Indigenous Families' Encounters With Maps and Their Story Mapping Experiences

• In Event: Decolonial Mapmaking: Critical Methodologies Contextualizing Disruption, Refusal, and Relationality

Abstract

Drawing on prior work from studies of walking, reading, and storying land (First Author, et al., 2018), this paper examines two Indigenous families’ experiences with maps and map-making while on walks in urban forest preserves. We ask: 1) how do Indigenous families’ encounters with forest preserve maps frame their relationships with and understanding of land/waters? 2) how do these same families create narrative maps? Utilizing the methodological framework of thick mapping (Presner, Shepard, & Kawano, 2014) we demonstrate how families’ relationships with land/waters is facilitated by their embodied and narrative map making practices.

Framework
The writings of Indigneous and feminist scholars consider how differentiations in conceptions of the world “meet up” in spaces to produce a diversity of interrelations and possiblities for the future (Goeman, 2013; Massey, 2005; Simpson, 2017; Wilson, 2008). As Goeman (2013) reminds us, “many histories and ways of seeing and mapping the world can occur at the same time, and most importantly our spatialities were and continue to be in process” (p. 6). Building with these ideas, we aim to understand how a multiplicity of map forms mediate actions between peoples and places while simultaneously influencing future possibilities for learning-in-place (Taylor, 2017). Specifically, we explore Indigenous families’ encounters and engagements with two kinds of maps -- those produced by governmental agencies (i.e., the Forest Preserve District) and their own mental maps. The maps produced by the Forest Preserve District are material, Cartesian-based representations of space. These maps are designed to represent “reality” (Goeman, 2013). In contrast, the maps of Native families are produced through temporospatial coordination of embodied and movement-based practices. These mental maps reside in personal stories and are related to ways of being and doing in particular locales.


Methods & Findings
Working with a data from a video-ethnographic study of parent-child forest walks (First Author, 2013), we analyzed eight walks (four per family). We identified the following kinds of parent-child interactions for analysis: 1) discussions with forest preserve maps, 2) children’s use of micro-stories to create mental maps of place, 3) parent’s embodied use of directives and questions to create mental maps, and 4) the joint recall of experiences in particular locations. We present two cases for each of the focal families. The first case focuses on families’ initial encounters with a forest preserve map and the interactions that follow. The second case focuses on families’ creation of narrative maps and subsequent actions. We argue that encounters with forest preserve maps lead to questions about what was “real.” Alternatively, families’ narrative maps created contexts for discussing relations with land/waters and imagined future relations.

Significance
These cases highlight how encounters with a multiplicity of map forms shape the unfolding of interaction and learning across time (Goeman, 2013; Taylor, 2017). We argue that western forms of maps silence Indigenous histories and experiences with places while Indigenous mapping practices support place-based identities and imaginations of possible futures. Our findings provide alternative possibilities for the design of curricular and pedagogical mapping practices.

Authors

• Lili Flores Raygoza, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ananda Maria Marin, University of California - Los Angeles