What is indigenous cartography?

What is indigenous cartography?

Indigenous cartographers work to decolonize mapping of traditional lands. — Amid growing national discourse around social and racial justice, a group of cartographers are diving into decolonial mapping as a means to recenter Indigenous voices and values.

Why are maps important to indigenous cultures?

Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have mapped and named places in their homelands. Indigenous peoples represent their territories through stories and use visual and conceptual maps for purposes such as regulating land use and demarcating territory.

What is colonial cartography?

Colonial cartography is the ultimate expression of topos. As a manifestation of topography in conquered countries, colonial cartography is an ideal field for exposing the power of a metrics that favors the materiality of territory over and against its social value.

How is map making useful for indigenous communities?

“Mapping not only empowers indigenous communities with evidence that they can use to assert their land rights, it also provides communities with the ability to catalog the natural resources sheltered in their territories,” said Tauli-Corpuz, the head of Tebtebba.

How are Indigenous sources important?

Indigenous knowledge is the basis for local level decision-making in food security, human and animal health, education, NRM, and other vital economic and social activities. IK is based on empirical experience and is embedded in both biophysical and social contexts, and cannot easily be removed from them.

What does the term Indigenous mean?

The word ‘indigenous’ refers to the notion of a place-based human ethnic culture that has not migrated from its homeland, and is not a settler or colonial population. To be indigenous is therefore by definition different from being of a world culture, such as the Western or Euro-American culture.

Why maps were used in a particular way?

Maps use symbols like lines and different colours to show features such as rivers, roads, cities or mountains. All these symbols help us to visualise what things on the ground actually look like. Maps also help us to know distances so that we know how far away one thing is from another.

How do we use maps now?

Answer Expert Verified A map is a symbolic representation of selected characteristics of a place, usually drawn on a flat surface. Maps present information about the world in a simple, visual way. Maps are a very essential element now a days. As people have started to travel more, the need for maps have increased.

What’s a mapmaker called?

The French word cartographie (the science of making maps), from which we get our English word cartography, was created from carte, meaning “map,” and -graphie, meaning “representation by.” Around the same time we adopted cartography in the mid-19th century, we also created our word for a mapmaker, cartographer.

Did indigenous people make maps?

All Indigenous peoples are map-makers of long-standing tradition. Visual and conceptual representations of Indigenous territories — that is, Indigenous cartography — have been around as long as our peoples have lived here. These two traditions of mapping often collide.