Counter-Mapping: Concerns and Critiques
As we have discussed above, there are many benefits to counter-mapping practices, including policy, environmental, and sociocultural change, among other forms of collective action. However, counter-mapping has also been critiqued by scholars and communities concerned about the potential (if unintended) reproduction of the colonial systems it is intended to challenge. One overarching reason for this concern is that, in order for counter-maps to work in legal claims or affect policy change, they often have to be made using tools, terms, and framing of colonial cartographic practices that run counter to Indigenous worldviews (Hunt and Stevenson, 2017; Iralu, 2021).
Mohamed and Ventura (2000: 224) explain that “the tools and concepts of geomatics are based on and built for Western private property regimes.” Therefore, the use of GIS and GPS to make counter-maps “legible” to the structures they contest might merely rework, instead of reverse, those colonial structures (Iralu, 2021; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009). Put another way, “Indigenous cartographers find themselves bound up in coloniality, having to produce maps whose conventions and authority rest upon the erasure of indigenous geographical knowledges and the realization of colonial (and postcolonial) rule” (Tilley, 2020: 1439).
Indigenous and feminist scholars also critique the tendency for counter-mapping initiatives to overlook “the knowledges and experiences of women, children, and other disenfranchised groups” (Iralu, 1488). This does not mean that counter-mapping will always overlook these groups, but it highlights the importance of asking not only “who is this for?” but also “whose knowledges and participation are welcome?” In the final section on moving beyond counter-mapping, we highlight Elspeth Iralu’s work on Indigenous feminist approaches to spatial justice, which address these concerns about who counter-mapping might leave behind.
Using the example of Google Maps’ “Map Your Indigenous Community Month” in collaboration with the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Iralu warns that Indigenous counter-mapping is always “at risk of cooptation” by non-Indigenous interests (1487). The Zuni Map Art Project presents one approach to mitigate the possibilities of this cooptation through “encoding” techniques. Iralu explains:
The maps are designed to make that purpose explicit, through the centring of encoded “data” throughout the series of paintings, despite the fact that the Zuni Map Art Project has been exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world. These maps centre Zuni spatialities, knowledges, and lifeways as both un-knowable and un-claimable by non-Zunis, even as Zunis and non-Zunis alike view the exact same images. (1497)
Other accounts of counter-mapping make room for the possibility of using colonial tools but subverting them to rebalance or shift power in favour of the communities. Recall, for example, that the Lake Nipissing Beading Project used aerial photography and remote sensing imagery to create a “basemap” that was separated into a grid, but then invited participants to bead the squares of the imagery as a way of “speaking back” to that colonial imagery. Like other forms of counter-mapping, the project combines geospatial archives and databases with local, Indigenous, and creative knowledges, creating new spatialities that might use, but do disrupt, colonial tools and techniques. Although encoding was not an intentional part of this project, it is also the case that beading stitches information, lands, and histories together, and in ways that are likely more legible to First Nation community participants with knowledge of this cultural history.
In the final section of this module, we consider what it might mean to use counter-mapping as a launching point for other forms of mapping and spatial justice.