Indigenous Knowledge and Colonial Cartography

It would be easy to start my post this week with a snide remark about academics who are not historians writing history. But there's something to be said for generosity in scholarly writing, and the critique of others' scholarly writing, so I'll set my snide remarks aside. In Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World John Rennie Short has pulled together a fascinating body of evidence, and convinced me that there's plenty of readily accessible documents that attest to the presence of Native Americans along side the Europeans, and eventually Americans, who explored North America.

In Cartographic Encounters, Short uses the terms “cartographic encounter” and “symbiotic destruction” to describe the relationship between Native Americans and the Europeans who relied on them for geographic information. As his terms suggest, Short is eager to both emphasize the agency of native people in the European “discovery” and “exploration' of the territory that eventually became the United States, and make clear that this information ultimately contributed to the demise of North America's indigenous populations. Short suggests that while initially the exchange of geographic information for trade goods benefited Native Americans, in the long run, their geographic knowledge helped the United States to dominate territory and eventually cast aside their indigenous interlocutors.

Short's argument covers a lot of chronological ground in order to make the case for this last part of his argument. But I would have appreciated a more in-depth look at some of the cartographic encounters Short describes. Short might, for example, have paid more explicit attention to the power dynamics at work in an encounter between La Salle's men and a band of Illinois, from who La Salle's men have just stolen corn (43). The episode, in Short's words shows on the one hand “the Illnois hoped to benefit materially and position themselves better geopolitically against their traditional enemies” while La Salle's men “in return received much-needed food that enabled them to survive the winter and much-needed spatial information that allowed them to plan their travels” (43). For all his claims to deconstruct his European/American sources, Short takes his source here at face value, and never raises the question of whether La Salle's men could, or did, make good on their promise to the Illinois.

The term “cartographic encounter” loses much of its usefulness when Short fails to examine the relationships of power in an encounter or exchange like the one between La Salle and the Illinois. But Sharp also uses the term to describe a confusing array of situations. In Cartographic Encounters it refers not only to chance encounters and verbal transfers of geographic information like this one, but also to expeditions where Native Americans were paid participants in expeditions, and when European and American explorers were guided by trails and roads. These all seem like interesting instances in which to consider the transfer of geographic knowledge, but Short doesn't differentiate between such instances, or consider how the motives for giving duplicitous directions to a passing expedition might differ from the motives for participating in a expedition as a guide.

In Cartographic Encounters, I'm frustrated to see such interesting evidence treated in a cursory fashion, but I'm not sure a more fully theorized treatment of this kind of evidence offers up answers that are any more satisfying. In his chapter “The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscapes, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica” Neil Safier, like Short, argues that indigenous people in colonial Brazil “did provide knowledge that influenced European spatial understanding in a region that had once been the natives' exclusive domain” (181). But much of Safier's argument hinges around a single account of an Indian who drew a map, which might have been incorporated into a more formal imperial representation. It's a tantalizing glimpse, and I for one am fascinated by the prospect of reexamining colonial sources for unexpected evidence of indigenous influence. But I'm also wary of the enormous claims both Safir and Short seem willing to attribute to a smattering of incidences.