5 Maps and Landmarks
We all use maps, right? Our phones give us instant access to digitized visual information and directions that can take us precisely from one point to the next! We can determine the location of the nearest gas station, the nearest hospital, even road construction or traffic jams. We can print out maps with directions that can help us arrive at our desired location even when out of WIFI range. But if you were to hand-draw a map of a region or route that was important to you today, how would you draw it? What would you include? Words, symbols, a legend? What would be the most significant points to highlight? Why?
Introduction
Native peoples created and used maps on the North American continent for centuries. They drew ephemeral maps in the sand and used twigs or hand gestures to pinpoint locations. They used more tactile devices such as charcoal or paint, even etchings on shells, birch bark, wood, skinned trees or deerskins to develop informative, topological charts and maps. Circles indicated villages, lines indicated connections, but even hieroglyphs and symbols indicated important aspects of the region. In short, Native peoples were rich cartographers who communicated information on locations and relationships, all topological in nature, quite precise and accurate.
Europeans also created maps, most often to chart terrain so to enhance their understanding of the continent’s geography. Though they primarily used parchment or cotton-based paper with quill pen and ink to create maps, more artistic cartographers such as Benjamin Dumont de Montigny used watercolors to artistically enhance their work. But Europeans did not create maps in a vacuum. They relied upon Native peoples to help pinpoint locations, provide directions, even indicate friend or foe through gestures, signs, and previously created Indigenous maps. Some of these cartographies or topological guides were even collaboratively created–drawn or painted by Native peoples, with French, English or Spanish words added to clarify the visual information. No matter how, when or why one created a map, it communicated cultural and spiritual landmarks, allies and enemies, paths and trails, subsistence opportunities and waterways as needed.
Native Drawn Maps
Native artisans demonstrated exquisite ability to visually display the geographical space that surrounded them–to mark trees to indicate their path, or to delineate boundaries between their terrain and that of others, or even to highlight the European presence.[1] Indeed, the Englishman John Lawson once remarked of Native peoples: “They are expert Travellers, and though they have not the Use of our artificial Compass, yet they understand the North-point exactly, let them be in ever so great a Wilderness.”[2] Father Chretien Le Clercq, a 17th century Recollet priest who served among the Mi’kmaqs of Acadie, witnessed that “they have much ingenuity in drawing upon bark a kind of map which marks exactly all the rivers and streams