Counter Modes in Cartography

Critical cartography takes off from a set of basic critical questions: Who is the author of the map? What is portrayed? How, and for what purpose, is the map made, and what is not represented in the map? No map is innocent.

Counter mapping refers to the crafting of maps that contest hegemonic map information; it shows and points to information that is subjugated or rendered invisible in existing maps. A counter map is basically countering another map. The term “counter mapping” was coined by Nancy Lee Peluso. It is as-sociated with postcolonial and Indigenous mapping practices that emphasise traditional land rights that are subjugated or rendered invisible in state maps.

In 1995, Peluso shone the searchlight on mapping practices perpetuated by international NGOs (non governmental organisation) in response to the Indo-nesian government’s superseding of customary forest rights through official planning and cartographies that provided land for industrial timber exploita-tion. Counter mapping harnesses the power of maps to raise awareness about the politics of spatial justice. Peluso recognises that ‘An alternative or “coun-ter” mapping movement has begun’ and goes on to say that:

The goal of these efforts is to appropriate the state’s techniques and manners of representation to bolster the legitimacy of “customary”

claims to resources. The practical effect is far-reaching: the use of maps and a highly “territorialized” strategy redefines and reinvents customary claims to standing forest resources and harvestable prod-ucts as claims to the land itself. (Lee Peluso, 1995, 384)

Counter mapping is a criticism of hegemonic mapping practices; it involves the making of counter maps to reveal what is invisible in the debate and enables an analysis of how power structures in the discourse of contested landscapes are partly manifested through the use of maps. Two mapping initiatives are of special interest in Sápmi: Globio and RenGis. RenGis is a mapping tool for Swedish Sámi reindeer pastoralists, where industrial plans, biodiversity and reindeer behaviour were superimposed, so that the impacts of landscape encroachments were visualised in a comprehensible way.

‘RenGis is the only systematic register of land encroachments in the field of

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reindeer husbandry that is publicly available’ (Kløcker et al., 2016, 34).¹⁴ In Norway, Protect Sápmi follows this method in supporting reindeer husbandry in development cases in the Norwegian part of Sapmi. Globio is developed by GridA. In an analysis from 2010, industrial plans and plans for infrastruc-ture in North Fennoscandia forecast a loss of reindeer pasinfrastruc-tures of 50 per cent by 2030. Landscape architect James Corner (1999) proposes employing the power of maps as a liberating enterprise and draws inspiration from artistic appropriation of cartography.

Unlike the scientific objectivism that guides most modern cartographers, artists have been more conscious of the essentially fictional status of maps and the power they possess for construing and constructing worlds. (Corner, 1999, 220)

Artist and cartographer Denis Wood has raised criticism of critical cartographers’ attempts to turn cartography—that is a tool of state

governance—against the state, ‘because in the end, what gives a map power is the power behind the map, that is the State’ (Wood, 2010). Especially problematic for Wood is the tendency among ‘counter-cartographers’ to render their own contribution invisible by referring to it as ‘technical stuff’

and, instead, make claims of authority, by referring to ‘authenticity’. Quite harshly, Wood suggests that NGO-driven counter mapping initiatives ‘help cartography penetrate every single space where it has not yet been’, thus unwittingly perpetuating colonial mindsets. He then gives examples of court rules where Indigenous peoples have been granted land rights through material evidence of occupancy that is not maps.

Yet having been challenged by a song, a dish of sand, a painting, no state map can ever again be quite the authoritative thing that it was. And this in the end has to be the systemic contribution of Indigenous mapping to cartographic critique—no matter its manifold contradictions—that of calling into question the authority of the state’s maps. Unless the contribution lies in the very contradictions, cracking open, the way they do, the shell of the map as they remake it. (Wood, 2010, 130)

14 Translated by me from Kløcker et al., 2016, 34: ‘RenGIS är den enda fullständiga sammanställningen av all markanvändning inom renskötselområdet som finns offentligt tillgänglig.’

Critical cartographer and writer Jeremie Crampton finds that, in cartography,

‘Two developments are especially notable: artistic appropriation of mapping and the storming success of map hacking’ (Crampton, 2010, 21). Crampton considers “non-cartographic mapping” some of the most interesting critiques of cartography, and notes that ‘Many of the artists are interested in geo-graphic re-mappings, and have worked with the assumption that maps are political without explicitly saying so’ (ibid, 21). Counter cartographies take many forms. A founder of the Indigenous Mapping Workshop, Steve DeRoy from Ebb and Flow First Nations in Manitoba, emphasises the importance of making Indigenous communities visible on corporate hegemonic maps, such as Google Earth, as well as state maps and various map applications (Pauls, 2017). The Indigenous Mapping Workshop supports geospatial capacity building, to promote Indigenous people’s ability to collect, analyse and visu-alise community-based geospatial information in mapping the future.

The late Greenlandic artist Pia Arke’s term “ethno-aesthetics” mirrors the European fetish for the exotic and the way of perceiving the Indigenous artist as someone that is supposed to produce Indigenous art. Arke’s insights are also applicable to the expectations regarding the kinds of cartography that Indigenous peoples should make in Wood’s (2010) criticism above.

The different ideals of cartography, of scientific objectivism, artistic expression, conventions and experiments live and develop side by side and find their expression through maps of different natures. Pia developed the term “ethno-aesthetics” in her master thesis. It was published by Kuratorisk Aksjon after her death, with an extensive commentary section, written by Lars Kiel Bertelsen. Earlier than most, Bertelsen writes, ‘Pia had understood that both in great things and in small things colonialism (the mastery over and exploitation of one party by another) is a consequence of the aesthetic distinctions between “them” and “us”’ (Bertelsen, 2010, 8). He continues:

For Pia [Arke] this question was an “aesthetic” concern (i.e. a matter of form), and perhaps her choice of the concept “ethno-aesthetics”

instead of “postcolonialism” also contains an existential recognition that this challenge is fundamental and permanent. It is a challenge that all people are faced with; a challenge which therefore does not just come “after colonialism”, but in a certain sense before it. It is not a matter of past guilt, but of future responsibility. (Bertelsen, 2010, 8) While studying fine arts in Copenhagen, Arke found an image of her grand-parents, labelled ‘Greenlanders’ in the magazine, National Geographic.

This prompted her to make contact with tourists, researchers, constructors

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and administrators that had been in Scoresbysund/Ittoqortormiit and ask for copies of their photos. Her project included an exhibition in Scoresbysund, where the citizens were invited to write names on the photos and share stories about the people that were depicted. In this way, Arke restored the history of the Greenlandic town, Ittoqortormiit. Pia Arke died in 2007. Throughout her whole artistic career, she deployed postcolonialism and geopolitics as a deep personal experience. In 2010, a retrospective exhibition, ‘Tupilakosau-rus’, curated by Kuratorisk Aksjon, took place in Nuuk. One of the works in the exhibition, Legend I-V, comprised five large collages of early maps of Greenland, juxtaposed with portraits of the Inuits that contributed the knowl-edge and skills that made the expeditions and measurements possible. In the programme for ‘Tupilakosaurus’, Jan-Erik Lundstrøm (2012) alluded to J.P.

Harley, in writing that:

Legend I-V unites life experiences rooted in personal biography with geopolitics; how the small strokes of the pen, which change a map, a map picture, and which draw in a territory, can completely at one and the same time, affect and define people’s lives. (Lundström, 2012, 275)

In the same year, Stories from Scoresbysund: Photographs, Colonisation and Mapping (Arke, 2010) was published. It is a book about the Greenlandic-Danish Artist Pia Arke’s work from 2003 on cartography, story-making and postcolonial reflections as an artist. Pia Arke explored how geopolitical tensions affected the Greenlandic population. Growing up in Scoresbysund, a city constructed by the Danish rulers as an answer to a Norwegian land claim on East Greenland in the 1920s, she lived a colonial experience. The town had the Greenlandic name, Ittoqortormiit, which ironically means, ‘the place with big houses’. The Norwegian land claim was taken to court in The Hague. The Norwegian anthropologist, Helge Ingstad, one of the main figures in Norwegian anthropological history, was Sysselmann in Scoresbysound the year Norway claimed East Greenland under Norwegian jurisdiction. Besides the measure of constructing the town, the Danes further produced the first territorial map that was based on aerial photos and won the trial. Pia Arke showed how territorial politics affect and define people’s life, but also that the challenge is to take on a future responsibility.