Listening to other worlds, mapping and writing with other words

Irène Hirt (1)

1 Passages

For a non-indigenous researcher, community mapping in indigenous contexts is probably less about mastering mapping technologies and methodologies than about to do one's best to fully acknowledge and listen to other worlds and territorial ontologies; which consists of trying to assume a position of humility and cultural de-centration. It is also about the capacity to depict and re-present these worlds/ontologies without misinterpretations, at the very least reducing them. But how can we map the "indigenous depth of place" (Pearce, Louis, 2008), that is, indigenous geographical knowledge, or the symbolic and spiritual relationship to the land? And how can we make "the invisible visible" (Sandercock, 1998), that is, to give a voice to landscapes and territories that have been erased by colonial histories and mainstream geographies, but which are still present in the collective memory of indigenous communities? I will tackle these issues by drawing methodological and epistemological lessons from my collaboration to a Mapuche mapping project in Southern Chile, in which dreams and dreaming practices were mobilized by the participants to express their own sense of place, landscape and territory (Hirt, 2012); and by reflecting on how to learn from this experience and extend it to a coming project with the Ilnu community of Mashteuiatsh (Québec), which will map memory landscapes transformed by hydroelectric or industrial development. I will connect these reflections with the recent work of cultural geographers and critical cartographers on innovative cartographic languages and grammars (graphic, textual or multimedia) to express cultural, symbolic and emotional geographies.

Mots clés: indigenous mapping; collaborative mapping; critical cartography; Chile; Canada; Mapuche; Innu

Domaines: Géographie; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Irène Hirt. Listening to other worlds, mapping and writing with other words. Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, AAG, Mar 2016, San Francisco, United States. ⟨halshs-01413433⟩