Decolonizing the Map of Minnesota

The people Indigenous to Minnesota have quite a different relationship to the land than their European and American counterparts. The Eastern Dakota and Ojibwe are historically migratory woodland peoples, moving with each season. The availability of food dictated much of their movement throughout the region. Wild ricing, maple sugaring, and hunting were all reasons for moving camp. Indigenous people lived in harmony with the land, its resources, and seasons rather than exploiting it. Camps moved seasonally allowing for the land to repair and refresh itself. Even today Indigenous people will leave gift, often tobacco and a prayer, when taking from the land, acknowledging that all relationships involve reciprocity.

The European conception of land ownership was new to Minnesota's Indigenous groups when they began to meet in the 17th Century. To the Indigenous inhabitants, land naturally provided for their way of life, so ownership was unnecessary. The Dakota and Ojibwe migratory way of life made fixed borders impossible. Conflicts with other tribal groups were mostly over who could exercise rights to hunting and gathering in areas where nations overlapped. This was the case when the Ojibwe displaced the Dakota from the area around Lake Mille Lacs in the mid 18th century. Despite this, the Minnesota's indigenous population still hold a strong connection to the land they live on. European colonizers' maps show little about the people who were there before them, which was a conscious effort to erase Indigenous peoples and claim the land for themselves. The Europeans diminished the Indigenous groups' ties to the land through renaming, drawing borders, and other cartographic practices. This process of disenfranchisement continues to the present day.

European-American epistemology and ontology have dominated mapmaking since the beginning of colonization. However, there is currently a movement in Indigenous communities and in academia to decolonize cartography. Broadly, decolonization refers to undoing colonialism, but here it refers to the intellectual process of challenging the supremacy of Western knowledge systems which claim to be universal.

There are many geographic projects dedicated to decolonization, most of which have come about in the last 20 years. Some of these examples of projects led by Indigenous groups and individuals include  Native Land , the  Decolonial Atlas ,  Tribal Nations Maps ,  Dakota Land Map , and the  Bdote Memory Map . Additionally, many geographic journals have designated space for articles pertaining to decolonization, and several have had special issues on the topic, including Geographic Research (Volume 45, Issue 2, 2007); Area (Volume 49, Issue 3, 2017); and Cartographica (Volume 55, Number 3, 2020); in addition to dozens of books and other published articles. Even Esri, the largest Geographic Information Systems software company in the world, provides a platform for Indigenous voices through their  Tribal Story Map Challenge . Winners of this challenge have included  a project predicting and building resilience to climate change impacts on the land of the Coastal Samish  and  a project by the Grand Ronde Community to piece together and map their ancestral homelands based on treaties and other historical documents . The decolonial atlas summarizes the idea of decolonizing the map succinctly:

“The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe. The orientation of a map, its projection, the presence of political borders, which features are included or excluded, and the language used to label a map are all subject to the map-maker’s bias – whether deliberate or not. Because decolonization is a process of unlearning and rediscovering, we’re especially committed to indigenous language revitalization through toponymy – the use of place names”

Maps like the  Dakota Land Map  (above) offer a total reinvention of places that have almost no trace of native legacy left. This vision by Twin Cities artist Marlena Myles shows what the Twin Cities looks like with Dakota names, offering an alternative reality void of the colonial naming practices of Euro-American settlers. To most non-natives things like google maps and place names are taken for granted, but to the Dakota and other native groups it represents their history, relationships, and identity. Taken as part of a larger push to recognize previously erased history, these maps are part of a larger movement of indigenous rights activists and allies pushing back against settler-colonialism on our landscape. 

This is just a small selection of the important work tribes, artists, and scholars are doing to decolonize mapping. The question now is how does this intellectual movement expand to impact people's lives in the real world? Education is the most obvious way, but it is hard to engage a large portion of the population because by definition decolonizing the map is inherently a local process. Projects like the Decolonial Atlas successfully utilize social media as a way to spread the message broadly, and as a method to decolonize education and cartography "viral maps" and social media should certainly be further explored. However, There are many people already doing this work, whether through teaching, activism, or working for change in the government.

Kade Ferris is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in Minnesota. He has been working for Red Lake since 2014, but has been doing cultural resource management for tribes for his whole career. I was able to chat with him about his work and personal projects to decolonize the map of Minnesota.

Kade studied Archaeology at University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University before beginning his career working in tribal government. While he uses GIS daily in his current job, when he first started in the 1990s just having a handheld GPS unit for plotting points was a big deal. He began using CAD software then switched to Esri software in the late 90s. He told me it was a slog making maps back then, using digitizing tablets and having to create almost all of your data from the ground-up. Now he's a GIS expert. His story map taking  an in-depth look at Indian Land Cessions in Minnesota  won the ESRI tribal story map competition in 2019.

Kade told me if he weren't at Red Lake today he'd "be doing the exact same thing for another tribe."

“I’m only happy when I’m doing tribal resource management. It’s more fulfilling. You’re helping get roads and houses built, creating grants and plans to benefit people, not just to satisfy a client and make a profit. I’ve been working for tribal governments by whole life.”

“I've had a few stints in private industry, but it's just not satisfying. I'm doing something that benefits a community as opposed to... 'wow I built an oil well.' I could destroy the earth or I could protect the earth. One company I worked for I refused to do any oil or gas. I did airports and roads and houses and that was way better because I want to be part of the solution not part of the problem. Around 2008-2009 with the huge oil boom in ND archaeologists were doing nothing but oil and gas, and I couldn’t do it. I guess in a way I’m morally opposed to destroying the earth.”

To Kade, tribal cultural resource management means "making sure that we’re protecting and promoting our land and resource rights for now and into the future; ensuring that we have sound development.”

“Finding new ways to promote cultural understanding is so important to me, for both the people who I work for and the public. Even for the tribal government there are so many things that have happened over time; physical and mental and cultural colonization. My kids grew up on the reservation and I tell them ‘this is not our land, this is what’s left of our land. Our land is this massive landscape around us.’ Trying to educate people about that is very important.”

“At the moment the project I'm looking forward to is the database of place names and cultural locations. I do a lot of historical research and talking to elders for that information. They were teaching a class on historic sites in and around Red Lake at the college and asked me to create this resource which they could engage with in class. Having elder input is essential. They know everything like why certain places have the names they do, even something as simple as roads.”

“Back in Turtle Mountain we would have community meetings about once a month where we would just talk about places and the land. We identified a lot of places around the state that way. But still, just having the location and the name isn’t enough, there are always important stories to go with them. For example, ‘why is this place called Bottineau’s Butte? Well because he fell off his horse and almost died and when he didn’t they said hey we’re gonna name this place after you, buddy.’

“Just getting those stories so you know why and how places are named the way they are and how it relates to the history, that’s what matters.”

“More knowledge = more power. I think that that’s the key. When you’ve been taken out of your historical landscape and shoved onto a reservation, and people have settled on the land that was once yours, being able to take that back in a way is important.”

But still, Kade says that more work needs to be done.

“You see these land acknowledgements like ‘we are on Dakota land’... okay so great, now what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna do anything at all or are you just acknowledging it? Especially at land grant colleges where they were founded with money from the sale of native land, are they using any of that money they gained to better the lives of the people whose land they’re acknowledging? No.”

The next steps, he says, would be to create scholarships and grants, at a minimum. There is only so much that education can do, but in order to truly reconcile the past there needs to be material exchange: reparations and the return of land: “It’s the same thing with truth and reconciliation. It’s like ‘Okay so now I’ve spoken my truth, where’s the reconciliation?’ Because there isn’t any. Just letting us speak is not reconciliation. Reconciliation is a reckoning, it’s compensation.”

For Kade, his job as THPO is both to generate immediate benefits to his community in the form of infrastructure and housing projects, but also to use his platform to promote cultural understanding. Mapping is a tool that can help him do both, especially due to the accessibility of web-based GIS applications. He is engaging in decolonization of the map enabled by GIS technology combined with the knowledge of elders and historical research. GIS is a way to level the playing field and enable anyone to tell their own story with maps. The intersection of oral and written history with GIS technology is a tool Kade has been using to decolonize the map, and one that could easily be adopted by other tribal governments.

So, what is the end goal of the movement? How can the scholarly be connected to the practical? This is all too often the problem with movements that originate in academia and address real-world issues. The sharing of knowledge leads to power and cultural understanding. The process of mapping to engage with this history makes GIS decolonial. Grassroots mapping vs. positivist Euro-American cartography shows how GIS has leveled the playing field for making maps and geospatial data.

Kade told me an interesting story form when he was THPO and director of natural resources at Turtle Mountain that illustrates this divide perfectly:

“There's a housing project at Turtle Mountain which was built by HUD and the BIA in the 80s. Those were problematic from the start because they didn’t care about aesthetics or saving money or location. They ended up building it on an intermittent stream that they had bulldozed and filled. A decade or two later they had to move it because black mold was growing in folks houses. At that point the tribe was able to contract for a new location for the housing themselves. What we gained from that was knowledge about these streams and the land, and in return we have a much nicer housing project built around these water features that gives folks green space as well as keeping their houses dry. The advantage of contracting at the tribal government level is that it’s more relevant to the people it’s affecting. Rather than the government coming in from the top-down to just do whatever they want, we are engaging the community to decide what's best for themselves. That's why it's successful."