Mapping Diversity Across Indigenous Perspectives
Reimagining homogenized western conceptions of Indigeneity by charting differences across Indigenous cultures
Intial Acknowledgements
Disclaimer
As someone who is not of Indigenous descent, I fully understand that this is not my story to tell. Even as the aim of this project is to serve as a narrator through remapping, all narrators, even those that attempt to be unbiased, become actors as well. While I am merely redistributing existing information, the ideas and images that I choose to include will always inevitably silence the other experiences that I have not included. I have done my best to provide additional resources to mitigate the silencing that occurs, but even so, this mapping project is not at all going to be fully comprehensive or fully decolonized. It is important for the viewer to understand that my own experiences will inform each and every decision that I make throughout this project, so I am careful to include such information throughout the writing.
Why Did I Choose this Project?
Because I am not Indigenous myself, my decision to remap Indigenous perspectives is not based in any personal connections. However, I still felt that this is an important topic to grow awareness around because I have noticed that stereotypes that all Indigenous people possess the same identities still linger today. I specifically noticed this when writing an essay on the protests at the Sioux reservation. The professor provided sources for us in order to specifically explain the Sioux perspectives on nature that informed these protests, yet the sources simply discussed the perspectives of "all" Indigenous people at large. I felt that this erased the differences across individual tribes, and so I became curious about how these people can be presented differently such that these differences become more evident.
Why Have I Chosen Three Tribes?
Ideally, I would create a project that analyzes all differences across all Indigenous tribes, but there are simply not enough resources for me to do so. Thus, my goal is simply to show that even across some of the most populated groups, there are conspicuous cultural differences to be found. I am aiming to begin to dispel the homogenized stereotypes, but as mentioned previously, I provide additional resources so that it does not end with my project.
Explore the Historical Presence of Indigenous People
Notice how Indigenous territory used to span across the whole United States and far beyond, how there are thousands of different indigenous cultures (many of which are not even mapped here), and how the borders are arbitrary, overlapping, and difficult to trace. What else do you notice?
Explore Cultural Differences Between Three Tribes
My trace in these collages is seen in that I am only able to populate them with images of indigenous people that are already well known or have at least been shared online. If I had the opportunity to visit each reservation, I would include images of individuals that are just as important to the story of the tribe, but less well known, and images of the landscape that are more accurate representations of how they see their land. As of now, the collages I have created represent an image of what is already depicted in the media, but I hope that my selected arrangement of the individual images can help to make them collectively more effective.
You can press on each image to find the links in which I found the images that comprise the collage, and you can press on the button below the image to learn more about each tribe.
Note: If I had more time, one of the ideas I would have liked to have done is to map various plants and animals important to each tribe overtop their territories (past and present). I also didn't find out about an interesting field called "ethnobiology" and/or "ethnobotany" until the end, which I would have explored more if I saw it in the beginning.