Mapping What Colonization Could Not Erase

Dear Readers:

Some of the most meaningful work of my career has been alongside Indigenous communities fighting to preserve their lands, histories, and ways of life. Those experiences profoundly shaped how I understand geography, science, and our responsibility to the people whose stories have too often been erased.

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’m sharing the extraordinary work of artists and cartographers who are reclaiming those stories, one map at a time.

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On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the artists and geographers restoring the histories that colonization erased, and why the fight to map Indigenous homelands is inseparable from the global struggle for land, identity, and survival.

Years ago, deep in the disappearing wetlands of coastal Louisiana, I stood alongside Indigenous tribal leaders searching for places that, according to the maps, did not exist.

Burial grounds. Ancestral settlements. Sacred places. Landscapes that had carried generations of history, only to be omitted from the official geographic record.

I was working with the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe and the Isle de Jean Charles, documenting historical sites and studying how hurricanes, rising seas, and centuries of environmental change had reshaped their homelands.

My research in Louisiana eventually became my Ph.D. work, examining how Indigenous settlement patterns, burial practices, and oral histories could preserve evidence of catastrophic weather events long before modern meteorological records existed.

What began as an exercise in geographic science became something far more profound.

The absence of a place from a map does not mean it was never there. Sometimes it means the people who knew it were never asked. Sometimes the records were destroyed, the names changed, or the knowledge passed between generations in ways Western institutions never learned to recognize.

And sometimes, the people making the maps had every reason to pretend the land was empty.

The communities I worked with were fighting to preserve far more than their physical homes. They were trying to protect the places where their ancestors were buried, where their histories were written into the landscape, and where generations had learned to live with the water rather than against it.

But the water was rising. The marshes were disappearing. And many of those places had never been formally documented.

What happens when a people lose their land before the rest of the world has even acknowledged their history on it?

That question has stayed with me throughout my career.

And this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I want to introduce you to some extraordinary artists, cartographers, and geographers whose work confronts that question from a different direction.

They are restoring Indigenous names to rivers and mountains. Reconstructing the geographies of nations that existed long before the United States and Canada. Transforming maps into works of art that challenge centuries of dispossession.

Their work is beautiful. It is scientifically and historically important. And it is part of a much larger struggle over who gets to define a place, who belongs to it, and who has the right to decide its future.

Before the Borders, There Were Nations

For thousands of years before European colonization, North America was home to hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations, with their own languages, political systems, agricultural traditions, trade networks, spiritual geographies, and relationships to the land.

The continent was neither empty nor waiting to be discovered.

Yet colonial maps frequently portrayed Indigenous homelands as territories available for occupation, acquisition, and exploitation. Native place names were replaced. Communities were omitted or displaced. Political boundaries were imposed without the consent of the people who lived there.

Maps became instruments of administration, property ownership, military expansion, and colonial authority.

The consequences extend far beyond the historical record.

A map that fails to recognize an Indigenous nation’s relationship to its homeland can shape decisions about land ownership, resource extraction, conservation, infrastructure, and displacement.

And the people whose history has been erased from the map may then be forced to prove that history existed at all.

Marlena Myles: A Homeland Written in Dakota