Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice

ABSTRACT

Neither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe’s hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation’s long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Counter-mapping
• extractivism
• Indigenous sovereignty
• data activism
• data justice
• compositional enquiry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dorothy Kidd is Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, California. Her current research project examines contentious communications practices among front-line communities in the extractive zone [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 Counter-mapping is one of several genres of critical mapping, including critical cartography, autonomous cartography, critical GIS, and public participatory GIS (Dalton & Mason, 441–442).

2 Anna Willow used a similar term in her article (2016, p. 10).

3 See Dyer-Witheford for the origins of the compositionist inquiry and an elaboration of his eight key questions (2008).

4 See Dalton and Mason-Deese (2012) for a longer discussion of counter-mapping utilizing an autonomist framework.

5 Many first nations in Canada have adopted critical mapping as core technologies, as have indigenous groups in Indonesia and Australia (Eades, 2015), Colombia, Mexico and many other Latin American countries (Bryan & Wood, 2015).

6 Willow (2016) compared three cases of Indigenous counter-mapping in Canada and the US. The Sokaogon in the northern US framed their work within US historic preservation legislation; the Grassy Narrows first nation in northwestern Ontario argued for recognition within their historical treaty relationship, and the Poplar River first nation within the framework provincial legislation in Manitoba and international support for indigenous rights (Anna Willow, 2016, p. 881).

7 These mobilizations have included the Mi’kmaq Blockade on the Atlantic (Sub-Media, 2013), Elsipogtog in New Brunswick (Howe, 2015), and Line 9 in Ontario (Paterson, 2018).

8 Their website includes text, videos and maps that outline their governance structure, and the principles on which they are operating. See http://unistoten.camp/about/governance-structure/

9 For more discussion of their international organizing, see Manuel (2015), ‘A Fourth World: A Global Movement’ pps. 167–178.

10 On 29 May 2018, the Canadian government announced it would purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline from Texas-based energy giant Kinder Morgan for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.5 billion US) in order to transport tar sands oil to Vancouver and onto China. In August, the Federal Court of Appeal struck down the federal government’s approval of the project due to inadequate indigenous consultation and failure to assess the impact on the marine environment.

11 This is the title of the Conclusion in G. di Chiro, 2004, p. 244.