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.