Claire Millikin – The Land Speaks: Margaret Wickens Pearce’s Cartographic Medicine

Will we forever be erased?

No, it is here our footsteps

we must trace

back to the source.

—Carol Dana (Penobscot Nation)

The artifact known as Powhatan’s Mantle is described by the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, UK), where it is held, as a ceremonial cloak, probably given by the leader of the Powhatan Confederacy to the earliest English settlers in the southeast of that land we now call the United States. The late 16th-century robe, of deer hide and cowrie shells, shows a human figure flanked by a deer and a wolf, surrounded by some thirty-six intricately dense circles of cowrie shells, each representing a village in this area of the land we now call Virginia. This image of interconnectivity is a map, a graphic design representing place: it shows the paramount importance to the Powhatan of their connection with each other and to their land.

Looking at Margaret Wickens Pearce’s collaborative map of Wabanaki lands, Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal / This is How We Name Our Lands, one has a similar sense of community. While Pearce’s cartographic practice, discussed in the following interview with the cartographer, draws from Western iconological and systematic practices of mapmaking, the feel of looking at her maps is yet one of estrangement from expectation—estrangement, that is, if one is accustomed to maps in the colonialist tradition. Pearce’s work is a multifaceted, careful, and skilled process of un-mapping colonialist naming and colonialist vision of land. Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal features artworks by James Francis (Penobscot) and traditional Indigenous place names (gathered, corrected, and confirmed in collaboration with Penobscot Nation members, most prominently the language keeper Carol Dana and linguist Conor Quinn), in context with Pearce’s own graphic interpretation of mathematical survey, photographic, and satellite data regarding the land’s form. In shaping Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal, Pearce did not create visual representations of land formations unless descriptions of and directions to those land formations are part of traditional Wabanaki knowledge. Her map of the territory in what we now call Maine, then, looks unfamiliar to the settler gaze. Hers is a representation of how Wabanaki people see and name their lands.

Looking at Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal, one has a sense of openness and promise, a sense of grace, that differs from looking at a standard contemporary map of Maine. Pearce’s map is large enough to cover a twin bed. Its colors are delicately verdant, indicating rural spaces. In sync with the choices Pearce has made in representing geographic features, the front of the map shows exclusively Penobscot place names in their language. Places for which no Wabanaki name is known or shareable are not marked and named on this map. Due to this graphic practice, a sense of openness emerges from the map, which is at once estranging to look at, because this is “Maine” where settlers’ descendants feel ownership. And yet the map can also feel exceptionally comforting to view. For the point of view of the map is not a settler point of view; the map is not acquisitive of land. The map’s feeling of openness, for me, is calming and energizing. It permits the land to retain its privacy, allowing the land to speak through Wabanaki toponymy. Would I, who am not Wabanaki and do not speak Penobscot, be able to find my way using this map? Only if I were willing to learn the language and the stories. The map feels like a representation of home. Not my home, but the home of those on whose lands I now live as an uninvited guest. It shows home not as the colonialist idea of a place where one is “king of the castle”, but rather home as a place where one knows and respects the land, with all its living beings, the land alive.

The map’s visual effect is subtle and profound, peeling away a layer of the settler ideology of land as “settled” space and revealing the real land which of course is not subdued. Land (earth) is more powerful than human beings. On some level, we all know this. In this revelation, Pearce’s work is art. While she has long been inspired by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s (Confederated Salish and Kootenai) paintings, such as Memory Map and State Names, Pearce’s maps create their own cartographic idiom, developing from her training as a doctorate in geography, and from her abiding, ongoing immersion in Indigenous knowledge ways.

Cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), based in Rockland, Maine, where she owns Studio 1:1, has devoted the best of her career to creating maps of North American places, cartographies that show and are governed by the painstaking process of what she calls “healing” the land’s colonialist misnaming, returning correct Indigenous names for places to mapped terrains. For Pearce, and her many Indigenous collaborators, this process involves working with tribal members who remember or can discern from mistranslated terms the original names for places. This work also includes deep archival research unearthing colonialist names that yet reflect Indigenous naming and that can be mended by fluent speakers of Indigenous languages, returning these place and land formation names to their correct articulations. Pearce began her exploration as a young scholar seeking to become a writer. But she felt writing constrained her rather than offering space for growth and, by chance, in taking an undergraduate course in cartography while at Hampshire College, Pearce found her passion.

This article reflects a recent conversation with the cartographer, a conversation in which the notion of maps as works of art was a point of convergence and agreement. Maps, as Pearce contends, are “graphic marks, graphic compositions,” images that are not merely visual structures on which words, toponymy, are placed, but are image fields in which words are themselves part of the art, as words also are graphic marks, graphic compositions. This expansive conceptualization of the visual art of maps, in which the connection between word and image is evocatively intensified, draws a clear parallel with the cartographer’s core understanding of her work as a process of healing the North American landscape that has been wounded by colonization and its misuse and misnaming of places. Pearce’s maps are processual images in which Indigenous words shape visible worlds. Looking at her work is like having layers of clouded varnish cleaned from an old painting: in her maps, you see this land anew as a place stewarded for millennia by Indigenous Americans.

Working in collaboration with local Indigenous communities, Pearce has created maps including The Cold at Inuit Nunangat; and mihtami myaamiaki nipinkonci saakaciweeciki / At first the Myaamiaki came out of the water. Wąąkšik huunųp homąnįra wagųsiraregi higi hįnįhawi / We have been here since the beginning of time; and Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal / This Is How We Name Our Lands, a map created in collaboration with the Penobscot Nation in the area now often referred to as the State of Maine. Of this project, Pearce indicates “It was not their first map . . . I joined them in 2011 to continue that tradition.” As she notes, creating a map image involves “choices, creating a narrative,” so that her work involves layers and levels of translation, translating mathematical data into image representations of topographic features, and, importantly, working with language keepers to return to places their original and correct names. Hence, the title Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal / This Is How We Name Our Lands is paradigmatic of Pearce’s approach to mapmaking. Her maps give visual, graphic expression to—and themselves are—the act of healing Indigenous lands from colonization’s violence.

Pearce notes that the “land is a living being” for which Indigenous peoples have been caretaking for millennia. She comments that her work is “translating the land’s voice/speech,” and qualifies that: “every translation is partial.” Her maps incorporate Indigenous beliefs that all the land is living and all living beings on the land are “relatives” of the people who live on the land. This understanding of inhabitation is in stark contrast to colonialist views of land as a resource to be made use of, a source of capitalistic wealth. Pearce emphasizes the historically deep knowledge that Indigenous people have of their land. For example, she mentions that the Ho-Chunk of the upper Mississippi River plateau remember in their traditional histories the glaciers coming and receding. Pearce reflects that for millennia, that is before and after the time of the glaciers, the Ho-Chunk have been able to “live in balance with the river,” whereas in a few centuries of industrialist capitalism the balance has been sacrificed. Her work is to guide towards regaining balance.

Thinking about how maps are used as tools to orient us in space and place so that we know where we are, Pearce’s work challenges the conceptual perspective of colonialist notions of place, which she calls “myopic.” Her work is to “counteract the very myopic relationship” intrinsic to colonialist concepts of land. In this sense, her work is to undo and resist the increasing (though also centuries old) colonialist pattern of “censorship” of Indigenous peoples’ history, knowledge, language, and naming of their lands. “The land speaks” remarks Pearce, and “the map is part of the land’s speech—cartographic language is an active agent, collaborative with what is being said by the land.” Her work in restoring Indigenous naming to this land is the work of restoring sovereignty to Indigenous peoples, moving toward co-stewardship of the land with the visitors (those whose ancestors were colonizers and settlers, and those who arrived more newly; all who are not Indigenous to this land). “Land is the most important thing for indigeneity,” Pearce clarifies. She notes that connotative meaning emerges from Indigenous place names—that is, these are names that express and contain the land’s voice and history—while denotative meanings are all we get from colonialist place names applied to Indigenous land. For example, the words “Old Town, Maine,” simply mark a place while the word “Panawahpskek” locates place and people in union by describing visual, sensory, and knowledgeable orientation to place. It is a name that emerges from, is spoken by, the place itself.

In working with the Penobscot Nation’s Cultural and Historic Preservation Department on Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal / This Is How We Name Our Lands, Pearce collaborated especially closely with James Francis (Penobscot Nation) and Carol Dana (Penobscot Nation). Artist James Francis’s splendid images are integral to the map, both visually and in creating fuller evocations of storied meanings of Penobscot land. Poet Carol Dana brought to the project decades of knowledge and insight she has developed in her work revitalizing the Penobscot language.

One bears in mind that part of colonization was the United States’ programmatic act, spanning 19th and 20th centuries, of forcibly reeducating Indigenous children in boarding schools where they would be stripped of their knowledge of their own languages. It is from this era that military captain R. H. Pratt’s brutal dictum “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” emerges and it is important here to note that destroying a people’s language and culture is a core plank of cultural genocide. In this sense, restoring the language of the land is an active form of healing cultural genocide, and it is a lifelong labor for Pearce.

Around the time of working with Francis, Dana, and other Penobscot people in Maine on the Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawal map, Pearce made the decision to leave her stable well-remunerated, tenured job as a university professor to found Studio 1:1 so that she could continue, unimpeded, to heal the land through the mapping. In making this choice she has endured financial uncertainty and precarity, albeit her recent award of a MacArthur “genius” grant goes somewhat towards alleviating that hardship. Working most closely with Carol Dana, in the creation of Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawa l / This Is How We Name Our Lands, Pearce notes Dana’s determination and resilience in bringing about language revitalization in the face of significant hardship.

“Healing the place names” Pearce explains, is an act of correct translation of the land’s voice and reflects how Indigenous peoples conceptualize orientation and direction on the land. Pearce notes that the “mapmaking language of the Penobscot” orients one in place through ancestral stories of Glusksabe (the creator who shot an arrow into an ash tree from which emerged the people: the Wabanaki). She explains, for example, that knowing the place where Gluskabe set down his basket to chase a moose calf when the calf runs down to the bay orients us by directions we’d now (in English) gloss as North-South-East-West. As she has written, this is an “approach to cartography as narrative, and attention to the story and discourse of narrative as the guide to articulating cartographic process and form.” Pearce works closely with Indigenous collaborators and then destroys the files that contain the knowledge they share with her, so that knowledge is protected. Along these lines, some place names on her maps cannot be healed with Indigenous naming because the original name has been too badly damaged. Such places are signified as untranslated. Pearce also uses the graphic signifier “untranslated” for names that are sacred to the Indigenous people. Place names, Pearce explains “come from the land; the land speaks the place names” and even if that original naming is broken beyond visible repair yet the names “don’t go away.” They are still there.

Viewing both sides of Iyoka Eli-Wihtamak^w Kǝtahkinawa l / This Is How We Name Our Lands reminds me of a written comment Pearce has made about her process of mapping as being both a gesture to “foreignize” and to “domesticate” presentation of the land’s speech. The Penobscot language side of the map conveys to the viewer that the Penobscot language and way of mapping is sovereign and independent of colonialist language and mapping, while on the reverse English language side of the map, one encounters a set of somewhat accessible “domesticated” signs that non-Wabanaki people can understand. Looking at the Wabanaki side of the map one is aware of a language one does not speak. One might speak it—arguably one should speak it since one lives here in Maine—but one does not. Gazing at Pearce’s map, one suddenly feels lost in this place, but that lostness is not a negative space; it is instead a positive comprehension, or invitation to comprehend, the land’s reality. And to be sure, even the English language side of the map, which is structurally like the Penobscot side, conveys a palpable sense of the land’s living expansion beyond colonialist grasp.

The first map presenting the colonizer’s view of the so-called New World was made in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller, only a few years after Christopher Columbus’s violent early acts of genocide (in 1492). While the United States Library of Congress Archives catalogs this map under the phrase “Recognizing and Naming America.” Pearce’s cartographic art labors to correct, as much as possible, the misrecognition and misnaming of America that began with Waldseemüller’s map. Pearce quotes by memory the words of the Wabanaki poet, ssipsis, “Sometimes I feel like throwing rocks, but I would be afraid that I would lose my name, and lose my territory, and damage my mother.” Pearce’s cartographic vision enacts and leads towards healing by listening to and graphically articulating the land’s voice.

 

Image at top: Margaret Wickens Pearce (photo courtesy University of Maine).