NACIS 2024

Native and Indigenous Critical Cartography and Counter-mapping Panel with Elspeth Iralu and Laurel Mei-Singh
Drawing on their research and experience, speakers in this panel will examine how counter-mapping and decolonial initiatives challenge colonial mapping practices and recenter Native and Indigenous communities and methodologies. Speakers will broadly explore the intersections of cartography, Indigenous spatial justice, carceral geography, spaces of resistance, and counter-mapping.

Rectifying a Map of Indian Country
Elspeth Iralu, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico
In this talk, I consider the legal category of Indian Country and how cartographers’ understanding of what makes up Indian Country influences the maps we imagine possible. Indian Country is a formal, legal term historically used in the United States to refer to all land within the borders of reservations. It has also been used within military operations to refer to “enemy” territory globally. Here, I consider what it might mean to understand Indian Country beyond its finite, legal boundaries to extend to an affective, felt experience of Indigenous presence. How might we represent this cartographically? How might we build on developments in Indigenous geographies to communicate this felt knowledge of place?

The Carceral Geographies of US Militarism
Laurel Mei-Singh, Assistant Professor of Geography & Environment and Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
The climate crisis has advanced the global dialogue about the environmental ravages of war and its impacts on marginalized people. This study of Native Hawaiians confronting the US military on O‘ahu’s contested land expands this critique to examine the environmental justice dimensions of carceral geographies. Carceral geographies involve ongoing partitioning that enforces uneven access to resources by criminalizing lifeways that draw from interdependence with the natural world. At the same time, Hawaiian paradigms premised on human-environment interconnection persist, competing with US territorial domination. As such, the carceral geographies of US militarism regulate and contain placemaking practices that yield viable alternatives to capitalism and war.