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Paper short abstract:

Three collaborative Indigenous storied mapping projects in British Columbia have become entangled with Indigenous work to decolonize education, to reframe municipal land use planning, and to ignite political dialogue to resolve overlapping claims by innovating with Google's geo tools.

Paper long abstract:

In Canada Traditional Land Use and Occupancy Studies (TLUOS) have long been the basic cartographic framework to visualize the spatial dimensions of Indigneous land and cultural rights. Alongside the hodgepodge of points, lines and polygons used in TLUOS, archaeological mapping has been a second mainstay of engaging the state in recognition frameworks, drawing out the physical footprint of material remains to trigger heritage-based land protection measures. Though powerful in some instances, these cartographic traditions also work to exacerbate overlapping claims, to freeze and gender relations to land, and to circumscribe the footprints of ancestral agency.

Through the University of Victoria’s Ethnographic Mapping Lab, in collaboration with Indigenous communities in British Columbia, we have created innovative digital maps that attend to dynamic relationships through the power of story, and to transcend scales in the archaeological and ethnohistoric record to see both intimate knowledges of place and the strength of cultural landscapes. Our work leverages Google Earth and other geo tools in ways that are attuned to the political ontology of a figured ancestral landscape, to narratives and priorities that do not always align with state recognition frameworks.

In this paper, I will describe how three of these projects have become entangled with Indigenous work to decolonize education, to reframe municipal land use planning, and to ignite political dialogue to resolve overlapping claims. The stories of giants, the agency of ancestors, and the complex networks of kin that bind to places provide the framework for our mapping work.