The Turtle Island Mapping Project

For the moment, this map includes only North America and much of Mesoamerica. When plotted, the resulting map is just over a square metre in size. The eventual addition of South America will at least double that size. Its orientation with East at the top is deliberate, and is meant to help the viewer shake off the version of "North America" they have seen most often, and consider the continent with fresh eyes. This positioning also places the major trade axis of the continent parallel to the viewer's "reading line" to draw their gaze from end to end of the land, as opposed to mainstream maps which tend to guide the eye away from the far north and south. The result is not perfect as the base map is still reflective of a distorted mercator projection, but the two features together help disrupt the training most North Americans have had not to really see the far north and south regions, and to see the east and west as broken apart.

One purpose this map does not have is to be used for the measurement of distances. Relative shapes and positions of traditional territories are correct as far as the data I have gathered allows, but since data has not been pinned and recalculated to a specific map projection formula, only the most general distance data is reflected. For this reason, there is no scale.

I did try at first to place all names in the same orientation, usually horizontal, with longer names in narrower territories broken up into hyphenated syllables. Even the font size was the same for all names. However, this soon became unwieldy and illegible, and I found this approach would force me to use numbers and a lengthy catalogue to list the names that didn't fit inside the territory. This would have been utterly unsatisfactory, because matching numbers to names in a key is a nuisance, and it is easy to make numerous mistakes putting together the key and trying to use it later. So instead I have allowed the font size to vary and the line of text to vary in orientation so it will fit. Especially on the coasts, where the land is covered by many smaller territories, I used a combination of labels with arrows. Then in an early test printing I checked the smallest font size to make certain it could be read without a magnifying glass at typical viewing distance. I have made some additional adjustments since this version, such as adding a translucent white background to the names in order to improve their legibility.

Nowadays creating maps with roughly the same idea behind seems to be an area of growing interest, along with people claiming that they can map traditional territories on request for free as a service to Indigenous groups. The latter people may mean well, but their claims are definitely problematic, and I have already observed examples of their work creeping into such online references as the canadian encyclopedia (a source that must be used with great care in any event). For the other people working on "pre-contact" maps, the proliferation of maps made by Indigenous groups has caused a certain level of headache for the unwary who may not have historical research to help them gauge what fits in the time period they have in mind and what doesn't. For instance, I have a reasonably good map of the traditional territory of the Métis Nation, yet you won't find a trace of it on this mapping project, because it is a post-contact development.

One puzzle that I have not yet solved to my satisfaction is how to better handle the fact that traditional territory was and is not static. There are core stable portions, but the "edges" are in fact areas of overlap and blending, places where sometimes everyone is friendly to one another and other times they are emphatically not. Since traditional territory is more than a place or a region – it is better described as a process and enacting of relationship between people, plants, animals, and land – a static, flat map is hardly sufficient. But then again, neither would a movie or some sort of three dimensional model. The only way to truly do traditional land justice is to live on the land within the network of action and relationships it entails as an active participant.

UPDATE (2018-03-29): Over the past several years numerous other mapping projects following similar lines to this one have sprung up across the internet. It seems revisioning the americas in a way that recaptures and perhaps fore-visions a non-colonial, non-settler imposed geography has caught the imaginations of many more people. That, and the availability of affordable and accessible GIS mapping software has changed completely now that there are free and open options like QGIS, and a growing community of scholars engaged in "historical GIS," mapping of past geographies via combining diverse datapoints in a GIS system.