Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice

Abstract

Neither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe's hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation's long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.

Mapping (as) Resistance: Decolonizing↔Indigenizing Journalistic Cartography

“…Despite such challenges-the ramifications of which persist to the present day-Indigenous people have been steadily resisting colonial cartography through various media, most recently digital, to decolonize, Indigenize, reclaim, and re-story contemporary understandings of Indigenous geographies and associated encroachment upon and degradation of Indigenous lands and waterways (Caquard et al 2019;Hunt and Stevenson 2017;Kidd 2019).…”

“…Inspiring examples of Indigenous countermapping are also presented-cartographic counternarratives (Giroux et al 1996) that challenge and/or present alternatives to colonial representations of Indigenous territories impacted by proposed, existing, and previous socioecological disasters. Although often ignored or contested, Indigenous countermaps have assisted Indigenous communities in media campaigns and negotiations related to extractive resource developments (Kidd 2019). The implications of such dynamics and considerations for journalistic mapping practices are also considered in this article.…”

Standing rock and the Indigenous commons

“…Indigenous resistance to oil pipelines in North America dates back at least to the battle in 1968 against the Trans-Alaska pipeline (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019, p. 2), and then in the 1970s by the Dene, Inuit and Métis downstream in the MacKenzie Valley in Canada (Kidd, 2019). Then during the 1980s, oil and natural gas fracking around the world began to be promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as part of the Washington neo-liberal consensus; national governments were strongly encouraged to adopt corporate friendly laws and taxation policies for extractivist companies, and to deregulate their environmental and labor laws with the argument that potential profits could provide employment, tax revenue, trickle down wealth, and spill-on effects for local and national economies (Kidd, 2016).…”

“…First, I reviewed the historical and current extra-activist struggles, and conducted a content analysis of dominant news representations of extra-activist struggles (Kidd, 2014a(Kidd, , 2014b(Kidd, , 2016. Secondly, I conducted case studies of communications practices used by extra-activist movements in Latin America and Canada (videos (Kidd, forthcoming); and counter-mapping (Kidd, 2019).…”

Policing the Pandemic: Tracking the Policing of Covid-19 across Canada

“…Following Nancy Lee Peluso [1], who coined the term counter-mapping in 1995, we conceive of mapping as an "intrinsically political act" with the potential to disrupt taken-for-granted power structures and ways of governing. With Kidd [2], we further conceive of counter-mapping as a form of data activism, involving the use of data "to create knowledge about the world, denounce dominant representations, shed light on discrimination and injustice, and establish alternative social categories." Since Peluso first introduced the concept, the number of counter-mapping projects worldwide has exploded.…”