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GIS, Internal Colonialism, and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Abstract
This article contains the first comprehensive empirical account of the history of geographic information systems (GIS) development within the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an account founded in part on a previously unused source of archival data. It also demonstrates the importance of linking a standard technical and institutional history of GIS with a topic neglected in most such histories, the history of the resource application crucial to GIS deployment. The main finding is that across four decades of effort, the BIA's pursuit of GIS is better understood as an effort to perpetuate its internal colonial agenda and its own bureaucratic existence during an era of rapid technological upheaval rather than as a trustee's effort to better manage resources for the greater good of American Indians. The BIA's quest involves various time-honored colonial practices: creating new forms of dependence, imposing complex bureaucratic procedures, misusing funds, distributing free commodities, developing obligatory points of control, and outsourcing both management and labor to a private sector with long experience exploiting Indian resource economies. We conclude that rather than revolutionizing institutions and setting them on new trajectories toward self-improvement as some have suggested, GIS development is often merely a part of a broader and historically consistent pattern of policymaking and behavior.
... After partitioning Native lands into individual parcels attributed to male heads of households, the BIA appointed itself to determine for Native peoples their right to use these lands through organising them in a fee or trust status, starting a land apartheid system which continues to this day. The process of cataloguing, distributing, lease managing and record-keeping of Native lands by the BIA is a well-documented massive historical failure which has shaped land management and development on Native lands (Anderson and Lueck 1992;McKean, Taylor, and Liu 1995;Gregg and Cooper 2010;Palmer 2011;Palmer and Rundstrom 2013). ...
... But recent archival work bears witness to a colonial data system that enshrined the dispossession of Native land into law and buried it in secrecy. For instance, GIS planning by the BIA has served the colonial agenda by monitoring land transactions in "Indian Country" and opening them to settler industries, thus "acting as forward scouts for exploitative industry" while marginalising the people it purposed to serve (Madsen 1995, 223;Palmer and Rundstrom 2013). ...
... This pattern has continued to this day, even into the recent progressive digitisation of data by federal agencies. Indeed, while data digitisation holds the potential to support greater emancipation and support tribal sovereignty, the BIA still oversees the release of land tenure data, and other federal agencies usually do not release suitable data for analysis at the reservation level (Rodriguez-Lonebear 2016; Palmer and Rundstrom 2013;Guzman 1992). In the era of digitisation, where digital information is required for management, the structural issue of data colonialism on US Native lands has created a situation where Native land management is impaired comparatively to US land management, which fully benefits from the myriad of datasets available for planning. ...
... Its structure and process are a replica of the American system" (169). Officials in tribal governments, Palmer and Rundstrom (2013) summarized, "is a textbook example of class conflict wherein a leadership class complicit in the maintenance of dependency on colonial institutions is pitted against a large, broadly colonized lower class" (1144). This, among others reasons, is why Klee Benally (2023) concluded, "Indigenous political sovereignty was manufactured by colonial forces with the specific intent of containing, controlling, and civilizing. ...
... Indigenous and decolonial environmental justice remains hostile to integration into colonial institutions, instead asserting self-determined autonomous decision-making rooted in "distinct frameworks that are informed by Indigenous intellectual traditions, knowledge systems, and laws" (McGregor 2018, 283). There is, as Palmer andRundstrom (2013, 1144) reminded us earlier, a difference of political perspectives and collaboration with state institutions by various Indigenous nation or segments of people within them, typically an elite or "upper-class." ...
... Geospatial data and computing technologies are acknowledged to be better-suited to manipulating data about space, rather than curating knowledge of place (Goodchild, 2011;Merschdorf & Blaschke, 2018;Pavlovskaya, 2006;Sheppard, 1993). This gap between data about space and knowledge of place is especially stark in connection with Indigenous knowledge (Palmer & Rundstrom, 2013;Rundstrom, 1995;Veland, Lynch, Bischoff-Mattson, Joachim, & Johnson, 2014). ...
... All too often, these beneficiaries are other than Indigenous peoples (Nadasdy, 1999;Palmer & Rundstrom, 2013). The entrenched power imbalances that channel those benefits are a long-established subject of study (Bell, 1979). ...
Indigenous knowledge of place is not well‐served by today's digital geospatial technologies, such as spatial data, maps, spatial databases, and GIS. This paper aims to identify and explore new connections between Indigenous knowledge of place and digital geospatial technologies. Our analysis is structured around three key gaps in past work: (a) the overrepresentation of digital data about space, rather than knowledge of place; (b) a lack of facility to differentiate access to knowledge and enable Indigenous data sovereignty; (c) a lack of facility to support and sustain relationships between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous peoples. The paper further identifies and explores recent research topics in the field of geographic information science (GI science) with relevance to addressing these gaps. This includes identifying new serendipitous synergies with previously unconnected research areas, such as research into location privacy, uncertainty, qualitative spatial reasoning, or distributed spatial computing. The conclusions acknowledge that our retrospective approach is unlikely to lead to radical reformulation of geospatial technologies. Nevertheless, we argue that identifying technological opportunities could offer a pragmatic pathway to more rapidly bootstrap new approaches, beyond simply technological “fixes.”
... Regimes of managing indigeneity become inexorably bound up with the tools at hand. Whereas Indigenous peoples were controlled historically via routines of education, dress and market rules, geography highlights how new technologies are enmeshed in settler-Indigenous dynamics of spatialization and territorialisation as when the USA's Bureau of Indian Affairs uses GIS (Palmer and Rundstrom 2013), the military builds counter-insurgency procedures in part through mapping indigenous territories (Bryan and Woods 2015), and when genetic information plays an active role in shaping contests over claim, presence and difference in Asia and north America (McHenry et al 2013;Simpson 2014). Late liberalism re-tools coloniality-modernity in its image, demanding types of authenticity, sociality and adaptability from Indigenous subjects (eg. ...
... Whereas blackness was associated merely with local enclaves before whiteness and racialization were recognized to permeate socio-spatial relations, so too geographers are unpacking how (settler) colonialism underlines dynamics that seem to be far from indigeneity. Geographers also continue to deploy the concept of internal colonialism, referring to enclosed spaces where indigeneity is contained and reproduced (Radcliffe 2015;Palmer and Rundstrom 2013). Indigenous enclaves are thus embedded analytically and empirically within multiscalar dynamics of territorialisation, even if indigeneity is only visible when found in marginal contained places. ...
Why talk of indigeneity rather than of Indigenous peoples? This report examines the critical purchase on questions of inequality, subjectivity and power offered by critical geographies of indigeneity. In comparison with accounts that treat indigeneity as relational with nature and the more-than-human, the report highlights literature that examines indigeneity as relational with deeply historical, institutionalized and power-inflected ontologies. To think about settler colonialism as an ongoing effect, not a singular event, recognizes how patterns of engagement with and oppression of indigeneity pervade the colonial present and its geographies beyond the specific locales associated with Indigenous peoples. Finally, the report examines how indigeneity figures in the geography discipline’s knowledge production, and argues that worldly Indigenous ontologies are theorizing the world precisely because they are forced to apprehend, appraise and then rethink ‘universals’.
... Some efforts, such as Pearce and Louis's (2008) depth of place in Hawai'i, Pearce's (2008) seasonal maps of the North West Company routes, Yorta Yorta management of secret and sacred indigenous knowledge in Australia (Veland et al. 2014;Lynch et al. 2016 Meanwhile, reliance on maps for spatial planning and interventions without the assistance of indigenous interpretation can also lead to problematic land-use change decisions and impact negatively the various ways humans and other species inhabit the landscape (Bryan 2011). The social process around the use of technology has implications for how the mapping exercise unfolds (Pavlovskaya 2006;Veland et al. 2014), and studies by Crawhall (2007) and Palmer and Rundstrom (2012), and others, argue that land-use mapping in regard to natural resource development has always been embedded in colonial practices that favour Western interests. Thus, while maps are powerful in influencing social and ecological change, they reflect cultural perceptions of the landscape and can be counterproductive in terms of viewing the landscape holistically (Löfmarck and Lidskog 2019). ...
The categories and concepts in the existing official land-use maps have been under improvements over recent years; however, this study from Nordland, northern Norway, shows that they continue to pose several dilemmas when aiming to better capture the impacts of multiple land uses on reindeer herding. While these developments have done much to better communicate the presence of reindeer herding to developers and planners, there remain significant challenges to achieve best practices. In particular, the confluence of multiple landscape features, for instance, roads, farmland, ecoregions, tenure, pastures, tourism paths and cabins, may have interactions that create cumulative impacts that do not “add up” neatly across map layers. Migration routes, herding routes, and resting areas have been introduced in these maps. In collaboration with reindeer herders, this article analyses how to enrich mapping practices by for example including bottlenecks, parallel to increased attention to influence zones and avoidance zones, as important emergent impacts of multiple interacting features of the landscape. Our research reveals how local knowledge developed by herders through their “presence in the landscape” is better capable of accounting for interactions and cumulative dimensions of landscape features. Through our participatory mapping approach with Sámi reindeer herders, we focus on ways of combining reindeer herders’ knowledge and GIS maps and demonstrate the potential in collaborative work between herders and policymakers in generating a richer understanding of land-use change. We conclude that the practical knowledge of people inhabiting and living with the landscape and its changing character generates a rich understanding of cumulative impacts and can be harnessed for improved land-use mapping and multi-level governance.
... Recent studies show that traditional groups located within national territories continue to have their right to land questioned and withdrawn, to enable state-led industrialization and resource development (Lawrence, 2014;Palmer & Rundstrom, 2013). Therefore, although internal colonization fell out of favour in the 1990s, these studies indicate this was premature. ...
On separating from Malaysia in 1965, the People's Action Party (PAP) sought to rapidly transform Singapore into a modern, industrialized nation-state. This was deemed essential if Singapore, a small island-nation, were to survive as an independent country. Nation-building would be reliant on territorial integration, entailing the industrialization and subordination of the rural periphery by a modernizing urban core, a process referred to as internal colonization. Territorial integration was critical in Singapore as the British had focused its efforts on the port city, leaving much of the island undeveloped. While there has been significant academic interest in both land and water scarcity in Singapore, rarely are they addressed together, which, as this paper argues, is necessary to understand the wider territorialization process. This paper reveals how the gradual expansion of catchment area into different regions of the island, through reservoir construction and anti-pollution measures, facilitated, legitimized and depoliticized the comprehensive restructuring of the domestic economy, urban renewal and gentrification, and resettlement of the population. The case is made for a political ecology of the state that historicizes and politicizes territory by revealing its forgotten, contested, physical geography. The importance of internal colonization to Michel Foucault's thinking on power is also underlined.
... GIS are commonplace in geography departments and classrooms in the United States. Several scholars, including the first author of this article, warned of the transformative capabilities of GIS and how the technologies could disassociate Indigenous geographic knowledge from its parent context as well as deskill elder knowledge [4][5][6]. However, over the last couple of decades, GIS became prevalent within Indian Country. ...
How might we teach undergraduate students about Indigenous geographies using historical maps? This paper describes processes associated with the bridging of a historical Kiowa map with computerized geographic information systems (GIS) and undergraduate geography curriculum. The authors applied an indigital framework as an approach for melding Indigenous and Western knowledge systems into a third kind of construct for teaching undergraduate students about historical/contemporary spatial issues. Indigital is the blending of Indigenous knowledge systems, such as storytelling, language, calendar keeping, dance, and songs, with computerized systems. We present an origin story about the indigitization of a historical Kiowa pictorial map, known as the Chál-ko-gái map, at the University of Missouri, USA. Undergraduate student engagement with the map resulted in new questions about Indigenous geographies, particularly map projections, place names, and the meaning of Kiowa symbols.
... Since the early critiques of GIS, however, the benefits of integrating Indigenous knowledges into GIS are seen to exceed its downsides and there are calls for balance (Caquard et al. 2009;Palmer 2012). Rundstrom himself has moved from a position of incommensurability to one of balanced use of GIS by government agencies and Indigenous bands (Palmer and Rundstrom 2013). Despite the benefits of utilizing GIS to serve Indigenous peoples' agenda, Rundstrom's early critiques still shape interrogations into Indigenous GIS (cf., Chambers et al. 2004;Chapin et al. 2005;Desbiens et al. 2020;Dunn 2007;Pearce and Louis 2008). ...
Advances in geospatial technologies over recent years have marked dramatic changes in traditional cartographic practices and conventional geographic information systems (GIS). Scholars in GIScience and digital geographies commonly argue that, compared to GIS, the geospatial web (geoweb) offers improved opportunities for Indigenous communities to make their own maps, contribute their own place-based content, and tell their own stories. Critical GIS has informed us about the potential issues with the use of spatial technologies in Indigenous contexts, which we synthesize into three themes: 1. compartmentalizing and distilling Indigenous knowledges, 2. undermining Indigenous ways of knowing and of transferring knowledges, and 3. exploiting and assimilating Indigenous knowledges. These three criteria are used to assess what Indigenous communities should examine when engaging with the geoweb and Indigenous knowledges. Our analysis focuses on issues of data ownership, access, sharing, and appropriation. We point to ways in which Indigenous peoples should carefully assess various components of the geoweb to avoid the misrepresentation, distortion, assimilation, exclusion, and exploitation of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous ways of transmitting knowledge. We conclude with potential solutions for development of the geoweb.
... This is notable as much of the mapping literature centres on what Harley (1989:2) originally called the "culture of technics" which has since evolved along with increasingly user-friendly and ever-cheaper spatial information technologies in the form of geomatics such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) (cf. Mohamed and Ventura 2000;Palmer and Rundstrom 2013;Crampton 2010). As one counter-mapper explained (Aditya, interview in Jakarta, 2013), in the first stage of the process sketch maps are made with the community involved. ...
Resource frontiers continue to expand globally across Indigenous lands as states and corporations enact forms of expropriation redolent of the formal colonial era for the sake of extraction. In the face of this expansion, the burden remains largely on frontline communities to defend their ecologies using the tools available to them. Across Indonesia’s resource frontiers, the ‘cartographic impulse’ Edward Said once named to describe anticolonial struggles is apparent in the form of counter-mapping, which seeks to secure adat (customary) rights and defend Indigenous lands against extractivist expansion. This article revisits this practice and argues that the counter-map and its goals remain tenuous – mapping in its scalable form risks processing complex and multi-dimensional ways of relating to land into two-dimensional representations appropriate for a liberal property regime, while adat itself is a contingent and mutable legal goal. Ultimately, the article echoes emerging calls for the burden to be shifted away from frontline communities through the pursuit of just transitions to post-extractivism.
... Examples of Indigenous people mapping their territories or having their lands and resources mapped for them exists in the literature, including global case studies (Chapin et al., 2005); Indigenous North Americans, mapping, and GIS (Lewis 1998;Laituri 2011); mapping in Canada (Brealey 1995;Sparke 1998;Eades 2015); map biographies, landuse/land occupancy mapping, counter-mapping, ethnographies, bioregional mapping, and participatory methods (Rundstrom 1991;Aberley 1993;Peluso 1995;Chapin and Threlkeld 2001;Tobias 2000;Wood 2010); and the history of mapping, GIS, and resources within institutions (Palmer 2012a;Palmer and Rundstrom 2013). The research in this paper contributes to the latter, with a focus on UNESCO World Heritage nomination documents held at international archives in Paris, France. ...
UNESCO World Heritage site nominations require the use and presence of maps and GIS to demarcate potential heritage property boundaries. UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee provided specific cartographic guidelines and standards for the inclusion of maps within the nominations. The New Zealand government used maps and GIS to visually convince UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee, the International Union on the Conservation of Nature, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites of intangible cultural relationships at Tongariro National Park. More specifically, New Zealand combined scientific maps, Māori language narratives, and symbols to make the intangible tangible and geographically visible. Maps and GIS images that accompanied World Heritage nomination dossiers were housed at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the International Council on Monuments and Sites in Paris, France. The first section of the paper introduces the data sources and methods used in our archival research. Next, we provide a brief description of the Tongariro National Park nomination and present a case study on, and interpretation of, the maps and GIS contained within the Tongariro National Park World Heritage nomination dossier. Finally, we will offer some conclusions and directions for future research.
Geography as a discipline is entangled in settler colonial regimes that continue to shape geographic practice and the boundaries of geographical knowledge. Digital technologies play an instrumental role in shaping the view of geography and sociospatial relations. This paper traces the construction of the settler imaginary in geographic thought through scholarship in digital geographies and anticolonialism. By bridging anticolonial scholarship in digital geographies, this paper contributes to debates on anticolonial and decolonial refusal politics and its role in realizing reciprocal land-life relations. The (re)imagining of digital knowledge politics begins with accountable digital geographic practices on the terms of Indigenous peoples’.
The Irish famine of the mid nineteenth century and the Ukrainian famine of the twentieth century have been the subject of large and quite contentious literatures. Whereas many popular explanations of the Irish famine attribute it to the English government’s infatuation with laissez-faire economic doctrines, by contrast the Ukrainian famine has often been ascribed to Stalin’s resentment of Ukraine’s resistance to the Soviet revolution. This essay suggests that despite their many differences, during these years both Ireland and Ukraine can be considered to have been internal colonies of their respective empires. The key implication of this conception is that these appalling famines arose from a common underlying cause: namely, the inferior political status of these regions relative to that of the core regions of these states. One of the defining characteristics of internal colonies is that they often suffer from alien rule. Alien rulers are typically indifferent to the welfare of the residents of the culturally distinctive regions within their borders. Due to this indifference, both the British and Soviet central rulers cast a blind eye to the fate of the Irish and Ukrainian peasants.
From 2010 to 2013, the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the University of Arizona, with funding from the National Science Foundation, hosted the Western Apache Ethnography and Geographic Information Science Research Experience for Undergraduates. Designed to foster practical skills and scholarly capacities for future resource managers and anthropologists, this field school introduced Apache and non-native undergraduate students to ethnographic field research and GIS tools. Building upon the extensive arrays of geographical, cultural, and historical data that are available for Western Apache territory, field school students engaged in community-based participatory research with Western Apache elders and tribal natural and heritage resource personnel to contribute to the Western Apache tribes' efforts to document their cultural histories, traditional ecological knowledge, local understanding of geography, and issues of historic and contemporary resource management. This essay reviews the program and traces how student alumni have incorporated skills and perspectives gained into their subsequent academic and professional work.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Canadian scientists, resource managers, and computer experts collaborated on two linked undertakings: the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) and the Canada Geographic Information System. CLI was an extensive project that assessed the state of key resources across much of the country, while CGIS was a pioneering effort at computerizing CLI data to support decision-making about resource use. Fundamental components of the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act, CLI and CGIS reflect Canadian innovation in new information-management tools designed to facilitate state goals. This paper examines the production and affordances of CLI and CGIS, and considers the renewed optimism and collaborative relationships that emerged from them. It also examines historical concerns over the limitations of these technologies and explores how CLI and CGIS were oriented to change over space, not time. Ultimately, these technological innovations served to naturalize patterns of inequality and normalize urban-industrial modernity.
This article will discuss the U.S. military’s spraying of toxic defoliants over Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. It will first frame these attacks’ diffuse material and cultural legacies through the concept of dispersed violence. By incorporating multiple spatiotemporal scales that encompass a range of forces, this notion seeks to recognize both the long-term consequences of war and the challenges of grasping these impacts decades later. This article will then address geographic information systems (GIS) and public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS), and examine how these technologies can newly register the tolls of Agent Orange and other herbicides. It will consider the potentialities and limitations of these visualizations, as well as analyze some extant examples. Ultimately, it will argue that resituating the violence of Agent Orange through GIS can mark one significant step towards reconceiving the toxic residues of remote warfare.
Indigeneity is an inherently political concept that is commonly culturally configured and connected to demands for social and environmental justice (Cameron et al. 2009, 2014). For many people who identify themselves, their families, communities, and ways of being as Indigenous, Indigeneity merits capitalization. The capital “I” signifies recognition of continuities such as heritage, territorial dispossession, and environmental practice, as well as more emergent global movements and international laws recognizing rights and responsibilities. But the conceptual category of I/indigeneity arose out of colonialist practices of representation and repression based on racialized social hierarchies. So formulations of indigeneity (without the capital I) also operate: historically, contemporaneously, and often—but not always—beyond Indigenous aegis.
The primary thesis of this essay is that technology and society co-construct one another. The dynamics of co-construction are often encountered by scholars who conduct research on the rights of indigenous peoples, indigenous knowledge, media, mapping, the social impacts of geographic information systems (GIS), science and technology studies, history of technology, indigenous linguistics, English, and film studies. We often find ourselves working ‘in-between’ dialogues, mediating indigenous geographies, negotiation research agendas, incorporating social theories, relying heavily upon the humanities, and representing geographies using digital technologies. For some of us, the projects are modest. Issues of data source uncertainty, how GIS handles temporal data, and the GIS leanings toward quantified data are all important issues. However, we are never removed from the web of colonial or postcolonial histories; reminded how cartographers, ethnographers, and historians constructed historical geographies for Indigenous people in the past; and the processes that contributed the historical condition of American Indians and how we should approach modern histories that involve researching and writing about Indigenous people. Some scholars have adopted frameworks that highlight the hybridity of systems, the blending of ideas, and contradictory spaces making up American Indian historical geographies.
In this article, the author will argue that development of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa nomination dossier involved collaborations between multiple actors, involved the recognition of indigenous knowledge systems, and resulted in the co-creation of hybrid mapping representations. This empirical research examines data sources like World Heritage dossiers and state/UNESCO correspondence letters held at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre archives in Paris, France and cultural site dossiers archived at the International Council on Memorials and Sites (ICOMOS) in Charenton-le-Pont, France. Actor-network theory informs this research and will act as a heuristic tool for collection, organizing, and analyzing the archival documents. A framework called postcolonial centers of calculation will be introduced to untangle technoscientific processes associated with World Heritage nomination documents. A case study of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa nomination dossier reveals historical cycles of accumulation geographic information around Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa, a strong network of indigenous and state collaborations, and the creation of hybrid geographic representations. The discussion and conclusion section relate this research to sustainability science and indigenous geographies, and suggest future research directions.
From 2010 to 2013, the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the University of Arizona, with funding from the National Science Foundation, hosted the Western Apache Ethnography and Geographic Information Science Research Experience for Undergraduates. Designed to foster practical skills and scholarly capacities for future resource managers and anthropologists, this field school introduced Apache and non-native undergraduate students to ethnographic field research and GIS tools. Building upon the extensive arrays of geographical, cultural, and historical data that are available for Western Apache territory, field school students engaged in community-based participatory research with Western Apache elders and tribal natural and heritage resource personnel to contribute to the Western Apache tribes' efforts to document their cultural histories, traditional ecological knowledge, local understanding of geography, and issues of historic and contemporary resource management. This essay reviews the program and traces how student alumni have incorporated skills and perspectives gained into their subsequent academic and professional work.
The interactive capability and ease of use of Geoweb technologies suggest great potential for Aboriginal communities to store, manage, and communicate place-related knowledge. For the Métis, who have a long history of dispossession and dispersion in Canada, the Geoweb offers an opportunity in realizing the desire to articulate a coherent sense of place for their people. This paper reports on a community-based research project involving the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Métis Nation of British Columbia (MNBC) – the political body representing the Métis people in BC. The project includes the creation of a Geoweb tool specifically designed to facilitate the (self) articulation of a Métis community in contemporary BC. It examines how Geoweb technologies have been used to create a participatory, crowd-sourced Historical Document Database (HDD) that takes meaning through the interface of a map. The paper further explores how the data contributed by members of the Métis community have been used to capture, communicate, and represent community memories in the dispersed membership. It concludes by examining challenges that have emerged related to platform stability and institutional relations related to the ongoing sustainability of the HDD.
Human geography has driven substantive improvements in methodologies and applications of Geographic Information Systems (GISs), yet Indigenous groups continue to experience erasure in geographic representations. GIS ontologies comprise categorised labels that represent lived contexts, and these ontologies are determined through the shared worldviews of those labelling spatial phenomena for entry into GIS databases. Although Western ontologies and spatial representations reflect Western understandings of human experience, they are often inappropriate in Indigenous contexts. In efforts to be represented in courts and land management, Indigenous groups nevertheless need to engage Western spatial representations to ‘claim space’. This paper examines what GISs are and do and shows that GIS technology comes with strings attached to the myriad social contexts that continue to shape the field of GIScience. We show that Intellectual Property Rights Agreements can sever and control these ‘strings’; the agreement between the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation and university researchers reframes GIS from a technology of erasure to a technology of opportunity that enables Indigenous groups to define their own engagement. The visual and narrative outputs will contribute important understandings of the environmental crisis facing the Murray–Darling Basin and connect older and younger generations through knowledge sharing. We conclude the application of GIScience is never simply technological but always has potential to empower particular communities. Applying GIS technology to new circumstances is an engagement of new relationships in the social praxis of technology transfer, where worldviews meet and negotiations are made over what exists and how we know.
This chapter examines the disciplinary interface between geography and technology from an ecological perspective. Our analysis of a few cases shows that the relationships between geography and technology are never clear-cut, but always intertwined like tree roots in a forest. The roots (or rhizomes) of each tree support an individual above ground, while the tangled roots just visible or invisible below the surface are a messy tangle that also are part of biochemical processes that sustain each tree, and the forest in which other trees grow. Rhizomes from different trees and plants interweave in symbiotic or parasitic relationship that are integral to the ecosystem. The relationships between geography and technology also can be understood in this ecological metaphor. What has made the growth of GIS possible? We argue that a highly fertile interface between geography and technology supports the profuse growth of GIS. Drawing on science and technology studies, we argue that the geography-technology relationship is no “chicken and egg” problem, but is evidenced in myriad, theoretically infinite relationships and interactions occurring worldwide. Each GIS implementation follows many roots, and we need to excavate them in order to understand the historical development of the interface between geography and technology. This approach calls for attention to specific sites and configurations of technology. The development of geography is intricately interwoven with the development of technology, but under no circumstances does technology determine a path for geography. In the fillamous rhizomatic network, many geographies and technologies connect and lead to subsequent developments.
GIS eased into geography without much discord until the 1990s, when a flurry of commentaries about the relative merits of GIS made their way into a number of geographic journals. The ensuing decade was marked by varying degrees of friction between GIS practi- tioners and their critics in human geography. Despite the methodological chasm between the two groups, little discussion of the implications of these differences has ensued. This article fills that gap with a historiographic examination of critiques of GIS. Critiques of GIS are organized into three waves or periods, each characterized by distinct arguments. The first wave, from 1990 to 1994, was marked by the intensity of debate as well as an emphasis on positivism. By 1995, the conversation waned as the number of critics grew, while GIS practitioners increasingly declined comment. This second wave marked the initiation of a greater degree of co-operation between GIS scholars and their critics, however. With the inception of the National Center for Geographic Information Analysis (NCGIA) Initiative 19, intended to study the social effects of GIS, many critics began to work closely with their peers in GIS. In the third wave, critiques of GIS expressed a greater commitment to the technology. Throughout the decade, debates about the technology shifted from simple attacks on positivism to incorporating more subtle analyses of the effects of the technology. These critiques have had considerable effect on the academic GIS community but are presently constrained by limited communication with GIS practitioners because of the absence of a common vocabulary. I argue that, if critiques of GIS are to be effective, they must find a way to address GIS researchers, using the language and conceptual framework of the discipline.
Despite considerable progress in recent geographic information systems (GIS) research (especially on public-participation GIS), the critical discourse on GIS in the 1990s does not seem to have affected GIS practices in geographic research in significant ways. Development in critical GIS practice has been quite limited to date, and GIS and critical geographies remain two separate, if not overtly antagonistic, worlds. This suggests that critical engagement that seeks to conceive and materialize the critical potential of GIS for geographic research is still sorely needed. In this article, I explore the possibilities for this kind of critical engagement through revisiting some of the central arguments in the critical discourse from feminist perspectives. I examine whether GIS methods are inherently incompatible with feminist epistemologies through interrogating their connection with positivist scientific practices and visualization technologies. Bearing in mind the limitations of current GIS, I explore several ways in which GIS methods may be used to enrich feminist geographic research. I propose to reimagine GIS as a method in feminist geography and describe feminist visualization as a possible critical practice in feminist research. I argue that GIS can be re-envisioned and used in feminist geography in ways that are congenial to feminist epistemologies and politics. These alternative practices represent a new kind of critical engagement with GIS that is grounded on the critical agency of the GIS user/researcher.
Recognition that GIS is a social technology implies that the GIS research agenda should be broadened to incorporate questions of the social imbeddedness and impact of GIS. Research into these questions can draw on the complementary skills of GIS specialists and social theorists. GIS as we know it is not the only form it could have taken, but has followed a direction of development shaped by technical and social conditions. GIS represents the world in certain ways that privilege instrumental logic over other ways of knowing. GIS can have significant consequences affecting the outcome of social problems which it is employed to solve, depending on differential access to GIS and information, and on what is defined as information. Such issues suggest a rich agenda for future research.
The process of cartography and the ideological problems that accompany this process has taken on new significance in the digital age with the proliferation of digital maps and geographic information systems such as Google Earth. This study begins by analyzing the history of digital mapping and its connection to an indexical, ontological reality. I demonstrate how Google Earth, by incorporating a social network that engages users as embodied interactors rather than disembodied voyeurs, is able to present user-generated content and dialog spatially on the very object that such content critiques. Ultimately, this study argues for ways that users can recontextualize and subvert ‘master representations’ of visual media within the authorial structure rather than re-authoring the existing software and structures.
In an era of postcolonialism and postcolonization, Indigenous struggles continue. Within ‘settler societies’ issues of dispossession—particularly of lands—remain largely unresolved. As part of the discipline of geography's active movement away from its colonizing project, this introduction to this special edition of Geografiska Annaler B seeks to (re)focus a disciplinary lens, and (re)open a dialogue—and potential research trajectory - about ‘indigenous geographies’. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, new cultural geographies have begun a process of re-engagement with issues of indigeniety through careful, sensitive, inclusive, representative and emancipatory research projects.
This paper is a political economic critique and exploration of the ways that private-sector companies in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry have emerged and consolidated themselves. This includes a discussion about buying, analyzing and selling spatial data mined from the Internet and other public resources, and how this is packaged and sold to other corporations for profit. I detail GIS research and development projects and the activities that are fueling growth. One of the fastest growing sectors of the GIS business is data mining and information processing, where companies are able to capitalize on the flow of information through proprietary systems or public networks like the Internet, and as such, are accumulating great wealth. GIS software projects are often the outgrowth of direct political and economic policy and funding, and industry giants are afforded greater access to purchasing huge data sets and labor to analyze and re-sell it. Public adoption and usage of GIS tools via the Internet is creating competitive tensions within the GIS industry and producing complex new partnerships. What is most critical to explore at this moment are the details of the industry, who it serves, and in whose interest. An understanding of the GIS terrain will better equip the public in making informed decisions about how state policies and consumer practices are contributing to, or disrupting, these activities.
The construction and implementation of geographic information systems (GIS) within the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is yet another attempt to assimilate American Indians into the greater American society. Historically, the BIA collaborated with Christian missionaries to assimilate indigenous Americans. The United States federal government implemented the reservation and boarding school systems, and promoted the English language and Christianity while effectively suppressing indigenous languages and religions. Today the BIA collaborates with new missionaries who are distinctly technical and corporate. This particular BIA/GIS implementation strategy can have homogenizing and universalizing impacts upon American Indian cultural landscapes, geographic knowledge and native languages.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is one of the most important institutions in contemporary Native American affairs. During most of the present century BIA officials have had direct administrative control over most local reservation institutions such as education, law enforcement, resource management and others. Historically, reservation tribal governments have had little decision-making power over goals and policies that affect their people. The primary task of this paper is to evaluate the effect of several reform movements that challenged BIA domination over Native American reservation communities during the seventies. An examination is made of the impact of local reservation groups, administrative organizations and legislative changes on the structure and functions of the BIA. Attempts to gain control of reservation institutions by reservation groups and reorganization efforts from within the executive branch have failed to force the BIA to relinquish its bureaucratic domination over reservation communities. The most effective means for forcing change on the BIA came from congressional legislation in the form of the Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. Even this reform could not break the continued domination of BIA bureaucracy over local reservation institutions, since the Act was Duane Champagne is a member of the Sociology faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a Research and Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
The centering processes of geographic information system (GIS) development at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was an extension of past cartographic encounters with American Indians through the central control of geospatial technologies, uneven development of geographic information resources, and extension of technically dependent clientele. Cartographic encounters included the historical exchanges of geographic information between indigenous people and non-Indians in North America. Scientists and technicians accumulated geographic information at the center of calculation where scientific maps, models, and simulations emerged. A study of GIS development at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs will demonstrate some centering processes.
Introduction: colonialism, agency and power Part I. Conquest: 1. 'Vilest Miscreants of the Savage Race': the Plains Sioux in an empire of liberty 2. 'Futile Efforts to Subjugate Them': failures of conquest 3. 'Doubtless an Unauthorized Promise': the politics of the Great Sioux war 4. 'Force is the Only Thing': the killing of Crazy Horse Part II. Colonialism: 5. 'We Were Raised in This Country': claiming place 6. 'I Work So Much It Makes Me Poor': the reservation economy 7. 'Just as Well with My Hair On': colonial education 8. 'All Men are Different': the politics of religion and culture 9. 'Great Trouble and Bad Feeling': government agents and Sioux leaders 10. 'Enough to Crush Us Down': struggles for Land Part III. Anticolonialism and the State: 11. 'When the Earth Shakes Do Not Be Afraid': the Ghost Dance as an anticolonial movement 12. 'To Bring My People Back into the Hoop': the development of the Lakota Ghost Dance 13. 'The Most Serious Indian War of Our History': the army's invasion 14. 'If He Fights, Destroy Him': the road to Wounded Knee 15. 'A Valley of Death': Wounded Knee Conclusion: after Wounded Knee.
Efficient irrigation system management requires accurate location and condition information for system components. Bureau of Lndian Affairs (BU) irrigation managers currently work with outdated paper manuscripts or minimally attrib-uted digital datasets. This paper examines how the Global Positioning System (GPS), a geographic information system (GIS), and digital cameras were used to perform a detailed inventory of three irrigation units managed by the BU on the Blacweet Lndian Reservation, Montana. More than 500 digital pictures were captured on approximately 500 kilometers (31 5 miles) of linear structures. Over 2,100 point structures were inventoried. The resultant dataset provides vastly improved analysis and display capabilities. Managers can identify and locate system components attributed as "repair immediately" and simultaneously view digital pictures of the irrigation system components, along with associated attributes and data components. This greatly facilitates their ability to estimate repair cost and complexity, as well as to determine materials needed to accomplish the repairs. The digital and photo-graphic data thus become a "living" dataset into which updates can be easily incorporated.
Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS is an introduction to the critical issues surrounding mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) across a wide range of disciplines for the non-specialist reader. Examines the key influences Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and cartography have on the study of geography and other related disciplines Represents the first in-depth summary of the "new cartography" that has appeared since the early 1990s Provides an explanation of what this new critical cartography is, why it is important, and how it is relevant to a broad, interdisciplinary set of readers Presents theoretical discussion supplemented with real-world case studies Brings together both a technical understanding of GIS and mapping as well as sensitivity to the importance of theory.
The "GIS and Society" literature has raised a number of critical issues concerning the political economy and epistemology of geographical information systems (GIS) and the politics and power relations associated with their use. Recently, attention has focused on the potential for GIS to help empower communities. This paper reviews the GIS and Society debate. Case studies of public participation GIS are reviewed. The GIS-empowerment-marginalization nexus is addressed through the concept of community-integrated GIS. It is argued that GIS is a contradictory technology that simultaneously marginalizes and empowers people and communities. As a result, the societal impacts of GIS are contingent upon particular configurations of place-based historical, socio-economic, political, and technological conditions.
Technology transfer and data-sharing are of central importance in exporting geographic information systems technology (GIS) to the non-Western world. Yet the impulse to export GIS has not been examined for its effects on other cultural systems of geographical knowledge, especially ones that differ substantially from the way most North Americans and Europeans know about the world. I am especially interested in the effects of GIS on the epistemological diversity still manifest among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In this article, I compare Euro-North American characteristics of geographical knowledge with those of indigenous peoples, looking particularly at how knowledge is developed and maintained differently. Special attention is paid to the differences between cultures that inscribe (writing tradition) and those that incorporate (oral tradition), and the importance of studying the process by which one learns geographical information. The role of GIS in assimilating indigenous North Americans to a Eurocentric way of knowing about the world is then discussed. In the conclusion, I propose that a GIS research agenda include cross-cultural studies of knowledge transformation and culture change.
Within organizational research, the subject of insider academic research has received relatively little consideration. By insider research, we mean research by complete members of organizational systems in and on their own organizations. Insider research can be undertaken within any of the three major research paradigms—positivism, hermeneutics, and action research—selected and presented in this article. First, we revisit some of the established research paradigms to see what position they might have on insider research. Second, we explore the dynamics of insider research under the headings of access, preunderstanding, role duality, and managing organizational politics. Our conclusion is that within each of the main streams of research, there is no inherent reason why being native is an issue and that the value of insider research is worth reaffirming.
With respect to the practice of geography and of science more generally, geographic information systems raise fundamental questions concerning rights and responsibilities. On the one hand, the systems appear both to support and to appeal to a traditional view or image of science. On the other hand, the size and complexity of the systems undercuts traditional ways of thinking about those issues, and appears to require new ways of thinking. Yet there are certain features of the systems that make this rethinking more difficult. The article analyzes this traditional image of science, points to suggested alternatives, and characterizes those features of science and geographic information systems that will make more difficult the development of an alternative.
A discussion is presented of factors involved in the transition from maps and related statistical data in hardcopy form to geographically-referenced data in machine-readable form. The process of using computers in automating the compilation process is examined. The development of geographic information systems is also traced. The institutional considerations of geographic information systems are examined. 18 Refs.
Innovation in cartography has come to depend on the design of software. This essay recounts two cycles of software development at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics which used different models for intellectual control. In retrospect, each model had its successes, but in neither period were there enough new professionals trained to expand the field of digital cartography.
Les AA. presentent les contours d'un modele de developpement pour les reserves indiennes en Amerique du Nord issu des recherches du Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Afin d'assurer un developpement efficace et durable, ce modele insiste sur les fondements politiques prealables necessaires a tout renouveau economique stable et sur la relation entre souverainete tribale, identite, construction nationale et developpement economique. Apres une introduction sur les situations et approches differentielles quant au developpement dans differentes tribus, les AA. examinent la nature des institutions politiques tribales susceptibles d'assurer la perennite economique et politique des nations indiennes.
Aimed at highlighting American Indian reservation conditions, outlining the scope of Federal aid to Indians, and suggesting the nature of future Indian problems and choices, this book attempts to assess the current socioeconomic status of the Indian community and its relationship with the Federal Government. Specifically, this book provides both narrative and statistical information re: (1) Indian Population (migration and Federal policy and Indian legal status); (2) Economic Conditions and Economic Development (income and employment; agricultural, forest, and mineral resource development; and industrial development); (3) Education (attainment; educational performance; the Indian school system; community control; aid to higher education; adult and vocational education; manpower training); (4) Health and Family Status (illnesses and mortality rates; family and marital status; birth rates and age distribution; Indian Health Service; the impact of the Indian Health Service); (5) Social Services (public assistance; housing; law enforcement; trust responsibilities and services; community development and tribal self-determination); (6) "The Indian Question" (underlying facts and policy considerations). Also presented are tabular data covering the years 1955-74 reported in 18 tables and 9 charts. (JC)
Recent geographical scholarship on the politics of calculation has led to a reevaluation of the role of statistics, census-taking, and mapping as calculative techniques that have been of primary importance to the rise of the modern territorial state. The current study contributes to this literature by examining how the political technologies of street addressing have been employed to reconfigure the territory of the United States as a calculable space of security. Drawing on extensive archival research and thirty semistructured, in-depth interviews, this study provides a genealogy of calculable space, focusing particularly on the extension of citystyle street addressing systems into rural communities to aid emergency management, homeland security, and various other governmental measures as part of the general process that Foucault (2007) has referred to as the "urbanization of the territory." As a case study, I consider the campaign to readdress rural areas in West Virginia to illustrate the social and political processes at work in remaking the territory into a space of calculation by encoding the landscape with a spatial regime of inscriptions. The results presented here show how 911 addressing systems have been central to the reorganization of political space at a time when the apparatuses of security are being "enhanced" by the apparent marvels of geospatial technology. To the extent that such technologies are themselves implicated in reshaping the very spaces that they are designed to represent, this study calls our attention to the pervasive role that spatial calculation plays in the production of a geo-coded world.
Recent scholarship has urged increased attention to how advances in geographical information systems (GIS) technology can more equitably help to bridge gaps between the theory and practice of environmental protection and dispute resolution. This study brings new evidence to burgeoning debates in the Amazon, examining how a United Nations (UN) development initiative developed mapping systems in a shifting political climate for environmental governance while conducting campaigns with peasant miners to address environmental management. Amendments made in 2002 to the Brazilian Forest Code established natural preserves according to the geographic features of watersheds. The laws deter commercial land use on preserves, imposing strict penalties where artisanal mining is widely prevalent as a livelihood. The UN program utilized GIS and Shuttle Radar imagery to map the contested areas according to legal definitions and engaged stakeholders to discuss political implications. In 2006, new reforms made such mapping tools even more controversial-and urgent-with amendments that created opportunities for bringing "informal" mining into the legal sphere, theoretically allowing "spaces of exception" where mining can be legitimated. Our multimethod study underscores the need for appreciating diverse understandings of ecologically sensitive zones and empowering rural communities to take ownership over geospatial technologies in addressing environmental challenges. Although maps produced using the proposed methods could be useful, dominant advocacies that champion GIS as an enforcement tool often undermine local trust, inflame tensions, and render alternative "grassroots GIS" strategies impracticable. We examine the contexts, powers, limitations, and risks of the UN's technical intervention, exploring how competing views of environmental controversy lead to divergent perspectives on the politics of GIS "knowledge translation" and mapping itself.
This paper considers the relationship between knowledge and power as it pertains to the political mobilization of indigenous identity. To illustrate this relationship, the paper reviews concepts used to map indigenous territories for the purposes of claiming land. Mapping requires any number of decisions about what to map and how to map in order to create certain political effects. Indigenous maps have been used as a means for advancing a variety of anti-colonial politics. However, mapping, like indigenous knowledge more broadly, is rapidly being assimilated into development policy by institutions like the World Bank. This paper considers how the very concepts used to identify certain kinds of knowledge as indigenous remain steeped in colonial power relations. That perspective informs my reconsideration of concepts of indigeneity, resistance, and territory in this paper. Without disavowing the tactical importance of mapping in advancing indigenous land rights, this paper concludes by raising a number of points aimed at advancing debates to develop a more critically informed cartographic practice.
Resource development on American Indian lands is bringing about a dramatic transformation of the political and economic status of American Indians. Recently, scholars observing this change have increasingly used underdevelopment theory to explain the nature of these changes. However, this discussion points out that as applied to American Indians, the perspective of underdevelopment theory is skewed in several important ways. Specifically, it fails to take into account the distinctive historical and political status of Indians in American society, A simple typology, captive nations 2Lad internal colonies is proposed for describing the status of Indian tribes before and after development.
In the colonial period of U.S. history, American Indian tribes enjoyed the status of political sovereigns, and dealt as equals with the English Crown and colonial authorities. In the years following U.S. independence, legal, administrative, and military actions were used to redefine the meaning of tribal sovereignty. Conceptualizing these developments, “captive nations” refers to the limited sovereignty of tribes and their isolation and detachment from mainstream American society. Recently, natural resource development on their land and especially the discovery of energy resources has had a major impact on the structure of Federal-Indian relations and the political status of Indian tribes in American society. Willingly or unwillingly, many tribes are in the process of renegotiating their status with the Federal Government as a consequence of the resource development. As a result, these former captive nations are now more aptly described as “internal colonies.”
Public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) pertains to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to broaden public involvement in policymaking as well as to the value of GIS to promote the goals of nongovernmental organizations, grassroots groups, and community-based organizations. The article first traces the social history of PPGIS. It then argues that PPGIS has been socially constructed by a broad set of actors in research across disciplines and in practice across sectors. This produced and reproduced concept is then explicated through four major themes found across the breadth of the PPGIS literature: place and people, technology and data, process, and outcome and evaluation. The themes constitute a framework for evaluating current PPGIS activities and a roadmap for future PPGIS research and practice.
In recent months there has been an explosion of interest in using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic
information provided voluntarily by individuals. Sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to create
a global patchwork of geographic information, while Google Earth and other virtual globes are encouraging volunteers to develop
interesting applications using their own data. I review this phenomenon, and examine associated issues: what drives people
to do this, how accurate are the results, will they threaten individual privacy, and how can they augment more conventional
sources? I compare this new phenomenon to more traditional citizen science and the role of the amateur in geographic observation.