For Indigenous Peoples’ Day
/I’m a day late with a post for Indigenous Peoples’ Day—the state-sanctioned name in Maine for what is elsewhere still commonly known as Columbus Day—but earlier today I encountered the following map from the AGSL feed on Facebook:
Official | Reg. United States Patent Office | Earth Science | Polyconic Projection Map Showing the | Indians | of | Wisconsin | by | Hearn Brothers | Manufacturers of America’s Largest Commercial & | School Wall Maps—Student Participation Series. Detroit: Hearne Brothers, nd [after 1960]. 169 × 126 cm. American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
At first sight, the map appears to be appropriate in celebrating the indigenous peoples of the US and of Wisconsin more particularly. And I first focused on the title’s bold claim to institutional authority and cartographic quality: “official” “earth science” “polyconic projection.”
But as I contemplated the presence of “earth science” in the title and the manner of depiction of the native peoples, I rethought the map’s connotations. Specifically, the map presents the native peoples as part of the environment of Wisconsin, or so closely tied to the environment that they might as well be another unthinking, savage creature. This argument is pervasive in White depictions of native peoples, but utterly self-serving and wrong.
This wall map comprises a monochrome base, over which has been printed a mass of color. On its verso is a map of the US, excluding Hawai‘i, showing the “original American Indian tribal ranges at the approximate dates of contact with European culture,” and a large body of textual information about the “Indians of Wisconsin.” The important elements in this map lie in the information encoded in color enhanced by the information on the verso.
The monochrome base is a fairly conventional base map of Wisconsin. It shows the state’s political territories: counties, delineated by broad double lines; townships, by thin, dashed lines; and other areal units such as public hunting grounds and state parks. Many of these units also indicate their population according to the 1960 census (I presume in thousands). The towns are linked by federal highways and state roads, railroads, and waterways and they are accompanied by some prominent hills and tourist sites. Among the political units are several native reservations, bounded with thin, dashed lines like townships, but none are named.
The base map’s denial of the native presence in Wisconsin seems to have been more than overcome by the bright colors of the overlay. Seven huge swathes of solid color unambiguously delineate the territories of the native peoples of the state. Each territory is named and bounded in prominent red letters and lines. (The boundary between the Chippewa and the Menominee continues, thinner, into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; other boundaries do not extend into either Minnesota or Iowa to the west.) The formal reservations are indicated in solid green, and named, and blue hatching is used to show “non-reservation Indian settlements of today” (some of which have since achieved reservation status). Also in blue are many small icons to show “Historical Points of Interest,” “Indian settlements,” “Indian Points of Interest,” and “Forts.”
The neat homogeneity and sharply bounded regions of the native territories are belied by several features, not least their contrast with the formal and informal reservations, and the seven native groups mapped on the recto contrast further with the twenty-one groups identified on the verso. Several prominent statements indicate how native groups had moved in the past; in the southeast corner of the state, for example, is an indication that the region was evacuated by the Ottawa after 1706. Then there is a series of orange flowers, each labeled by a letter, that are scattered across the map but are not identified in the legend. The map’s verso has a list of places settled by the Menominee, which match up with the flowers on the recto, indicating that the Menominee once occupied much more than the limited region that the map grants them in the northeast of the state.
The blue icons all refer to historical features: the trading posts and forts established by the Whites as they entered into and progressively appropriated the land; former “Indian settlements”; and mound sites left by native peoples. Here, too, the contemporary presence of native peoples is restricted to the formal and informal reservations. On the face of it, the map proclaims a native presence in Wisconsin. But it shows a past that has been well and truly overwhelmed by White settlement, encompassed by the delineation of Wisconsin itself, not a region sustained by any indigenous spatial concept.
So, what do the seven areas of color represent? Comparison with the map of the US on the verso, reveals that the seven regions are the “ranges” of native groups when they came into contact with White colonizers:
And this is where the reference to “earth science” comes in. I have no idea if the Hearne Brothers used this phrase in the titles of other maps, but on this map it concretizes the narrative of dispossession and othering constructed by the map’s historical elements. In short, the native peoples of Wisconsin are depicted as being part of the environment. (They have “ranges,” not “territories.”) The manner of the delineation of their spatial expression is no different than the delineation of soils or bedrock on soil and geological mapping. The colored overlay also features two other elements: all the lakes are colored blue and the “isohyets” of annual rainfall are indicated in blue-green isolines, in five-inch increments. Why? Added to the overlay, the two features suggest a connection of native life to rain and water.
The pictorial vignettes around the map and their accompanying explanations all emphasize the hardship of hunting and farming in indigenous societies, such that “finding food occupied most of the Indian’s time” and that children were taught only that which “would help them later…provide food, shelter, and clothing.” (This is also highly gendered: “provide” of course implies “for women”; the explanation focuses on boys and how the men would educate them “about animals and nature.”) This is a strictly technological explanation of Indian backwardness, in line with old ethnographic hierarchies of savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples who are discerned by their material conditions. (Despite the emphasis on water on the map and in the vignettes, there is no hint in the vignettes that native peoples fished.)
This “earth science” map thus delineates native peoples as if they were part of the environment, an environment that would be extensively modified by Whites. Even as the Whites divided up the region into states and counties and townships, and built roads and railways and points of interest, they also reshaped native territories. In this respect, this map is akin to the maps of “native vegetation” that delineate the extent of vegetation before disruption by human urbanization and agriculture, and that suggest what will “grow back” should human disturbance be reversed.
All told, a complicated image that encapsulates the complex history of native persistence in the USA, but still very much from a White perspective.
(And don’t get me started on the north arrow designed like a shield done in a plains rather than woodlands style.)
