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.