Inland journeys, native maps

Cartographica

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 1-16

  Belyea, Barbara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CARTOGRAPHY; DOCUMENTARY SOURCE; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; HISTORICAL CARTOGRAPHY; HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY; INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE; MAP; MAP PRODUCTION;

NORTH AMERICA;

EID: 0030321992     PISSN: 03177173     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/X286-G041-2RP1-8057     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova, eds., The Enlightenment and Its Shadows (London: Routledge, 1990): 7.
2. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
3. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
4. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
5. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
6. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
7. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
8. National Archives of Canada: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1743 (NMC 13814); Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1755 (NMC 21057), and Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries of the Interior Parts of North America, Inscribed by Permission To the Honorable Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, In Testimony of their liberal Communications, 1795 (NMC 97818), third of the issues dated 1796 (NMC 17396), and second of the issues dated 1802 (NMC 19687). For Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries..., first of the issues dated 1802, see Warren Heckrotte, "Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," The Map Collector 39 (1987): 16-20. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Andrew Graham, "A Plan of part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers, communicating with York Fort & Severn," 1774 (HBCA G2/17), reproduced in A Country So Interesting: the Hudson's Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670-1870, ed. Richard Ruggles (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), plate 6. An earlier sketch by Andrew Graham, "A Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay & Rivers communicating with the Principal Settlements," 1772 (HBCA G2/15), reproduced in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1969): endpaper, extends only as far west as Squaw Rapids on the Saskatchewan River.
9. See notes 4 and 11 below.
10. Malcolm Lewis, "Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography," Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Frederick C. Luebke, Frances W. Kaye and Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press with the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1987): 78.
11. Cf. the "correction" of Native knowledge described by Matthew H. Edney, "The Patronage of Science and the Creation of Imperial Space: the British Mapping of India, 1799-1843," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 63: "Eighteenth-century Europe was rooted in an esprit géométrique, the desire to order both nature and human society through laws and formulations which possessed the simplicity and universality of geometric theorems. ... The advocation of science, that is, rational thought, was tantamount to the advocation of the European state and its stable social hierarchies. ... The British ... had no qualms about using geographical information from native sources, but they discarded it as soon as even the sparsest survey had been completed."
12. See note 2 above and cf. Glyndwr Williams' evaluation of Graham's very similar "Plan of Part of Hudson's-Bay" dated 1772, in Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay, verso of endpaper: "As a work of cartography the map has little to commend it, and reveals how limited was the Company's knowledge of the interior a century after the establishment of the first Bay-side posts. The most striking and erroneous feature of the map is the distorted outline of Lake Winnipeg ... tilted on its axis, and stretching more than twice its actual length. Other errors include the longitudes generally ... The map bears all the marks of compilation from Indian descriptions and the vague reports of Company servants sent inland from York and Severn for some years previous."
13. Heckrotte, 20, observes: "There is no record, as far as I know, when Fidler prepared a map or sent maps or papers which would have served as the basis for the first 1802 issue (or for the previous issue [third of the states with the date 1796] for that matter." The Hudson's Bay Company record of correspondence, remarkably complete, has no such record. But it is faintly possible that Fidler corresponded directly with Arrowsmith after publication of the 1795 issue on which the journey of 1792-93 was recorded. Arrowsmith's records were destroyed in the bombing of London during the second world war - see Coolie Verner, "The Arrowsmith Firm and the Cartography of Canada," The Canadian Cartographer 8:1 (1971): 1 and passim 1-7.
14. As a commercial and explorational practice, wintering inland did not originate with Henday's journey in 1754-55. Henry Kelsey and William Stewart, HBC employees half a century before, had preceded him, already imitating a seventeenth-century French practice - cf. Conrad Heidenreich, "Mapping the Great Lakes: The Period of Exploration, 1603-1700," Cartographica 17:3 (1980): 57: "With Champlain came the coureurs de bois. In a sense they were his idea. These were young men whom Champlain planted among various native groups to learn their language, persuade the natives to trap for furs and convey them to the St. Lawrence, learn native customs and learn something of the geography of the interior which the native groups were so reluctant to show the French."
15. t Home by him anno 1760" (HBCA G2/8), and a second map copied by Moses Norton, endorsed "Captain Mea.to.na.bee & I.dot.ly.a.zees, Draught. CR [Churchill]", 1767-68 (HBCA G2/27). The first map is reproduced in Ruggles, plate 8. Matonabbee, one of the cartographers of the later map, led Samuel Hearne along the Coppermine River.
16. June Helm, "Matonabbee's Map," Arctic Anthropology 28 (1991): 54-87. In this article, Helm discusses both of the maps cited in note 9 above.
17. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
18. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
19. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
20. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
21. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
22. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
23. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
24. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
25. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
26. Even now, several respected historians of cartography are content to consider non-European maps in terms virtually unchanged since Leo Bagrow's History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; reprinted and enlarged, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985). Bagrow, 25-26, opines that "races given to stylisation of animal or human figures ... draw either no maps or very bad ones. ... A primitive savage's drawing is often like a child's ... Primitive peoples ... know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. ... They cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds." In his History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), P. D. A. Harvey remarks on the ephemeral nature of "primitive" maps but with no mention of the very different power, requirements and characteristics of memorial knowledge. Instead Harvey, 34, is convinced that "the more spectacular feats of cartography by primitive people seem to have followed contacts which could have introduced them to more advanced forms of mapping." G. Malcolm Lewis has made close studies of the convention of North American Native maps - see "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps of North America," Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 9-34; "Misinterpretation of American Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77:4 (1987): 542-63; "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest: The Realities and Reasons behind a Major Mistake in the 18th-Century Geography of North America," Cartographica 28:1 (1991): 54-87; "Metrics, Geometries, Signs and Language: Sources of Cartographic Miscommunication between Native and Euro-American Cultures in North America," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 98-106; as well as the article in Luebke, Kay and Moulton, cited note 4 above. Lewis nevertheless continues to describe Native maps in terms of their failure to satisfy the standards of a topographical survey: Native North Americans lacked the "levels or types of abstractions" necessary for writing and geometry, and Native "cultures reveal little to suggest that they had a concept of grid. " Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), follows the order of Bagrow's and Harvey's histories, briefly discussing "primitive" maps, then retreating to consider "classical" European cartography. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York. Guilford Press, 1992) reiterates Bagrow's and Harvey's progressive-evolutionary view of cartographic history, from "nascent forms of protocartography" to "relatively simple mapmaking" and finally to "cartography per se" as developed by "nineteenth-century British and contemporary Americans." Wood's earlier table of children's hill drawings, showing a progression from elevation to plan, relies on the comparison between childhood and "primitive" cultures apparent in Bagrow; Harvey praises this "analysis" in The History of Topographical Maps, 26, and Wood in turn praises Harvey for his adoption of this scheme in " P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," Cartographica 31:3 (1994): 54. This congratulatory filiation simply continues the focus and bias that characterized the history of cartography earlier in the century. In fact, the assumptions of these historians reach back to Enlightenment dichotomies of primitive and civilized, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, which are then developed according to nineteenth-century notions of progressive evolution. The imperial energy that used a European grid of spatial coordinates to survey the world has not yet dissipated intellectually.
27. Jacob, L'Empire des cartes, 53-54.
28. Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l'état (Paris: Minuit, 1974): 15-16: "On aura depuis longtemps reconnu l'adversaire toujours vivace, l'obstacle sans cesse présent àla recherche anthropologique, l'ethnocentrisme qui médiatise tout regard sur les différences pour les identifier et finalement les abolir.... L'évolutionnisme, vieux compère de l'éthnocentrisme, n'est pas loin. La démarche à ce niveau est double: d'abord recenser les sociétés selon la plus ou moins grande proximité que leur type de pouvoir entretient avec le nôtre; affirmer ensuite ... une continuité entre toutes ces diverses formes du pouvoir" (original emphasis). See note 37 below.
29. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, 6 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987- ): 11:3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies (forthcoming).
30. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, 6 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987- ): 11:3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies (forthcoming).
31. Cf. Barbara Belyea, "Amerindian Maps: The Explorer as Translator," Journal of Historical Geography 18:3 (1992): 267-77. This article is limited to explorers' treatment of Amerindian maps - see my discussion below of Fidler's "translation" of the Blackfoot maps. But historians of cartography should be wary of falling into the same habit of simplistic translation that served explorers' practical needs.
32. Amerindian ways of seeing, which may or may not be closely related to Native experience during the contact period, are discussed by Barre Toelken and N. Scott Momaday in Seeing with a Native Eye, ed. Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper and Row, 1976): 9-24, 79-85. William Sturtevant, "Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, ed. Elizabeth Tooker (Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society, 1983): 5, explains "the ethnohistorical technique of upstreaming from later and therefore better ethnographic and historical evidence ... Upstreaming presupposes that one can disentangle cultural persistences from the changes introduced in the intervening period." All the intercultural differences of the present are squared when they are applied to conditions of the past. When a culture has been profoundly disrupted, meaningful "upstreaming" may well be impossible.
33. Amerindian ways of seeing, which may or may not be closely related to Native experience during the contact period, are discussed by Barre Toelken and N. Scott Momaday in Seeing with a Native Eye, ed. Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper and Row, 1976): 9-24, 79-85. William Sturtevant, "Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, ed. Elizabeth Tooker (Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society, 1983): 5, explains "the ethnohistorical technique of upstreaming from later and therefore better ethnographic and historical evidence ... Upstreaming presupposes that one can disentangle cultural persistences from the changes introduced in the intervening period." All the intercultural differences of the present are squared when they are applied to conditions of the past. When a culture has been profoundly disrupted, meaningful "upstreaming" may well be impossible.
34. Robert A. Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy," Geographical Review 80:2 (1990): 165. See note 30 below for comment on the possibility of making such a parallel. For problems of recording spoken arts in documentary form, i.e., translating from one medium to another, from one cultural tradition to another, see Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), and more recently, "From Voice and Ear to Hand and Eye," Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 133-56. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), describes the monastic/scholastic tradition of medieval Europe, a memorial culture in which orality and literacy were profoundly integrated. Given that mapping is in part a graphic process, Carruthers' book is a fine corrective to studies that simplistically oppose oral and written cultures. Carruthers also describes how memorial culture constantly renews itself: the memories of individuals are repositories of inherited textual knowledge that is enriched and modified by their personal experience.
35. Robert A. Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy," Geographical Review 80:2 (1990): 165. See note 30 below for comment on the possibility of making such a parallel. For problems of recording spoken arts in documentary form, i.e., translating from one medium to another, from one cultural tradition to another, see Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), and more recently, "From Voice and Ear to Hand and Eye," Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 133-56. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), describes the monastic/scholastic tradition of medieval Europe, a memorial culture in which orality and literacy were profoundly integrated. Given that mapping is in part a graphic process, Carruthers' book is a fine corrective to studies that simplistically oppose oral and written cultures. Carruthers also describes how memorial culture constantly renews itself: the memories of individuals are repositories of inherited textual knowledge that is enriched and modified by their personal experience.
36. Robert A. Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map
37. Robert A. Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy," Geographical Review 80:2 (1990): 165. See note 30 below for comment on the possibility of making such a parallel. For problems of recording spoken arts in documentary form, i.e., translating from one medium to another, from one cultural tradition to another, see Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), and more recently, "From Voice and Ear to Hand and Eye," Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 133-56. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), describes the monastic/scholastic tradition of medieval Europe, a memorial culture in which orality and literacy were profoundly integrated. Given that mapping is in part a graphic process, Carruthers' book is a fine corrective to studies that simplistically oppose oral and written cultures. Carruthers also describes how memorial culture constantly renews itself: the memories of individuals are repositories of inherited textual knowledge that is enriched and modified by their personal experience.
38. Lewis makes this point in "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 15. But in the same article, 17, he deplores "the absence on [Amerindian maps] of equivalents to graticules, grids or neat lines, their failure to conserve distance, or direction, or shape, and the absence - or at best, paucity - of unambiguous toponymic and environmental content ..." Cf. Matthew H. Edney, "Cartography without 'Progress': Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking," Cartographica 30: 2 & 3 (1993): 54-68.
39. Lewis makes this point in "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 15. But in the same article, 17, he deplores "the absence on [Amerindian maps] of equivalents to graticules, grids or neat lines, their failure to conserve distance, or direction, or shape, and the absence - or at best, paucity - of unambiguous toponymic and environmental content ..." Cf. Matthew H. Edney, "Cartography without 'Progress': Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking," Cartographica 30: 2 & 3 (1993): 54-68.
40. Cf. Lewis, "Indian Maps ..." 64-65: a famous exception is the Pawnee star chart, dated as "pre-1906 and supposedly much older." The stars are marked as crosses on a symmetrical oval ground, bordered by a heavy line.
41. James Isham, Observations on Hudson's Bay, ed. E. E. Rich (Toronto: Champlain Society for the Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1949): 65, 102.
42. Lewis, "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 22-31, "Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information ...," passim, "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest...," passim; D. W. Moodie and Barry Kaye, "The Ac Ko Mok Ki Map," The Beaver 307:4 (Spring 1977): 4-15, and Judith Hudson Beattie, "Indian Maps in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives: A Comparison of Five Area Maps Recorded by Peter Fidler, 1801-1802," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 166-75. See note 24 below.
43. Lewis, "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 22-31, "Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information ...," passim, "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest...," passim; D. W. Moodie and Barry Kaye, "The Ac Ko Mok Ki Map," The Beaver 307:4 (Spring 1977): 4-15, and Judith Hudson Beattie, "Indian Maps in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives: A Comparison of Five Area Maps Recorded by Peter Fidler, 1801-1802," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 166-75. See note 24 below.
44. Lewis, "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 22-31, "Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information ...," passim, "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest...," passim; D. W. Moodie and Barry Kaye, "The Ac Ko Mok Ki Map," The Beaver 307:4 (Spring 1977): 4-15, and Judith Hudson Beattie, "Indian Maps in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives: A Comparison of Five Area Maps Recorded by Peter Fidler, 1801-1802," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 166-75. See note 24 below.
45. Lewis, "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 22-31, "Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information ...," passim, "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest...," passim; D. W. Moodie and Barry Kaye, "The Ac Ko Mok Ki Map," The Beaver 307:4 (Spring 1977): 4-15, and Judith Hudson Beattie, "Indian Maps in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives: A Comparison of Five Area Maps Recorded by Peter Fidler, 1801-1802," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 166-75. See note 24 below.
46. Lewis, "Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations ...," 22-31, "Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information ...," passim, "La Grande Rivière et Fleuve de l'Ouest...," passim; D. W. Moodie and Barry Kaye, "The Ac Ko Mok Ki Map," The Beaver 307:4 (Spring 1977): 4-15, and Judith Hudson Beattie, "Indian Maps in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives: A Comparison of Five Area Maps Recorded by Peter Fidler, 1801-1802," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 166-75. See note 24 below.
47. Jacob, L'Empire des cartes, 147.
48. In 1869, for example, Kohklux, a Tlingit chief, drew two maps of the route he had taken to the Yukon seventeen years before. George Davidson, "Explanation of an Indian Map," Mazama (April 1901): 75-82, reprinted in [no author or editor], The Kohklux Map (Whitehorse: Yukon Historical and Museums Association, 1995): 14-24, prefaces his description of the larger of the two maps, drawn on the back of a topographical sheet, by stating briefly, and a bit cryptically: "At his own suggestion Kohklux proposed to draw upon paper his route ... The second attempt was upon a large sheet, 43 × 27 inches." A note on the back of the first map explains why it was left unfinished: "Kohklux started from his place at Klukwan and drew all around the paper for want of room. He asked for a big sheet of paper and I gave him the back of an old map on which he and his wife drew their routes etc. in 1852." Both maps are in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (G4370 1852 K61 A and G4370 1852 K6 D).
49. In 1869, for example, Kohklux, a Tlingit chief, drew two maps of the route he had taken to the Yukon seventeen years before. George Davidson, "Explanation of an Indian Map," Mazama (April 1901): 75-82, reprinted in [no author or editor], The Kohklux Map (Whitehorse: Yukon Historical and Museums Association, 1995): 14-24, prefaces his description of the larger of the two maps, drawn on the back of a topographical sheet, by stating briefly, and a bit cryptically: "At his own suggestion Kohklux proposed to draw upon paper his route ... The second attempt was upon a large sheet, 43 × 27 inches." A note on the back of the first map explains why it was left unfinished: "Kohklux started from his place at Klukwan and drew all around the paper for want of room. He asked for a big sheet of paper and I gave him the back of an old map on which he and his wife drew their routes etc. in 1852." Both maps are in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (G4370 1852 K61 A and G4370 1852 K6 D).
50. Philippe Buache, Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes ... (Paris: Académie Royale des Sciences, 1754): appendix map 5. See Lucie Lagarde, "Philippe Buache, ou le premier géographe français, 1700-1773," Mappemonde 87:2 (1987): 26-30, and Lucie Lagarde, "Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer de l'Ouest dans la cartographie française du XVIIIe siècle: contribution àl'étude de l'oeuvre des Deslisle et Buache," Imago Mundi 41 (1989): 19-43.
51. Philippe Buache, Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes ... (Paris: Académie Royale des Sciences, 1754): appendix map 5. See Lucie Lagarde, "Philippe Buache, ou le premier géographe français, 1700-1773," Mappemonde 87:2 (1987): 26-30, and Lucie Lagarde, "Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer de l'Ouest dans la cartographie française du XVIIIe siècle: contribution àl'étude de l'oeuvre des Deslisle et Buache," Imago Mundi 41 (1989): 19-43.
52. Philippe Buache, Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes ... (Paris: Académie Royale des Sciences, 1754): appendix map 5. See Lucie Lagarde, "Philippe Buache, ou le premier géographe français, 1700-1773," Mappemonde 87:2 (1987): 26-30, and Lucie Lagarde, "Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer de l'Ouest dans la cartographie française du XVIIIe siècle: contribution àl'étude de l'oeuvre des Deslisle et Buache," Imago Mundi 41 (1989): 19-43.
53. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Ackomokki, "An Indian map of the Different Tribes that inhabit on the East & west side of the Rocky Mountains with all the rivers & other remarkable places, also the Number of tents," 1801 (HBCA G1/25); Ackomokki, untitled map, 1802 (HBCA B39/a/2, E3/2); Akkoweak, untitled map, 1802 (HBCA B39/a/2, E3/2); Kioocus, untitled map, 1802 (HBCAB39/a/2, E3/2); ["Fall Indian"], untitled map, 1802 (HBCAE3/2).
54. The third of the three states dated 1796 must have been prepared between 1799 and 1802.
55. Cf. Jacob, "Il faut qu'une carte soit ouverte ou fermée: le tracé conjectural", Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale 45 (1992): 39: "Il est certains cas où le tracé se désigne lui-même comme conjectural ... Le tracé est beaucoup plus simple que celui des régions déjà explorées." On the contrary, Arrowsmith's conjectural Missouri appears as complex as surveyed rivers.
56. Theodore Binnema, "Indian Maps as Ethnohistorical Sources," paper presented at the Northern Great Plains History conference, Brandon (Manitoba), 27-30 September 1995 and to the History Department, University of Calgary, 28 March 1996.
57. th, 1754" (HBCA A11/ 114); Hearne, Narrative of a Journey ... to the Northern Ocean, xxxiii-xliv, 64-65. Similar instructions were given to Meriwether Lewis: see Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962): 61-62.
58. th, 1754" (HBCA A11/ 114); Hearne, Narrative of a Journey ... to the Northern Ocean, xxxiii-xliv, 64-65. Similar instructions were given to Meriwether Lewis: see Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962): 61-62.
59. th, 1754" (HBCA A11/ 114); Hearne, Narrative of a Journey ... to the Northern Ocean, xxxiii-xliv, 64-65. Similar instructions were given to Meriwether Lewis: see Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962): 61-62.
60. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux: Guy Ducros, 1968): 29. Cf. the paraphrase of Rousseau's argument in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967): 331: "La langue du geste et la langue de la voix ... sont 'également naturelles.' Toutefois l'une est plus naturelle que l'autre, et à ce titre elle est première et meilleure. C'est la langue du geste, qui est 'plus facile et dépend moins des conventions.' Il peut certes y avoir des conventions de la langue des gestes. Rousseau fait allusion plus loin à un code gestuel. Mais ce code s'éloigne moins de la nature que la langue parlée." Gesture was privileged because of its immediacy - the author of the gesture must be bodily present, whereas words can be repeated, written down, divorced from their original speaker, and thus denatured. Derrida buys none of this, of course.
61. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux: Guy Ducros, 1968): 29. Cf. the paraphrase of Rousseau's argument in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967): 331: "La langue du geste et la langue de la voix ... sont 'également naturelles.' Toutefois l'une est plus naturelle que l'autre, et à ce titre elle est première et meilleure. C'est la langue du geste, qui est 'plus facile et dépend moins des conventions.' Il peut certes y avoir des conventions de la langue des gestes. Rousseau fait allusion plus loin à un code gestuel. Mais ce code s'éloigne moins de la nature que la langue parlée." Gesture was privileged because of its immediacy - the author of the gesture must be bodily present, whereas words can be repeated, written down, divorced from their original speaker, and thus denatured. Derrida buys none of this, of course.
62. Garrick Mallery, quoted by David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 21.
63. Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy," 163-68. Rundstrom also mentions the artifactual extension of this bodily mimicry to string games, carving of small objects (pinguak or imitation-things), man-shaped stone markers (inuksuit) and the drive lanes constructed for a traditional caribou hunt. The figures for the drive lanes, called "dead men" in Fidler's 1792-93 journal, were also part of traditional hunts for buffalo among Plains cultures. Rundstrom (personal communication) has warned against generalizing between Amerindian and Inuit cultures; he can only be right in urging cautious discernment. It is tempting nevertheless to draw certain parallels among the memorial cultures of North America. The parallels I suggest here are made very tentatively, as comparisons meriting further study.
64. Jack Nisbet, "Sky People," in Purple Flat Top (Seattle: Sasquatch, 1996): 110.
65. Robert A. Rundstrom, "GIS, Indigenous Peoples, and Epistemological Diversity," Cartography and Geographical Information Systems 22:1 (1995): 51-52. Both Rundstrom and I are walking the dangerous line of speaking of/speaking for cultures that are not our own. But even if they are not fully understood, at least the differences are indicated.
66. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975): 9-21; Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967): 173-202.
67. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975): 9-21; Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967): 173-202.
68. Denis Wood, "The Fine Line between Mapping and Mapmaking," Cartographica 30:4 (1993): 55-56 and passim. 37.
69. Barthes, L'Empire des signes (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1970): 42 . Cf. Denis Wood, "The Fine Line between Mapping and Mapmaking," Cartographica30:4 (1993): 50-51.
70. Barthes, L'Empire des signes (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1970): 42 . Cf. Denis Wood, "The Fine Line between Mapping and Mapmaking," Cartographica30:4 (1993): 50-51.
71. Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988): 6-10.
72. Barry Came, "Fighting for their Land," Maclean's Magazine (27 February 1995): 16.
73. Cf. Wood, "P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking," 53-54: "What is it that makes a map a map? It is nothing other than the way [certain] relationships are embodied in relatively durable graphic expressions ..." (original emphasis). Both Harvey and Jacob remark that dialogue is a defining characteristic of "ephemeral" maps. Harvey, 31, 33: "We can learn practically nothing of maps of this sort that may have existed in distant ages. [He cites four examples of "ephemeral" maps.] ... not one of the four could possibly have been recognized [by Europeans] as a map without some explanation from the people who made it or used it." Jacob, 57-60: "le tracé rudimentaire ... est indissociable du commentaire de qui le réalise ... [il] n'a d'autre raison d'être que cet usage immédiat et éphémère." At the same time, Jacob, 348, is convinced "que le support, les formes et les tracés, la lettre même de la carte permett[ent] de retrouver, comme en creux, la trace, l'empreinte de ces gestes, de ces regards et de ces opérations intellectuelles." Cf. note 17 above.
74. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba: Fidler to the HBC London Committee, 10 July 1802 (HBCA A11/52).
75. Any constructive intercultural dialogue would have to turn these negatives into positive though foreign attributes - an important and still badly needed turnaround urged by Robert A. Rundstrom, "The Role of Ethics, Mapping, and the Meaning of Place in Relations between Indians and Whites in the United States," Cartographica 30:1 (1993): 26: "a cross-cultural map comparison can be ethical and insightful only if the comparison is non-evaluative [i.e., recognizes the relativity of values, does not judge maps of one convention in terms of another] and facilitates the bridging of discourses, not the replacement of one discourse by another."
76. Cf. Ronda, 89: "The story of Lewis and Clark Indian cartography has a curious and revealing epilogue.... the explorers drew a map ... as Lewis put it, 'in their way.' The mapping ways of Hidatsas and Nez Perces had become at least partially an expedition way. Maps once formidable in structure and design could now be made and understood by the explorers themselves. Effort and understanding had made map encounters into common ground." Ronda is too sanguine.
77. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba: Peter Fidler, journal entry for 1 January 1793 (HBCA E3/2).
78. Cf. Sturtevant, "Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries," 5: "... the ethnohistorical technique of 'upstreaming' from later and therefore better ethnographical and historical evidence ... presupposes that one can disentangle cultural persistences from the changes introduced in the intervening period.... But one can hardly subtract the later changes in the very cultural features in which one is interested, in order to discover a pre-existing sociopoliticial system of the same type whose existence is precisely the question. One must, instead, examine the primary written sources ... without reading into them features we know to have been present among the tribes of the region in [later] centuries" (my emphasis).
79. Gilbert Vaudet, "Du silence au dialogue: la fin des tribus," in L'Esprit des lois sauvages: Pierre Clastres ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique, ed. Miguel Abensour (Paris: Seuil, 1987): 145.