Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (review)

Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use. Edited by G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 318 pp. $60.00.

This impressive and well-illustrated collection of essays traverses a path that few scholars have followed, toward an exploration of maps among native peoples in North America. As Lewis points out in his introductory chapters, the collection and study of Indian maps had been a lively enterprise throughout the nineteenth century, but by the second decade of the twentieth century, interest in Indian maps entered a hiatus that lasted until the 1970s. But the authors who join Lewis in this book form a core of scholars who can help reinvigorate this long-dormant interest and provide a new appreciation of the many layers of meaning embedded in the intercultural discourse of cartography.

There are many sorts of maps and mapmaking conventions, even in the modern world. A subway map, with its color-coded complex of straight lines and circles, guides a commuter through the urban underground just as well as a topographical map, with its curving mass of contour lines, guides a hiker up a mountain. In that sense, the awareness of the different models of modern maps may help readers to understand better the various forms that Indian maps could take. Indeed, indigenous mapmaking cannot be understood simply as a process of describing space through precise measurement and conventional symbolism. Indian maps were not intended to be produced as scientific documents or to be preserved as permanent records. Rather, they were often ephemeral drawings quickly inscribed on the ground or on a piece of bark and sometimes elucidated by physical gesture--the cartographic equivalent of sign language. Many of the indigenous maps that survive in archives and museums are European transcriptions of the ad hoc cartography of encounter, thus showing native American notions of space mediated by European interpreters.

As Elizabeth Hill Boone points out in an essay about Aztec maps in early colonial Mexico, however, some of the surviving cartographic paintings preserved from the era of Spanish contact "retain vestiges of the pre-Columbian manuscript tradition" and help us to understand the role of Aztec maps in the pre-contact period: "Aztecs relied on maps to chart paths of movement, and they relied on them to organize space visually"--just as we do today--but Aztec maps also "encoded history and organized the community territorially," creating a collective narrative for a people, "a popular foundation on which to structure the telling of migration stories" (112, 131). Similarly, Morris S. Arnold offers a persuasive analysis of an eighteenth-century buffalo-hide painting, now in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, that seems to contain both a historical account of a Quapaw victory over their Chickasaw enemies and a cartographic representation of the territory that is now Arkansas. Finally, in a wide-angle essay that ranges, as it were, all over the map, Peter Nabokov shows how native people in North America used maps not only to chart geographical space, but also to conceptualize cosmological concerns and thus to direct people in their moral and religious journeys. Indian maps, these essays tell us, were not just about land; they were about the relationship between people and places over time as well as space.

European explorers were more interested in defining and demarcating physical space, but they could hardly have done so without relying on cartographic information from Indians. Focusing on southern New England, Margaret Wickens Pearce argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deeds of Indian-land transfers reflect Indian, as well as European, traditions of representing and naming contested territories. Indeed, the land transactions suggest that different notions of cartographic understanding were as much a part of the negotiations as the land itself. In two excellent essays on early Indian and European maps of the Southeast, Gregory Waselkov and Patricia Galloway show that European mapmakers...