America transformed
Mapping the 19th Century and Erasing Native Legacies
Maps are pretty important to how we think about the world. They definitely show our relationship to other people. Maps for different purposes emphasize different things. Some maps emphasize roads. Others emphasize geographical features like deserts and mountains and forests. Some emphasize borders, cities, or bodies of water.
Maps are also tools of colonialism. In our class discussion following the visit to the Levanthal map center. Someone mentioned how many of the maps portrayed US expansion as almost inevitable. Like a manifest density thing. As if it were necessary for the United States to span from coast to coast and have definite borders between Canada and Mexico that we see today.
(image source) I think a part of that is the idea that the united states never lost land, it simply gained it. This is like an extension of manifest destiny.
I think that the viewpoints were very important. However, I didn’t like that they were posed as “alternative viewpoints” as much. They did a good job of making people consider the fact that the United States was not just expanding their borders, but also killing and taking land from Native Americans in order to do so. However, I feel like at times they were off to the side as if these viewpoints were not important enough to be stated as fact.
One such viewpoint was next to a map calling settlers to new land divisions in Ohio, it read:
These divisions remind us of the harmful game of wrongful land dispossession. For Native people, these squares represent a systematic disruption of our ancestral ways of life. This diagram reflects the colonial concept of land ownership: packaged up in little squares, as though one can compartmentalize a way of life and sell it.
- Rebecca Sockbeson, Ph.D., Penobscot Indian Nation, University of Alberta (source)
I think this is an important sentiment, and equally important to have it attributed to a native voice as a part of stopping erasure, however, I would have liked it if things like the fact that is was harmful to Native people in dispossessing them of their land was simply a part of the description instead of some viewpoint, that people may not consider being “”as factual.””
Something that I hadn't really dwelled on before seeing all the maps and their accompanying viewpoints was the role of the railroad in the colonization of America. In high school history class, the railroad was never viewed as a bad thing, it was never properly contextualized as a method to destroy the connection between and seize land from native people. The Native people were instead portrayed as either force that was stopping “good” “progressive” change (like the “Indians are Anti-science” myth does) or erased them entirely.
These narratives play out in the maps that choose to highlight railroad lines, but intentionally also choose not to label Native Americans. Trying to erase them from existence on paper.
On the topic of that erasure, it’s also interesting that maps that showed population left out Native people too, so that it appeared that the west was slowly filling up with people, instead of displacing people who had already lived there.
However maps aren't just used to erase Native people, they are also able to demonstrate the crimes the US has committed in taking their land. The shrinking maps of "Indian land" in the United States readily show how much the US had taken.
But I think the maps of Indian land in the US play a different role internationally. When I was in France this summer I found an article that had a map of Indian land in the united states. The first thing that jumped out at me though, was the map over-exaggerated the land that belonged to native people. For example, half the state of Oklahoma was still labeled as Indian land in the map. Unfortunately, I can't read french, so I don't know exactly why the map was like that. However, I can guess, that maps like that, make the US look better than it actually is, by making it seem like the US granted their indigenous people some land and not mentioning how much of their land was taken away.
As if the maps were trying to transform the US from something that took land away to something that was “generous enough” to allow land for them to stay.
