Art and Argument: Indigitization of a Kiowa Historical Map for Teaching and Research

How might we teach undergraduate students about Indigenous geographies using historical maps? This paper describes processes associated with the bridging of a historical Kiowa map with computerized geographic information systems (GIS) and undergraduate geography curriculum. The authors applied an indigital framework as an approach for melding Indigenous and Western knowledge systems into a third kind of construct for teaching undergraduate students about historical/contemporary spatial issues. Indigital is the blending of Indigenous knowledge systems, such as storytelling, language, calendar keeping, dance, and songs, with computerized systems. We present an origin story about the indigitization of a historical Kiowa pictorial map, known as the Chál-ko-gái map, at the University of Missouri, USA. Undergraduate student engagement with the map resulted in new questions about Indigenous geographies, particularly map projections, place names, and the meaning of Kiowa symbols.

Human Geography and Islands

Work on islands has long played a critical role in the development of many academic disciplines that overlap and are intimately connected with the discipline of geography. Islands were central to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and have subsequently been for the development of ecological, sustainability, and resilience approaches that are prevalent in geography in the 2020s. Islanders were the focal points for Margaret Mead’s and Marylin Strathern’s developments of the discipline of anthropology, concerns for Indigenous geographies, and the counterpositioning of nonmodern reasoning to European or Western frameworks of reasoning. Islands and islanders have also long been a key focus for many who have critiqued the forces of colonialism, such as Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, and Derek Walcott, whose work is extremely influential for Critical Black Geographies. More recently, engaging islands and islanders shaped Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s influential reappraisal of how academic research itself can and should do better, reorienting toward more geographically appropriate Indigenous perspectives. What this is already telling us is that any bibliography compiled under the title of “Geography and Islands” needs to work beyond the boundaries of neatly defined academic disciplines. The focus is the geographical form, the island, and associated island cultures, and thus geographers who study islands regularly step outside fixed disciplines. Thus, this article presents a range of references that are categorized by way of key early-21st-century island themes and topics that will be of particular concern to geographers. Here, the decades since the late 20th century have seen the rise of a more distinct or focused field of academic inquiry, which has come to be known as “island studies.” The key characteristics of this field are its diversity, interdisciplinarity, openness, and extremely rapid growth—geographically, intellectually, and in the broad range of topics and subjects being engaged with in the 2020s. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the term “island studies” did not have much purchase. In the 2020s, due to the strong repositioning of islands within broader concerns—such as human-nature relations, current developments in environmental and resilience approaches, the ongoing legacies and effects of colonialism, Indigenous geographies, migration patterns, mobilities and movements of humans and nonhumans, geopolitical tensions and strategies, and the Anthropocene, as just some examples—the figure of the island has moved considerably more to the center of many debates (and particularly those debates that concern geographers). This article therefore also reflects the sense of dynamism, as well as the interdisciplinary nature, of work with islands as an exponentially developing field of research.

"Anishinaabe time": temporalities and impact assessment in pipeline reviews

Indigenous ways of living that embrace multiple temporalities have been largely supplanted by a single, linear colonial temporality. Drawing on theoretical insights from Indigenous geographies and political ecology, this article considers how pipeline reviews come into being through contested temporalities and how dominant modes of time dispossess Indigenous peoples of self-determination in energy decision-making. In particular, Anishinaabe clan governance – a form of kinship that provides both social identity and function based on relations to animal nations – is undermined in colonial decision-making processes. Through analysis of documents from Canada's National Energy Board and interviews with Anishinaabe pipeline opponents, I explore tensions between Anishinaabe and settler temporalities reflected in the 2012-2017 Line 9 pipeline dispute in the Great Lakes region. These include divergent understandings of periodicities, timeframes, kinship relations, and the role of nonhuman temporalities in decision-making. Colonial temporal modes that have been imposed on Indigenous communities foreshorten timescales, depoliticize kinship relations, and discount nonhumans in decision-making – resulting in narrower and more short-sighted project reviews than Anishinaabe temporalities would support. I argue that the rich concepts of kinship, queerness, continuity, and prophecy embedded in Anishinaabe temporalities can inform strategies for decolonizing energy review processes and open possibilities for Indigenous self-determination in energy decision-making.Keywords: Anishinaabe studies, Two-Spirit, Indigenous geographies, temporalities, Indigenous knowledge, energy governance, pipeline, National Energy Board

GENTES|TERRAS: O OUVIR MÚTUO DAS GEOGRAFIAS INDÍGENAS / People|lands: the mutual listening of Indigenous Geographies / Gente|tierras: la escucha mutua de las geografías indígenas

“Ouvir uma pedra!”: assim resumimos metaforicamente a proposta deste texto. “Ouvindo-a”, ecoamos: (1) palavras índias, sobretudo de Ailton Krenak e Davi Kopenawa; (2) crítica à separação de espaço e lugar, em encontro entre Antropologia (Tim Ingold) e Geografia (Doreen Massey); (3) um jeito índio de relação gentes e terras nos tristes trópicos, de Claude Lévi-Strauss; e (4) a indissociabilidade gentes e terras (e águas) traduzida na palavra “sentipensar”, ensinada por pescadores camponeses-indígenas colombianos. E que aqui “ouvir uma pedra” seja um acontecimento, um ato, um território, sensibilizando a todas e todos para as experiências pulsantes que as geografias indígenas ensejam. Como citar este artigo:GOETTERT, Jones Dari; MOTA, Juliana Grasiéli Bueno. Gentes|terras: o ouvir mútuo das Geografias Indígenas. Revista NERA, v. 23, n. 54, p. 9-34, mai.-ago., 2020.

Medicine lines and COVID-19: Indigenous geographies of imagined bordering

In response to COVID-19, this commentary explores the disproportionate impacts that the pandemic is having on Indigenous nations of Turtle Island (North America) and the rendering of Indigenous borders as sites of compassionate community care. I argue that settler colonialism during COVID-19 is enacted through travel and second-home escapism of urban elites.

GEOGRAFIAS INDÍGENAS NO/DO MATO GROSSO DO SUL/Indigenous geographies in Mato Grosso do Sul

De 1492-1500 aos dias atuais, as histórias e trajetórias dos Povos Indígenas passaram por profundas transformações socioespaciais em decorrência do contato com o não-índio. Hoje, mais do que nunca, é necessário um olhar atento às existências indígenas, que até a virada do século XV para o XVI eram construídas sem qualquer relação com o mundo ocidental. Cada povo, a seu modo de ser, viver e pensar o mundo, estabelecia um conjunto de interrelações com outras gentes ameríndias, diferenciando-se pelo/no contato.