both within the Smithsonian and other organizations. From June 2009 to June 2010, he was president of the Canadian Cartographic Association. And he is presently a Board Member of Cartography & Geographic Information Society from 2011-2014. Imre Sutton was Professor Emeritus of geography at California State University-Fullerton and the author of Indian Land Tenure; the editor of Irredeemable America: The Indians' Estate and Land Claims; and the co-editor of Trusteeship in Change: Toward Tribal Autonomy and Resource Management.