Paper short abstract:

This paper reports on an experimental digital map that offers new possibilities for representing Indigenous territories drawing on an ethnographically informed land tenure model, and Indigenous notions of relational ontology.

Paper long abstract:

The troubling language of 'overlapping claims' is exacerbated by polygon-based ways of representing Indigenous territories in maps, and ethnocentric assumptions about the nature of property, jurisdiction and cultural practice that go with conceptualizing territory as fixed and contiguous. This paper reports on an experimental digital map that offers new possibilities for representing Indigenous territories drawing on an ethnographically informed land tenure model, and Indigenous notions of relational ontology. This map experiment eschews Western cartographic traditions of using bounded polygons to represent indigenous territorial boundaries, drawing on the powerful deck.gl programming script to create dynamic radiating lines to highlight networks of relationships of people to places.

Our work is informed by long-term collaborative ethnography which set the background of land tenure and relations for the map design and content, and detailed discussions about implications of such an experimental map with indigenous leaders, negotiators and analysts who are primary users of such cartographic representations of their territory in Indigenous rights and title contexts. We argue that such novel high-tech methods to represent Indigenous peoples' concepts of territories based on Indigenous legal orders and relationships to place, rather than perpetuating the denomination of Western cartographic methods, can facilitate a conversation about territory, sovereignty, and how to most effectively use maps as tools. We hope to stimulate new conversations that avoid overlapping claims discourses.