Walking with and on Turtle Island: Indigenous Activist and Artistic Expressions in North America as Counter-Mapping Practices

Abstract

Indigenous Peoples have expressed, remembered, and performed spatial orientation, imaginations, and relations as part of their various movements across Turtle Island (the North American continent according to some Indigenous Nation’s creation stories), including migration, trading, hunting, gathering, and also the forced displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands to reserves. Gwilym Lucas Eades’ (2016) research demonstrates how Indigenous communities understand spatial imagination and use maps and digital media to express their cultural identity, reclaim land and assert their sovereignty, tell stories, transmit cultural knowledge, and counter colonial narratives through counter-mapping showing the essence of one’s spatial awareness. In the context of this study, I understand counter-mapping as a form of activism against dominant power structures to restore the voices and perspectives of Indigenous nations that oppose Western notions of place and spatial imagination and question the arbitrarily imposed by colonization borders between different areas on earth, between people and between nature and man. This paper explores three different forms of walking experiences as Indigenous counter-mapping practices. The protest walk initiated by David Kawapit, known as the Journey of Nishiyuu or the Journey of the People, a 1,600-kilometer journey of a group of young Cree walkers from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to support the Idle no More movement marks a contemporary activist expression of embodied mapping through journeying. The traveling art installation project Walking With Our Sisters, honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, demonstrates how Indigenous artists bridge the walking and traveling experience to enact a counter-mapping practice for resurgence and healing of the community. Finally, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, a solo performance choreographed by Michelle Olson and Floyd Favel, presents how Indigenous performers draw from travel stories and nomadic experiences of their ancestors to establish contemporary artistic expressions of embodied mapping as forms of resistance to colonial narratives. Drawing from decolonial cartographic approaches and Indigenous perspectives on land and mapmaking, these Indigenous activist and artistic performances of journeying are theorized as counter-mapping practices offering decolonial mapping of Turtle Island and embodied healing.