What were we mapping? From the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project to the Southern Kalahari

Maps express the authority of those who make them, their claims to know and therefore own the world or the areas of the world that they thus declare to be theirs.Colonial and imperial expansion can be traced through a history of cartography.The names on British maps of Canada and much of southern Africa are evocative of their origins and purpose: members of the royal family, commanders of expeditions, explorers who represent the nation become headlands, islands, mountains and rivers.The challenge to these imperial claims, the assertion of prior or original entitlement to those lands, can also come in the form of maps.These set out different kinds of information about place, with names that belong much more deeply in the past and in the land.The authority behind these maps, and the needs that they meet, come from the peoples who have used and occupied the land 'since time immemorial'.The colonists' frontiers are thus revealed to be indigenous peoples' homelands.The modern history of challenges to Canadian sovereignty, especially in the Arctic and British Columbia, is to be seen in a series of mapping projects.It was in these maps of indigenous life that representation of an altogether different way of knowing, using and laying claim to their lands, was pioneered.These rival maps, and the whole idea of cultural mapping, depended on a process and methodology that focused on achieving decolonization, originated in Canada and then spread across the social scientific and indigenous political world.I was fortunate to work on several of the Canadian projects, and also had the opportunity to help carry the methodology to the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa.What follows here is a summary of this flow of mapping, a story about a set of stories each of which centers on a potential transformation of how the world should be seen and understood. *** 1I insert hyphens to show the place of nnguar; these would not be used in usual roman orthography for Inuktitut.2In a recent filmed interview (January, 2020) George Qulaut, an Inuit elder from Igloolik, said that "land" without inclusion of all "the animals" did not make sense to Inuit.

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