Decolonising the maps settler colonialism made: Elspeth Iralu, ‘Putting Indian Country on the Map: Indigenous Practices of Spatial Justice’, Antipode, 2021 | settler colonial studies blog

Decolonising the maps settler colonialism made: Elspeth Iralu, ‘Putting Indian Country on the Map: Indigenous Practices of Spatial Justice’, Antipode, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisations of Indigenous spatialities that seek to re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice. After examining a Google Maps initiative that takes on colonial mapping tropes to enforce Indigenous dispossession, I consider two mapping projects based at Zuni Pueblo: first, a Zuni-led response to proposed coal extraction that would have affected Zuni cultural practices; and second, the Zuni Map Art Project, an initiative that remixes tropes of colonial mapping to create spatial representations that are encoded such that the information they contain can only be understood by those who have been initiated in Zuni cultural knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Indigenous feminist spatial practices disrupt the colonial relations of power that mapping and counter-mapping often reinforce.

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