Maps are tools that help us navigate the unfamiliar. Maps tie a space, a place, to its context, and thus inform our interactions with these places that we map. Maps, of course, even in their proposed objectivity, are complicit in the colonialist and capitalist project, historically central to inscribing concepts like discovery and the untouched wilderness into our wider cultural assumptions about nature and the outdoors, or similarly, making visible or invisible indigenous pasts and futures.

Even GIS mapping, with it’s ethos of scientific objectivity, often relates space only by colonial names and boundaries, eliding the history of indigenous ways of mapping, of indigenous histories. The context of a map, then, is not only the web of latitudes and longitudes that shape direction, but also the cultural ideas that shape what is worth mapping, and what is not, but also what is marked as known, and what is not. 

This project seeks to use this understanding of locational plotting in the context of cultural layers (here, North American Indigenous Poetry) to pivot away from the colonialist and white supremacist understandings of the modern nations of North America. Instead this project insists on a different cultural context through which to understand place, and in particular, nature. Refiguring GPS coordinates to plot cultural touchpoints reimagines mapping not only as a way to navigate physical space, but a way to navigate cultural space too.

The mapping thus moves two ways. Those who seek to understand indigenous poetry in the long 19th century can learn from the spatial relations of indigenous poetry, and in turn, those seeking to better understand a place, or a natural space, can inform their knowledge of this place through understanding the cultural layering that might inflect the history there.