The Poetics of Indigenous Carto-Activism
“[P]art of what fascinates us when looking at a map is in inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience. […] The coded visual language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our world we each have our own dialect.”
—Katharine Harmon1
In this era of radically accelerated and instantaneous communications, when ideas and images are proliferated worldwide by the mere touch of an iPhone screen, and when we can circumnavigate the globe by plane in a mere 42 hours, it is not surprising that the world has suddenly become a smaller place—a place that we erroneously believe we know. What does it mean to know a place and what social, political, cultural, spiritual, or geographical perspectives contribute to this knowing?
For decades now, visual artists have been addressing questions of place through the implementation of mapping as an aesthetic expression and form. The well-known maps in the works of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ai Weiwei, Guillermo Kuitca, Nancy Graves, Jasper Johns, and Nancy Holt come to mind. These artists have taken up mapping as a means of signaling geopolitical instability and the shifting dynamics of power and influence that are a current reflection of postmodern times. This is equally true for contemporary Indigenous artists, who have embraced mapping as a
