Mapping (as) Resistance: Decolonizing↔Indigenizing Journalistic Cartography

Abstract

This article considers journalistic cartography in relation to socioecological disasters in Indigenous territories and associated resistance movements. The authority of Western-style maps as presented in news media and elsewhere is often taken for granted—colonial cartography exerts powerful, typically unquestioned, influence upon peoples’ understandings of cultural geographies and associated land-based relationships. Such dynamics are particularly germane to consideration of Indigenous environmental and territorial concerns and associated resistance actions across Turtle Island / North America and elsewhere around the world. I present Indigenous mapping traditions and contemporary cartographic interventions as inspiring counterexamples for shifting public narratives and understanding of Indigenous territories, environmental knowledge, and related issues within news media and beyond.

Indigenous cartographies and mapping abundance

“…Allowing Indigenous communities to drive the design and dictate the content demonstrates that creative collaborations can lead to useful blendings, for example, by supporting disempowered people’s control over how stories about their homelands are shared, including their origins, migrations, and locations of hunting, fishing, and medicine grounds. Another faction sees the terms as embracing the contentious and political nature of Indigenous relationships with colonial cartographies and their continued forms of oppression (Lowan-Trudeau, 2021; Sium and Ritskes, 2013). They recognize and use the “power of the map” to resist colonial domination and those “acts of violence” emerging from their unrestricted, exploitative, and nonreciprocal socio-ecological practices (Lucchesi, 2019; Rose-Redwood et al, 2020).…”

Seeing the (in)justice of sustainability: Visualizing inequality at the centre of climate change communication

“…Within these realms, media institutions can perpetuate inequalities that are bound up within power dynamics of collectives and societies-including within communication infrastructures and industries, themselves (Gutsche & Pinto, 2022) that have long contributed to environmental decline; or they can speculate as to the future of solutions-based approaches, such as "sustainability." Yet, visualizations science organizations and diverse, global citizen collectives complicate these narratives, such as in terms of data visualizations (MacKenzie & Stenport, 2020), cartographies of socioecological disaster (Lowan-Trudeau, 2021), the "effectiveness" of visuals in terms of interactions between individuals' and communities' ideologies and action (Duan, Takahashi, & Zwickle, 2021), and the role of visuals in environmental advocacy (Fernández, 2019).…”