Walking with and on Turtle Island: Indigenous Activist and Artistic Expressions in North America as Counter-Mapping Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous Peoples have expressed, remembered, and performed spatial orientation, imaginations, and relations as part of their various movements across Turtle Island (the North American continent according to some Indigenous Nation’s creation stories), including migration, trading, hunting, gathering, and also the forced displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands to reserves. Gwilym Lucas Eades’ (2016) research demonstrates how Indigenous communities understand spatial imagination and use maps and digital media to express their cultural identity, reclaim land and assert their sovereignty, tell stories, transmit cultural knowledge, and counter colonial narratives through counter-mapping showing the essence of one’s spatial awareness. In the context of this study, I understand counter-mapping as a form of activism against dominant power structures to restore the voices and perspectives of Indigenous nations that oppose Western notions of place and spatial imagination and question the arbitrarily imposed by colonization borders between different areas on earth, between people and between nature and man. This paper explores three different forms of walking experiences as Indigenous counter-mapping practices. The protest walk initiated by David Kawapit, known as the Journey of Nishiyuu or the Journey of the People, a 1,600-kilometer journey of a group of young Cree walkers from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to support the Idle no More movement marks a contemporary activist expression of embodied mapping through journeying. The traveling art installation project Walking With Our Sisters, honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, demonstrates how Indigenous artists bridge the walking and traveling experience to enact a counter-mapping practice for resurgence and healing of the community. Finally, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, a solo performance choreographed by Michelle Olson and Floyd Favel, presents how Indigenous performers draw from travel stories and nomadic experiences of their ancestors to establish contemporary artistic expressions of embodied mapping as forms of resistance to colonial narratives. Drawing from decolonial cartographic approaches and Indigenous perspectives on land and mapmaking, these Indigenous activist and artistic performances of journeying are theorized as counter-mapping practices offering decolonial mapping of Turtle Island and embodied healing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".