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MAPPING THEM ‘OUT’: EURO‐CANADIAN CARTOGRAPHY AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE NUXALK AND TS'ILHQOT‘IN FIRST NATIONS’ TERRITORIES, 1793–1916
Author(s) -
BREALEY KEN G.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
canadian geographer / le géographe canadien
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.35
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1541-0064
pISSN - 0008-3658
DOI - 10.1111/j.1541-0064.1995.tb00409.x
Subject(s) - appropriation , ideology , politics , context (archaeology) , cartography , colonialism , sociology , commission , geography , epistemology , political science , law , philosophy , archaeology
As social constructions of reality, maps embody the values, truth‐claims and power‐structures of the cultures that make them. Using a variety of interpretive methodologies, geographers and cartographers have developed the thesis that, through selective ‘re‐presentation’, maps ‘work’ at a discursive, symbolic level. In focusing on the artifact itself, however, they have tended to forget that maps are made by someone. Indeed, as part of a wider institutional network, organized and reified by people in pursuit of certain goals, maps serve to create and sustain territories. In a colonial context, moreover, maps arrest and de‐legitimize the territorialization of some cultural groups even as they enfranchise and legitimize that of others. Maps are, in this view, ideological weapons. In this paper I use a materialist hermeneutic to investigate the way in which maps helped to actualize the territorial dispossession of the original inhabitants of what is now British Columbia. Beginning with the charts of George Vancouver and Alexander MacKenzie, and ending with the Indian Reserve maps of the 1916 Royal Commission, I illustrate this thesis by tracing the cartographic encirclement of the Nuxalk and Ts'ilhqot'in First Nations. As an essential adjunct in the Euro‐Canadian colonization of the region, the analysis has implications for our understanding of the social, political, and juridical function of maps within contemporary land claims discourse.