Cartographies of Consignment: First Nations and Mapwork in the Neoliberal Era

Anthropological critiques of development on First Nations territories increasingly conflate indigenous participation in government- and corporate-led information gathering projects with a broader resignation to neo-liberal governmentality. New government-authored resource management plans and incremental treaty agreements (e.g., short-term revenue-sharing plans and self-government measures), however, have transformed the defensive research and information-sharing strategies which characterized earlier land claims confrontations. This article explores how field mapping techniques and concepts of territory originally developed around participatory mapping and traditional use and occupancy studies have been re-systematized for the constraints and complicities of corporate-funded environmental mapping and database work. Drawing on my experience with mappers contracted to trace an alternative route for a gas pipeline proposed to bisect the traditional territories of the Gitanyow First Nation, I argue that iterative map-work methods allow First Nations experts to engage in long-term territorial politics while deferring direct confrontations and emotional investments in specific development proposals through a process I call “consignment.” This process has helped technicians working for groups like the Gitanyow to weather new uncertainties generated by the neoliberalization of resource management and territorial politics, and to safeguard key anti-colonial projects even as they are forced to defer other political goals. Contextualizing new institutional instabilities within the long history of indigenous mapping projects in British Columbia, I outline how the contingencies of map-work expose connections between technocracy, daily life, and the politics of indigeneity in the neoliberal era.