Between 1536 and 1601, at the request of the colonial administration of New Spain, indigenous artists crafted more than two hundred maps to be used as evidence in litigation over the allocation of land. These land grant maps, or mapas de mercedes de tierras, recorded the boundaries of cities, provinces, towns, and places; they made note of markers and ownership, and, at times, the extent and measurement of each field in a territory, along with the names of those who worked it. With their corresponding case files, these maps tell the stories of hundreds of natives and Spaniards who engaged in legal proceedings either to request land, to oppose a petition, or to negotiate its terms. Mapping Indigenous Land explores how, as persuasive and rhetorical images, these maps did more than simply record the disputed territories for lawsuits. They also enabled indigenous communities—and sometimes Spanish petitioners—to translate their ideas about contested spaces into visual form; offered arguments for the defense of these spaces; and in some cases even helped protect indigenous land against harmful requests. Drawing on her own paleography and transcription of case files, author Ana Pulido Rull shows how much these maps can tell us about the artists who participated in the lawsuits and about indigenous views of the contested lands. Considering the mapas de mercedes de tierras as sites of cross-cultural communication between natives and Spaniards, Pulido Rull also offers an analysis of medieval and modern Castilian law, its application in colonial New Spain, and the possibilities for empowerment it opened for the native population. An important contribution to the literature on Mexico's indigenous cartography and colonial art, Pulido Rull’s work suggests new ways of understanding how colonial space itself was contested, negotiated, and defined.

Despite centuries of colonization, many Indigenous peoples’ cultures remain distinct in their ancestral territories, even in today’s globalized world. Yet they exist often within countries that hardly recognize their existence. Struggles for political recognition and cultural respect have occurred historically and continue to challenge Native American nations in Montana and Sámi people of northern Scandinavia in their efforts to remain and thrive as who they are as Indigenous peoples. In some ways the Indigenous struggles on the two continents have been different, but in many other ways, they are similar. Mapping Indigenous Presence presents a set of comparative Indigenous studies essays with contemporary perspectives, attesting to the importance of the roles Indigenous people have played as overseers of their own lands and resources, as creators of their own cultural richness, and as political entities capable of governing themselves. This interdisciplinary collection explores the Indigenous experience of Sámi peoples of Norway and Native Americans of Montana in their respective contexts—yet they are in many ways distinctly different within the body politic of their respective countries. Although they share similarities as Indigenous peoples within nation-states and inhabit somewhat similar geographies, their cultures and histories differ significantly. Sámi people speak several languages, while Indigenous Montana is made up of twelve different tribes with at least ten distinctly different languages; both peoples struggle to keep their Indigenous languages vital. The political relationship between Sámi people and the mainstream Norwegian government and culture has historically been less contentious that that of the Indigenous peoples of Montana with the United States and with the state of Montana, yet the Sámi and the Natives of Montana have struggled against both the ideology and the subsequent assimilation policy of the savagery-versus-civilization model. The authors attempt to increase understanding of how these two sets of Indigenous peoples share important ontological roots and postcolonial legacies, and how research may be used for their own self-determination and future directions.

Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers. Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy. The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.

Employing anthropology, field research, and humanities methodologies as well as digital cartography, and foregrounding the voices of Indigenous scholars, this text examines digital projects currently underway, and includes alternative modes of "mapping" Native American, Alaskan Native, Indigenous Hawaiian and First Nations land. The work of both established and emerging scholars addressing a range of geographic regions and cultural issues is also represented. Issues addressed include the history of maps made by Native Americans; healing and reconciliation projects related to boarding schools; language and land reclamation; Western cartographic maps created in collaboration with Indigenous nations; and digital resources that combine maps with narrative, art, and film, along with chapters on archaeology, place naming, and the digital presence of elders. This text is of interest to scholars working in history, cultural studies, anthropology, Native American studies, and digital cartography.

More than one hundred fifty years ago, Moravian missionaries first landed along a so-called isolated stretch of Honduras’s Mosquito Coast bordering the western Caribbean Sea. The missionaries were sent, with the strong encouragement of German political leaders and in the context of German attempts at colonization, to “spread the word” of Protestantism in Central America. Upon their arrival, the missionaries employed a three-pronged approach consisting of proselytizing, medical treatment, and education to convert the majority of the indigenous population. Much like the Spanish and English attempts before them, German colonizing efforts in the region never completely took hold. Still, as Benjamin Tillman shows, for the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Miskito people, the arrival of the Moravian missionaries marked the beginning of an important cultural interface. Imprints on Native Lands documents Moravian contributions to the Miskito settlement landscape in sixty four villages of eastern Honduras through field observations of material culture, interviews with village residents, and research in primary sources in the Moravian Church archives. Tillman employs the resulting data to map a hierarchy of Moravian centers, illustrating spatially varying degrees of Moravian influence on the Miskito settlement landscape. Tillman reinforces Miskito claims to ancestral lands by identifying and mapping their created ethnic landscape, as well as supporting earlier efforts at land-use mapping in the region. This book has broad implications, providing a methodology that will be of help to those with an interest in geography, anthropology, or Latin American studies, and to anyone interested in documenting and strengthening indigenous land claims.

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

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.

Containing unusual and rarely viewed maps constructed by Native Americans, a vibrant celebration of the Native American culture details significant historical events, people, and places and is accompanied by breathtaking illustrations. Reprint.

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

How can we map differing perceptions of the living environment? Mapping the Unmappable? explores the potential of cartography to communicate the relations of Africa's indigenous peoples with other human and non-human actors within their environments. These relations transcend Western dichotomies such as culture-nature, human-animal, natural-supernatural. The volume brings two strands of research - cartography and »relational« anthropology - into a closer dialogue. It provides case studies in Africa as well as lessons to be learned from other continents (e.g. North America, Asia and Australia). The contributors create a deepened understanding of indigenous ontologies for a further decolonization of maps, and thus advance current debates in the social sciences.