Paper short abstract:

Contributing to literatures which examine the production of indigenous cartographic materials, the paper will discuss a map drawn by Kallihirua, a member of the Inughuit community of northern Greenland who was abducted during the 1850-51 Franklin Search.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine the circumstances surrounding the abduction of Kallihirua, a member of the Inughuit community who was recruited by the crew of the Assistance during the 1850-51 expedition in search of the missing ships Erebus and Terror. To aid the navigators on board the Assistance, Kallihirua was asked to draw a map depicting the Northwest coastline of Greenland. This map was later included in a guide on 'Arctic Geography and Ethnology' that was produced by the Royal Geographical Society and presented to George Nares in preparation for his 1875-76 Arctic expedition. Drawing on the recent literature urging us to examine more closely the circumstances in which indigenous cartographic materials were produced, the paper will study the events surrounding the production of this intriguing map and will consider Kallihirua's role in shaping cartographic knowledge about the Arctic.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents some reflections on the problems anthropologists face in studying the corpus of Native American colonial maps as the expression of a hypothetical "Native American" spatial cognition and explores possible methodological alternatives to this essentialist approach.

Paper long abstract:

To avoid taking an essentialist approach to "Native American cartographic thinking", it seems necessary to focus on ethnographic case studies. But this is rarely possible. We propose to link this methodological question to the examination of the debates that have gone through the iconological approaches attached to the names of E. Panofsky, F.Saxl or E. Gombrich. The suggestion is that the morphological approach proposed by the historian C. Ginzburg who had himself discussed the work of the "Warburgian school", offers a way of analysis for these cartographic images. By creating a context that is both ethnographic and historical, it would then be possible to avoid the pitfalls of naïve expressionism and excessive critical scepticism.

Paper short abstract:

Anishinaabe scholars today are making ways and space for other Anishinaabe academics to recognize their ways of knowing as a legitimate research methodology using their language. This presentation will give examples of traditional Anishinaabe stories using Dibaajmowin, Aadzookaan, and Aansookaan.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous peoples have sought to be and are increasingly involved in the designing and selecting of content and methods of presentation of museum exhibits and educational curricula about their own cultures and histories. Maps have traditionally been used to situate a people in a spatial area and sometimes to graphically represent aspects of their culture. However, museum maps and historical cartography in general had ethnocentric and colonialist biases and thus misrepresented Indigenous peoples' views of their territory, their cultural knowledge, and their histories. These maps tended to present Indigenous cultures, socio-political structures, and territories as static or disappearing rather than as vibrant, evolving cultures. How can new possibilities within Indigenous counter-mapping aid land claim negotiations and/or decolonizing space and place?

This presentation will examine the potential of Indigenous interactive mapping to facilitate greater Indigenous community involvement in portraying, preserving, and revitalizing their culture and relationship to their land within Indigenous resurgences. In addition, interactive mapping will be examined for its potential to address the limitations of static mapping in presenting a true Indigenous perspective, one that would involve incorporating traditional ways of imparting knowledge, such as storytelling, oral history, art, music, and dance. From the user's perspective, this type of modern technology for constructing digital maps can offer alternative perspectives of Indigenous cultural representations while simultaneously providing new insights within contested areas of space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Paper short abstract:

At the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly manuscript maps covering large parts of the world. Conservation, cataloguing, digitisation and computer vision analysis is under way at the British Library to open up the archive to researchers worldwide.

Paper long abstract:

Around the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly hand-drawn maps covering large parts of the world where detailed and reliable surveys were not otherwise available. The maps were gathered from a rich variety of sources including military expeditions, boundary commissions, explorers, travellers, missionaries and spies, and they were used by the War Office for making and revising official printed products.

From sketch maps made by intelligence officers, through surveyors' field sheets to cartographers' fair drawings, most of the items are unique manuscripts that show regions from a European perspective immediately before and during the colonial era. The maps are now held at the British Library in the 'War Office Archive'.

With generous funding from Indigo Trust almost 2,000 maps covering large parts of eastern Africa have been conserved, catalogued and digitised, and around 1,300 sheets relating to western Asia are currently being digitised in work sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. A further 2,500 items relating to China have been catalogued.

In many cases the maps are unique sources of historical data, providing evidence of populations, settlements and ethnic regions, and describing land use, limits of vegetation, hydrology and much else. We are trialling automated transcription techniques to harvest this data in preparation for analysis by researchers.

Nick Dykes, Curator of Modern Maps at the British Library, will provide an introduction to the archive, and describe the work being done to make the archive available for research worldwide.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses maps of the nineteenth-century mapmaker John Arrowsmith in the map collection of the British Colonial Office. I read the maps with and against the grain of prevailing written documentation and shed light on the material histories of the maps.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation discusses the colonial map collection of the British Colonial Office, housed at the National Archives, Kew. I examine the contributions that mapmaker John Arrowsmith made to it between the 1830s and the early 1860s. During these decades Arrowsmith was the semi-official mapmaker of the Colonial Office and many of his maps accumulated into the department's collections on an ad hoc basis. They included printed maps of the colonies but also manuscript tracings and are now available for consultation bound in the volumes of correspondence and as separate map files.

At Kew the maps are stored close to much of the material that helped generate them: the colonial map tracings and survey and exploration reports that arrived from the colonies. However, these maps form only a fraction of a globally dispersed colonial map 'collection'. As commercial commodities the maps found their ways to diverse geographical settings and consequently to many collections. Many of these maps are currently highly valued collectibles.

This presentation discusses ways to read the maps with and against the grain of the prevailing written documentation. I provide a multifaceted interpretation of their position in colonial governance and analyse the contributions of different actors to their making (ranging from indigenous and settler informants to draftsmen on the mapmaker's payroll). By taking examples concerning different colonies, I discuss the cultural and material histories that the collection encloses, including disputes over 'correct' knowledge and copyright, the authority of maps as well as histories of maps that were not made.

Paper short abstract:

During the early 1700s, the Compagnie des Indes attempted to enforce a system of racial categories on the Ile de Bourbon. Using GIS technology, eighteenth-century maps and ethnographic materials, this project tracks the results of that attempt and offers methods of disseminating its conclusions

Paper long abstract:

During the early eighteenth century, officials of the French Compagnie des Indes instituted a colonial regime on the Île de Bourbon based on an emerging discourse of racial categories. This system of laws and social practices was being implemented in the Compagnie's possessions in Louisiana and elsewhere. Despite its size, this small outpost in the Indian Ocean constitutes an excellent site for a case study. Through close analyses of censuses and supporting documents that were created during the 1700s, the project seeks to demonstrate that the initial attempts to create a racial hierarchy faltered. As the century wore on, the Compagnie succeeded in forging a racially divided social landscape as the island's economy shifted from provisioning ships on their ways to and from South Asia to exporting agricultural commodities such as coffee and sugar.

This study is unique for two reasons. The first is that it focuses on a corporate entity rather than political and legal institutions as the creator of a racial discourse. The other reason involves a methodology little used by historians. Rather than relying strictly on a qualitative assessment of textual documents, this project employs a quantitative approach utilizing Geographic Information Systems software. This application suite enables spatial and statistical analyses to literally map the demographic transformation of the island over time. Thus, it seeks to visualize the formation of racial categories on the Île de Bourbon as they occurred between the 1690s and 1730s.

Paper Download (143 KB)

Paper short abstract:

The kinds of maps found among records created or used by British central government reflect official business, but include a wide range of less-expected material. Legacy data work aims to widen access and provide intellectual linkage to maps arranged by original provenance.

Paper long abstract:

Maps and plans made or collected by departments of state responsible for foreign relations include the map libraries of the Colonial Office, Foreign Office and War Office, and maps in correspondence and reports, as well as those chosen for Confidential Print. This remit means that historical maps of other European powers' colonies and dominions are held, as well as those of the former British empire.

Maps range in date from one of Roanoke, the first English colony in the New World c.1585, to the post-war era of Aden and Cyprus. They accompanied the different phases of colonial enterprise such as exploration, boundary definition, administration, and decolonisation.

These maps are an integral part of the archives, generally following their original provenance and arrangement. They are embedded in context that can provide rich information about their provenance, purpose, use, and how they were seen by contemporaries. Related records such as letters and reports can help us to understand the maps and the stories behind them.

For instance, what is believed to be the oldest known Maori map of New Zealand was sent to London by the governor of Norfolk Island in 1793, with a Maori vocabulary and gazetteer, and a report with a very tall tale about kidnap and flax-spinning. Text and map together tell a broader story than either alone, and give insight into specific colonial maps and more widely into their social and political role in the colonial arena.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will offer reflections on a research project about Indigenous maps in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London, with a particular focus on the methodology used to uncover maps routinely obscured in colonial collections.

Paper long abstract:

My PhD project, provisionally titled The Indigenous map: native information, ethnographic object, artefact of encounter, aims to document the extent of Indigenous maps within the collection of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). As I am coming close to finishing this project, I would like to offer some reflections on my methodologies and approaches.

The map collection at the RGS consists of over a million maps assembled over the nearly 200 years of the Society's existence. The RGS had close ties with the British Empire, which means that the acquisition history of the map collection mirrors the Empire's activities. As is commonplace in such colonial collections, western conventions of accessioning, cataloguing and storing materials have traditionally worked to emphasise histories centred on Europeans.

Building on recent scholarship offering innovative methodologies for uncovering "hidden histories" in colonial archives, I have attempted to develop ways of working around the restrictive classifications imposed by the RGS's catalogue. Acknowledging that terms such as "non-western map" and "Indigenous map" are closely tied to colonial contexts and discourses, I have tried to broaden these categories in order to demonstrate that most maps created during the colonial era are hybrid in some form. For this purpose, I conceptualise maps made in colonial contexts as artefacts of encounter: as witnesses to exchanges that were taking place between colonisers and the colonised, the soon to be colonised, and other Indigenous intermediaries. This paper will detail this approach and reflect on its advantages and limitations.