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Maggie Lindsay

Spatial history visualisations: Colonial and Indigenous mapping

Updated: Jun 6, 2022

Last week I gave my presentation on visualising spatial history, and our conversation ranged over accessibility, data presentation, methodological transparency, and climate change. This last idea raised the question of changing landscapes - how will we conduct spatial history when the spaces we’re dealing with are no longer recognisable to us? Olivia brought up the notion of flooding river deltas, the boundaries of which shift and change throughout the year even before the influence of the climate crisis. After spending weeks thinking about how to apply data to maps, it was good to have the idea of maps’ fixity challenged, and that is what this blog post will now focus on.


Spatial history is a reasonably recent discipline, especially its digital aspect, which draws heavily from the traditions and knowledge of other subjects such as cartography, geography, and geology. Spatial historians are well used to the subjectivity of their sources, turning textual documents into quantifiable data can be quite a challenge. It requires a good knowledge of your source, what you’re trying to achieve, and a consciousness of how far you’re willing to manipulate your source to fit it tidily in a spreadsheet. What hasn’t been dealt with appropriately yet, in my opinion, is the subjectivity of the maps we embed our data in. Software such as ArcGIS allows us to present our data easily and intuitively, simply by choosing between their default map underlays.

Image description: A map of the USA is divided into miniscule sections, those along the coast are smaller, those in the centre are larger. There are so many boundaries along the East coast that it appears smudged.
An example of arbitrary boundaries in Arc GIS - Census Tracts in the USA from 2020

Space is one side of the metaphorical historical coin, different to but paired with time. In our discussion, Liam brought up maps’ temporal limitations. He pointed out the difficulty of mapping movements of nomadic communities, since maps don’t often have a temporal element or allow for the nuance, patterns, and variations in peoples’ movements. Maps impose a sense of fixity and permanence. For Indigenous peoples, mapping is fraught because it has served as a tool of colonisation. Bernard Nietschmann, a geographer with an interest in Indigenous self-determination, stated “[m]ore Indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. And more Indigenous territory can be reclaimed and defended by maps than by guns”.


In our discussion I noted that animated maps, combining spatial and temporal elements, are a good resource for addressing such issues of change over time. Lola Remy’s article on an Indigenous relationships to spatial history highlights the harm maps have played in colonial encounters, but also the ways Indigenous people have reclaimed the tool for their own emancipation. The film You Are on Indian Land includes an animated map which “arbitrarily cuts through the Mohawk territory along the St Lawrence River. Here, state logic disrupts the logic of the land, as half of the territory is progressively marked as American, and the other Canadian.” In this example, the animation adds a sensory level of dissection, violently dividing a group of people in two. This visceral element would be lost in a static map, its timelessness potentially validating the division.

Image description: Black-and-white stills of an animated map from the 1969 film You Are on Indian Land. A white dotted line creeps across a map of North America, creating an arbitrary division between Canada and the USA.
Borders dissecting Indigenous land - Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, Mort Ransen, You Are on Indian Land ©1969

Activists have combined traditional Indigenous maps with colonial spatial histories, to juxtapose their worldviews and challenge the colonial maps’ implied objectivity. Maps are a representation of a moment in time, framed by a cultural viewpoint and perspective. Part of the violence imposed by colonial powers is that of hegemony; enforcing the imperial perspective as unchallengeable. The films Remy cites provide several examples of how Indigenous people have asserted their cultural ways of viewing and representing land, in the face of colonial mapping traditions.

Image description: Two images of the Mi’gmaq nation’s land. On the left is a Western map showing landmass and ocean, labelled with Latin text. On the right is a geometric Indigenous depiction of the land, a circle encloses a shape with seven points which represent the seven districts of the region.
Coloniser vs. Indigenous depictions of the same land - Alanis Obomsawin, Our Nationhood ©2003 National Film Board of Canada

Spatial history visualisations can show more changeable and subjective data than a static map, but as historians we must also interrogate what maps we take for granted and whose worldviews we’re endorsing. When we select a template we need to consider who decided where the borders lie? Does this map show a particular point in time? Is it enforcing a colonial perspective? These sorts of questions are second-nature when we’re analysing a historical document, but as history becomes increasingly digital and spatial history visualisations become more attainable to run-of-the-mill historians, we need to develop those analytical reflexes for visual in addition to textual representations.

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