Native Land, Tribal Reservation Land & Park Land in Maine
Lab 2: GIS 220
Indigenous understandings of land differ from Westernized conceptions of property, which designate land as something which a person owns and considers to be under only their possession.
Rowe and Tuck define the relationship of Indigenous peoples and land as "peoplehood, relational, cosmological, epistemological," further, "land is memory, land is curriculum, land is language." The authors emphasize that the word "land" refers to all: "water, sky, underground, sea (Rowe and Tuck, 5)".
FIGURE 1: Native Land Guide (native-land.ca). A digital tool that maps out Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages. It is not an official or legal guide, but maps that aim to visualize how native peoples and cultures overlapped and intersected.
This Indigenous definition of land is important to understanding maps of native land in juxtaposition with Western mapping. Western conceptions of property designate land (and therefore maps) as something that must be broken into regions contained by boundaries: countries, states, counties, cities. These maps include only land and ocean, split into name-designated chunks.
In Figure 1, we can see a clear example of this differentiation: native territories in the map are spread over both land and sea, and also merge into each other. This rings true to how Tuck and Rowe analyzed Indigenous understandings of space and land and also represents the diverse peoples who previously inhabited all of this land.
These territories are polygons clipped within the Maine subregion (Figure 1). However, the Maine boundary was constructed by British colonization and therefore is not a present feature in this map.
FIGURE 2: Map of Native Land, Tribal Reservations, cities, and Wabanaki Place Names, cut to the boundary of Maine.
Indigenous peoples were, ultimately, forced to confine to the Western mapping system: they were relocated to small chunks of land far outside of where they may have congregated and lived. Cities have replaced Wabanaki Place Names in the southern region of Maine, while reservations are pushed into the rural areas of central Maine. Figure 2 demonstrates the original native land map, in juxtaposition with current federal tribal reservation land.
- On average, tribal land has shrunk 98.8%.
- Present-day tribal reservations are 2.6% the size of historical lands.
- A land reduction of 83,131 square miles
- The average distance between historical and current lands is 149 miles.
(Data: Flavelle. The New York Times, 2021.)
Figure 2, snipped to the boundary of Maine State, demonstrates several of the above statistics: the native land polygons have shrunk into tiny chunks of land with very detailed boundary lines.
The above maps also show that many of the Wabanaki Indigenous people's "place names" were in southern Maine, where the cities are today. However, there are no tribal reservation lands in the rural areas of the state (Figure 2).
FIGURE 3: List of Wabanaki Place Names
The Wabanakis used place names (Figure 3) to designate the land they lived on, and even more specifically, how they lived on it. Each place name correlates to a "name type" (as shown in Figure 1) which indicates if it is a:
- Boundary place
- Land feature
- Person or people
- Place of animals or food
- Portage
- A spiritual or legendary place
- Uncertain or unknown
- Water Feature
These name differentiations largely do not exist in Western place names, and the Tribal place names are often converted into a Western word, enforcing structures of colonization.
FIGURE 4: Nature preserves and Tribal Reservations, by Maine Counties.
Figure 4 combines federal tribal land and Maine Parks land. As the map indicates visually, the amount of land that is designated as a state, regional, national, or local park appears to be roughly similar in size to the amount of designated tribal land across the state. It's no accident that the Department of the Interior (which contains the NPS) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sit right next to each other, as they are much more closely related than one might think at first glance.
All of the "park" land was once inhabited by the Native people, but the federal government did not consider or recognize these peoples as having any property rights to this land. National and State Parks, like Acadia and Baxter in Maine, are considered to be "protected wilderness" spaces, discovered by white settlers (and protected for a largely white public). Before this land was "discovered", however, it was occupied by native peoples, who considered it -- like all of their land, sky, water, and soil --- sacred.
In fact, on other reservations across the country, newly formed national parks were able to displace native people with a presidential order: Ulysses Grant signed the Yellowstone Act into law in 1972, which deliberately "set apart" the parks by enforcing that "all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom" (Tidnam, 2016).
All of these maps emphasize the reality that many indigenous peoples were displaced from their native land and relocated to less desirable locations, first by white settlers, and then by the government. Native people were also subsequently forced off the land that was considered "natural preserves" designated with boundaries by the government, and further removing peoples from their ancestral home and spiritual land.