Putting Indian Country on the Map: Indigenous Practices of Spatial Justice

Abstract

This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisations of Indigenous spatialities that seek to re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice. After examining a Google Maps initiative that takes on colonial mapping tropes to enforce Indigenous dispossession, I consider two mapping projects based at Zuni Pueblo: first, a Zuni-led response to proposed coal extraction that would have affected Zuni cultural practices; and second, the Zuni Map Art Project, an initiative that remixes tropes of colonial mapping to create spatial representations that are encoded such that the information they contain can only be understood by those who have been initiated in Zuni cultural knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Indigenous feminist spatial practices disrupt the colonial relations of power that mapping and counter-mapping often reinforce.

Automating gentrification: Landlord technologies and housing justice organizing in New York City homes

“…Though the map only touches upon a small fraction of self-reported landlord tech deployments, it is nevertheless more comprehensive than anything geospatial offered about landlord tech by the city or by landlord tech companies. This speaks to the ongoing need for cartographic and data projects led not by the logics of data capitalism and neoliberal governance, but rather, in the spirit of counter-cartography and decolonizing computing, by community-based data projects committed to undoing the violence of property—data, bodies, real estate, or otherwise (Chan, 2018; Dalton and Stallman, 2018; Iralu, 2021; kollektiv orangotango, 2019). Yet despite the best efforts to create counter-maps and data for housing justice, lessons from APT make it clear that at the end of the day, grounded organizing in the space of home is one of the most effective tactics for keeping data-hungry landlord technologies out of our homes and neighborhoods.…”

Undoing settler imaginaries: (Re)imagining digital knowledge politics

“…Elspeth Iralu centers Indigenous feminist spatial practices as a mode to disrupt the violence of colonial cartography and the entanglement of the counter-mapping process itself (Iralu, 2021). Indigenous feminist spatial practices begin with reframing settler notions of space, race and gender, which disrupt colonial imaginaries such as the reservation and the urban, to insist instead on the spatialization of Indigenous political orders everywhere (Goeman and Denetdale 2009; Iralu, 2021).…”

“…From Native feminist spatial practices to Black methodologies insistent on affirming Black joy and Black livingness, Black and Indigenous refusal frameworks redirect digital knowledge politics towards methodologies curated for liberatory and life affirming ends (King, 2019;McKittrick, 2021;Iralu, 2021;Goeman, 2011). Legacy Russell argues that refusal politics generate digital ruptures between the "recognized and recognizable," assembling "fantastic landscapes of possibility" (Russell, 2020: 28).…”

“…Section four, Undoing Settler Imaginaries, traces the ongoing disassembly and dismantling of settler imaginaries by anticolonial and decolonial movements themselves. I will show how the undoing of colonial entanglements is evident in the place-based relationalities made visible by anticolonial world-making movements led by Black and Indigenous women (Iralu, 2021; McKittrick, 2021; TallBear, 2019). As Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang contend: “decolonization is not a metaphor,” but a political project that requires the rematriation of Indigenous land and life (Gray, 2022; Tuck and Yang, 2012).…”

DIS/POSSESSORY DATA POLITICS: From Tenant Screening to Anti‐Eviction Organizing

“…They also align with and inform an exciting body of work on data power, data activism, data justice and counter‐mapping that examines activist projects gathering, analyzing and mapping data for emancipatory means (Cinnamon, 2020; Dalton, 2020; D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020; Elwood, 2020; Thatcher and Dalton, 2021). Despite this being a growing and increasingly digitized space, communities have been mobilizing data and maps for centuries in combatting coloniality (kollektiv orangotango, 2018; Iralu, 2021). Amanda Meng and Carl DiSalvo also note that for groups such as the Westside Atlanta Land Trust, ‘counter‐data action through community‐collected data is rooted in a legacy of Atlanta's Black activism and Black scholarship; that this data activism enabled resource mobilization and critical conscious making; and that design and media production are essential post counter‐data action activities in data activism’ (Meng and DiSalvo, 2018: 1).…”