Indigenous Map of Southern Ontario

Christi Belcourt is a Metis artist who "indigenized" the regional maps and surveys of Albert Salter into a map called "Good Land". 

One side of the map has the English text that most people are familiar with, while the other side uses indigenous place names and commentary.

This level of commentary can be seen in this zoomed in image showing Toronto and areas to the north. Highway 401, running along Lake Ontario is described as a graveyard for animals.

It would be nice to have a higher resolution version where the legend can be read but I can’t find one the Decolonial Atlas or on Belcourt’s web site.

The map title comes from Salters use of the term "good land" repeatedly on his map of the north shore of Lake Huron.

via UWM Libraries

More about the "Good Land" map can be seen on the Decolonial Atlas.

The Coaquannock Map

I will begin Philadelphia month at an early stage, just before European settlement.

via Historical Society of Pennsylvania

This 1934 map showing the homeland of the Lenape people when the first white settlers arrived in Philadelphia, was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) . The full title is Philadelphia Region when known as Coaquannock "Grove of Tall Pines" and As First Seen by the White Men. 

 Here is a detail showing the villages of Coaquannock and Shackamaxon (still a street name having inpired this wonderful song), just north of center city. These are two of the four circular villages of the Turtle Clan, as described in this blog post.

The text on the map provides some place name translations such as Kingsessing (place of large shells) and Wingohocking (a favorite spot for planting) and, of course Manayunk (where we go to drink). There are also now buried creeks with name translations such as "where we were robbed".

This map is listed on the Temple University digital collections as "Map of Philadelphia at the time of the arrival of the first Swedes" and was originally published in the Philadelphia Bulletin, an evening newspaper that died in my youth. If you want to dig into the individual neighborhoods and see what remains, take a look at this post from Philly Trees. 

Mapping the A:shiwi Perspective

The A:shiwi Map Art Initiative is an indigenous mapping project sponsored by the A;shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center on the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico. The project seeks to challenge ideas of what maps are. To the Zuni, or A:shiwi people they are more about telling stories than about scale and direction.

Little Colorado River - Larson Gasper, 2009 via Emergence Magazine

There is an excellent article on this project with videos and maps in Emergence Magazine. According to Jim Enote, the museum's director more native lands have been lost through mapping than through physical contact. These maps seek to reclaim their land, names (including their own people's name) and memories.

Ho'n A:wan Dehwa:we (Our Land) - Ronnie Cachini, 2006 via Emergence Magazine

In the map above the modern road network intersects an otherwise dream-like landscape.

Migration of Salt Mother - Larson Gasper, 2009 via Emergence Magazine

Shiba:bulima - Levon Loncassion

These maps are in a traveling exhibition that has appeared in New York, Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Flagstaff.

Most of these are in the form of traditional paintings but there are also a couple of digital paintings.

"The maps represent landscapes but also historical events, such as Zuni migrations and Zuni relationships to places throughout the Colorado Plateau. The maps also guide viewers through Zuni cosmological processes where water, plants, animals, and even the sky make up the unique Zuni world. The exhibition shows how Zuni see their own history, their ancestral migrations, their ancient homes, and the parts of nature that sustains them."

Major Native American Map Found

A map drawn by Arikara tribal leader, Too Né for Lewis and Clark was recently discovered in the Bibliotheque National de France. Here is a sample.

Too Né drew this map in 1805 or 1806 and it shows how much the American explorers depended on the knowledge of Native Americans.

The map is from the May 2018 issue of  We Proceeded On, journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. It is available as a print copy only but the version above was put online by the Daily Astorian. Here is a quote from the Daily Astorian article:

“Monumental doesn’t fully cover the importance of this discovery,” historian Clay Jenkinson declared, noting that “individuals like Too Né were as important to the success of the expedition as, say, Sacagawea.”

here are a couple more map samples - the entire map can be seen here.

Your State's Third (or Second) Language

The American Community Survey shows that English is the most commonly spoken language in all 50 of the United States. This makes for a pretty boring map. Slate has a set of maps that dig deeper into the data to see what other languages are spoken. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in 43 states so that map is still not very interesting. However when you remove English and Spanish and look at the third (or second for 7 states) most common language things get more interesting.

This type of map should be taken with some caution as the numerical differences between languages may not be very large. Also one large urban area such as Detroit, with its large Arabic population can bias an entire state. If I had more time I could look this up but I would guess that not many Michiganders speak Arabic in the Upper Peninsula, or even north and west of Pontiac. Still, it's interesting to see how some of the original settlement patterns of the US have persisted (Navajo in the southwest, German in the midwest, and pockets of French, Italian and Portuguese in the east,) while other states show more recent settlement patterns such as Filipinos in California and Nevada, Vietnamese in Texas, Oklahoma and two other states, and Korean.

The article has several other maps showing the most common Scandinavian, South Asian and African languages. These are based on much smaller numbers so they're not as meaningful, yet there are still some regional patterns that emerge. More interesting is the map of the most common Native American language. The map mostly reflects original or sometimes forced settlement patterns, but also shows some long distance migration, particularly of the Navajos.

For more details and maps go to Slate.

Native American Industry

Thanksgiving is a time to travel, shop, cook, watch the Cowboys lose and argue with your relatives. It is also a time to honor those who were here before we took their land. We may think of Native Americans in simplistic cliches, but the interior cultures had an extensive network of production and trade called the Hopewell Exchange System.

This map shows the extent of trade among the different cultures that flourished from about 200 BC to about 500 AD (or CE.) The map's author, Hieronymous Rowe has numerous maps of Native American culture on Wikipedia.

A few centuries later, members of the Mississippian Culture began quarrying chert, a stone used to make tools and ceremonial objects. The raw material was dug up and transported to nearby settlements to be made into hoes, spades and other tools. Here is Rowe's map of the production sites at Mill Creek, Illinois.

Tools were then traded extensively as seen here.

And you thought they only made turkeys and yams!