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Gone are the clear, neatly delineated boundaries of modern nation states. A new, equally clear yet very different geopolitical regime is presented. Contiguous territories that abut each other yet also kinda overlap (or sometimes really overlap). A three-part scheme that distinguishes between territory, language, and treaty.
This approach provokes so many questions. What does it mean to overlap (is it a process vs. a static reality, is it peaceful, etc.)? What is a territory and who defines it? What happens in the little slivers of land not covered by the translucent blobs? What happens in the waterways and lakes? Is the concept of "treaty land" universal in some way? What does non-treaty land mean?
We debated all these issues in grad school, and seeing it in an interactive map like this is all the more powerful. I hope that readers here see the questions that maps like this provoke as an asset rather than proof of fallibility.
Looking forward to reading more about the creator's research and pedagogical methods.
Maybe it's relative geographic stability (e.g., not moving around very much)? But it seems like that's pretty arbitrary depending on how much you zoom out--i.e., if you zoom out wide to all of Europe, Europeans were very stable for a very long time, and if you zoom in tightly on a given Native American tribe, they probably migrated over a wide geographical area.
The Wikipedia page for Indigenous peoples claims that the majority of indigenous people live in Africa and Asia. [0]
My first thought for indigenous people in Asia would be Tibetans, but if I google "are Tibetans indigenous?" it appears to be a matter of debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-...
Generally part of it is history of colonization. Good example of non-european related indigenous people are the Ainu, who are considered indigenous in comparison to the colonizing Japanese.
They are not generally considered indigenous. What about them?
> What about non-indigenous groups which have been colonized?
Examples of such groups?
I think there are examples, but it depends on how broad your definition of “colonized” is. The most extreme cases are the various isolated tribes of the world (of course, everything is interconnected, so a disingenuous person could argue that our impacts to the climate which affect their lifestyles constitute a kind of colonization, which is to say that disingenuous people like to stretch semantics).
> Examples of such groups
Virtually any non-indigenous people who have been conquered by an empire. The Irish are one of thousands of concrete examples.
Indians, Irish, many African countries, many SEA countries, etc
The reason indigeneity is not applied to Europe or Asia is because those cultures are just as indigenous as the natives of other parts of the world, but they've advanced well beyond that.
The resurgence of indigeneity as a concept is due to a resurgence of the noble savage myth on the behalf of europeans and a xenophobic, racial purity craze on behalf of certain self-described indigenous (it's hardly a universal thing).
In reality, being part of a lineage that's been on a certain plot of land gives you no more rights or authority than anyone else. Land division, ownership, and use should be determined by the needs of currently existing people, not tied indeterminably to the past. Why is it that we are happy to toss out any old tradition, and any old legal document, in order to bring it up to date with modern needs, but we simultaneously need to kowtow to people who claim their authority solely from the immobility of their ancestors?
The literally definition reads: "Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group"
In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization.
In extension, here in Canada the Métis People (explicitly descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and cultural practices. They are by no means thought of as "pure bred" as you reductively tried to frame it.
The University of Alberta has an excellent, widely accoladed, and free MOOC on Indigenous Canada that I highly recommend you, and anyone else interested in learning more, consider taking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada
> No. Métis are not presently exempt from paying provincial or federal taxes. You should not attempt to use an MNO citizenship card for this purpose. If you do, you will be personally liable for any legal consequences.
(from https://www.metisnation.org/registry/citizenship/frequently-... )
The same page almost comes close to answering the question I had, which is, "what make a person Métis"? It seems to be someone who is not otherwise "aboriginal" but also not entirely not so either.
And exactly, what am I supposed to learn from this? What happens if you descend from the earliest known inhabitant of a place? Don't we all? Exactly what are you supposed to gain from being a descendant of such a person as opposed to those who are not? Do I get brownie points for having a nose?
> In extension, here in Canada the Métis People (explicitly descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and cultural practices.
Exactly my point. The word is either meaningless (anyone who's different is indigenous) or it refers directly to a notion of racial purity. You can't have it both ways. Either its meaningless and useless or its meaningful and dangerous.
I belong to such a creole group, and I don't understand why it ought to make me so special. Guess what... it doesn't. Governments can classify us as whatever they want. I'm indigenous, like all other humans, in that I descend from the earliest known inhabitants of many places, presumably. And I'm also a mix of many cultures, like EVERY other human being on the planet. Oh also, I'm the child of conquerors, because literally everyone is. No one is special. People who think their ancestors make them special deserve the highest forms of criticism.
EDIT: one more thing:
> In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization.
How needlessly eurocentric
maybe we can just rewrite that subtly, to get
"the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to one of the most cataclysmic mass death events in the history of humankind, in which roughly 10% of the total human population of the planet died"
any better?
Sure, not long after, they sent armies to conquer the land, but that's not part of the die off that took place before most of those armies got off the boats.
I'm not pretending there was anything more or less noble about the residents of the Americas vs. those of Europe (although the latter do have a spectacularly bad record).
The amount of brainwashing in this sentence is absolutely insane. You state a thing about no group being more or less noble and then immediately contradict it with European exceptionalism. When will the gaslighting end?
I don't see this as a European trait so much as an extension of the religious and political doctrine of the period. The combination of Abrahamic ("personal relationship with god") religion powering a divine right of kings and technological war superiority seems to be a particularly vicious combination. Other cultures and civilizations have engaged in some brutal oppression too, but for the most part they seem to have understood that other humans were (1) humans (2) potential assets and subsequently engaged in a more complex aspirational relationship with the conquered than most European cultures have tended to do.
Did Europeans attempt to exterminate peoples in Asia and Africa?
> I don't see this as a European trait so much as an extension of the religious and political doctrine of the period. The combination of Abrahamic ("personal relationship with god") religion
“personal relationship with God” is solely a trait of Christianity. Anyway Christianity and other Abrahemic faiths are widespread across many civilizations which are peaceful so I doubt this factor.
> divine right of kings
This has been a feature of many civilizations going back at least to the Egyptians but probably much earlier. Nothing particular to Europe or Christianity (or Abrahamic faiths more generally) here either.
> technological war superiority
Here I agree, but I actually think this was probably a relatively minor advantage compared with the disease factor which meant the Europeans were fighting peoples whose civilizations were positively collapsing.
> Other cultures and civilizations have engaged in some brutal oppression too, but for the most part they seem to have understood that other humans were (1) humans (2) potential assets and subsequently engaged in a more complex aspirational relationship with the conquered than most European cultures have tended to do.
I don’t think there’s any truth to this. Many other peoples enslaved, exterminated, sacrificed, and even ate their vanquished. Europeans stand out merely in their efficiency.
I don't think this is true. Judaism and Islam both feature the same fundamental concept: there is a single god who cares about you personally and that your behavior and belief will shape that relationship in terms of direct, personal consequence. This is not true of the pre-Abrahamic faiths, it's not true of the religions of Asia or Africa.
> Many other peoples [ ... ]
Can you name any other conquerors in history who had a clearly and repeatedly stated goal of the complete elimination of the conquered? I'm not saying there are none, but I'm not aware of them.
"Personal relationship with God" refers to the idea that God knows us as individuals and cares about us individually (rather than as an abstract collective). That's a uniquely Christian theology. Islam and Judaism both believe that God knows and cares about his creation in general, but that a relationship with God isn't possible because God is beyond human understanding (Christianity also agrees that God transcends human understanding, but disagrees that this prevents a personal relationship). Indeed, both Islam and Judaism maintain that "God is not a person", while Christianity maintains that Jesus is the literal personification of God.
> Can you name any other conquerors in history who had a clearly and repeatedly stated goal of the complete elimination of the conquered?
1. I don't accept that this is true for European powers in any general sense at any point in history.
2. Selection bias--even if prehistoric peoples did have this stated goal, we would be far less likely to have any evidence. We do have evidence of prehistoric genocides and all manner of other violence, and we don't have any compelling framework for why Europeans would be uniquely evil. Even still, history records many attempted and successful genocides by non-European powers (e.g., Rwanda, Cambodia, Ottoman Empire, etc) and many European genocides which predate the Christianization of Europe (contrary to your framework about why Europeans are/were uniquely evil).
3. I don't accept that "repeated stated goals of genocide" is the right metric when we can look at actual genocides.
My question wasn't about the totality of the European record, but specifically about what was done when they arrived in the Americas.
> Islam rejects the doctrine of the Incarnation and the notion of a personal god as anthropomorphic
What utter nonsense. The british colonials were epic in their attempts to integrate their colonized into their societies. Gandhi himself trained to be a lawyer at a prestigious law school (the Inner Temple) in England. See the plethora of ex-colonials in England itself. Same with the spanish (whose colonized peoples have literally adopted the moniker latino/a to describe themselves) and the portuguese (who -- as the descendants of portuguese colonization -- are pretty popular overall in the areas they colonized).
I’m not defensively posturing? I’m not even European. Sometimes people are just interested in the truth—no need to suppose some nefarious motive.
> I'm not pretending there was anything more or less noble about the residents of the Americas vs. those of Europe (although the latter do have a spectacularly bad record).
Terrific, I’m glad we agree here (although again Europeans have a bad record because they kept a written record, not because they were uniquely barbarous).
That one's ancestors suffered in some way does not give you any more authority or importance today.
The impact of disease on the Americas was arguably numerically larger than actual colonization, and the initial wave (say, 1492-1520) probably wasn't very intentional. So yeah, that particular experience doesn't give anyone "more authority or importance today".
But colonization, first by the Spanish and later by northern Europeans, was literally a war whose goal was frequently the complete annihilation of the population already in the Americas. It was a brutal, vicious war (that in a number of senses continues to the present day), and suffering through that does, under most western-ish moral philosophies, give you some status that you otherwise would not have.
> suffering through that does, under most western-ish moral philosophies, give you some status that you otherwise would not have.
This is an interesting point, but I don’t think the common belief is “indigenous have moral title to the land due to great suffering”, but rather due to “they were the first people in the land at recorded history” so in our collective psyche we errantly assume they must’ve been the first there ever. I deed, if it were merely “suffering” then surely their disease experience alone would suffice? These are at least the reasons I’ve commonly heard, including from people in this thread.
> The impact of disease [ ... ] So yeah, that particular experience doesn't give anyone "more authority or importance today".
What we could do is read a little more carefully, just for starters.
In particular, doesn’t the idea of legally recognizing “a people” seem pretty close to 20th century racial ideologies (per the parent’s point)? How do we test an individual for membership in “a people”? Is there a one drop rule? Do you have to pass a cultural competency test? Speak a language?
What does it mean when we say “such and such land rightly belongs to such and such people”? Even if that people group was the earliest known, that doesn’t mean they didn’t likely take it from an earlier group.
It seems to me that the entire concept is fraught with the same problems that beset 20th century racialism. And please note the distinction between “indigenous people are bad” and “categorizing people into ‘indigenous’ and ‘other’ seems like a bad idea”.
Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest known people = special." It's more that displacing, dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most? all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas, Australia, etc.
I don't have any answers for you about how to test for membership, and you're absolutely right that this particular aspect of the issue is fraught. I'm not an expert but I believe that in the United States at least this question is left to the tribes themselves. ("The courts have consistently recognized that in the absence of express legislation by Congress to the contrary, an Indian tribe has complete authority to determine all questions of its own membership."[0]) That seems reasonable on its face at least, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of recreating the issue one level up: the United States government decides who is and isn't a tribe, and that's just as fraught.
These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or their way of life.
Many changes in people groups with respect to territory are simply migrations. Is there any evidence that violent conquest is the norm and migrations are the exceptions? My amateur understanding of history and archeology is that migrations are the norm and conquest is the exception (although posing this as a binary is itself misleading because violence is a matter of degrees). Moreover, lots of people who aren't considered indigenous have been brutally conquered, but we don't afford them special status (e.g., virtually any people which has been conquered by virtually any empire).
I certainly agree that many indigenous peoples in history have been brutally conquered, but considering they aren't the only ones and many of them haven't been brutally conquered, it seems like a crumby proxy.
> These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or their way of life.
Fully agree (who wouldn't? is this even controversial?), but I don't understand the "indigenous is a useful proxy for peoples who have suffered" argument.
Of course it is another discussion completely if every culture is something we want to try to rescue. Right now the general atmosphere is that yes, we do want to try to have as many cultures survive as possible instead of the great assimilation thinking of previous centuries.
Wouldn’t it be all the more effective and righteous to categorize between “colonized peoples” (rather than simply indigenous) and “other”? Or even “cultures at risk” versus “other”? Or do the Inuit have some stronger claim than the Irish or the Armenians?
In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as much time documenting them.
And finally, I put quotes around 'indigenous' and 'first', because for the most part this is a map of the groups of people who were most recently replaced; before the map of tribes in the Americas you see in the link, there were larger cultures/empires that rose and fell (Inca, Aztec, Maya, Mississippian, etc).
The Arab conquests of North Africa would like to question this.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_Afric...
The latest genetic evidence suggests there was actually a very high level of replacement of the indigenous inhabitants of a large part of central/southern Africa, e.g.
Despite a gap of 5,000 years in some cases, all four of the children’s genomes were remarkably similar to one another. But compared with the DNA of modern Africans, their genomes were more closely related to those of the hunter-gatherer groups in west central Africa that are sometimes known as Pygmies than they were to those of contemporary Cameroonians or other Bantu-speaking populations.
The researchers also used the genomes to understand even older events in human history. The four children seem to descend from a group of Homo sapiens that branched off from the common ancestors of our species more than 200,000 years ago — perhaps even earlier than the ancestors of distinct Indigenous southern African groups known collectively as Khoesan peoples. Previous studies of modern human genomes had suggested that these groups descended from the oldest distinct lineage of Homo sapiens. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5
So populations who'd been living in Africa for 200k years were displaced and replaced just recently, in fact the tale seems quite familiar - original hunter gatherer populations replaced by agriculturalists. Europe and Asia are much the same, nearly everywhere.
No, the Bantu expansion was mass genocide on a continental scale. The bulk of africa was previously populated by brown skinned people and pygmies, not by Bantus, who originated in the west Niger delta. From that delta, they exploded, exterminating the rest of south saharan Africa. Most of the natives were killed but some were enslaved and kept as food - an entire continent genocided, with many tribes eaten to extinction.
You can see evidence of this with DNA studies and by the fact that virtually all the brownskinned people or pygmies are gone. Sub-saharan africa is now a black skinned continent inhabited primarily by Bantus, when it was previously a heterogeneous continent with black and brown skinned people as well as pygmies.
It may have taken more time than the European conquest of America, but it was much more bloody.
It should be noted that the pygmies are generally in a symbiotic relationship with the Bantu today - competition between the groups is limited by the fact that the pygmies inhabit non-arable land.
This would have been different when the Bantus arrived, of course.
Huh? The Bantu expansion mostly happened well within what in the rest of the world is the historical period. The people the ancient Egyptians documented to their south do not exist today. The replacement of the population of South Africa was late enough that it happened under white rule.
There was no phase where African people were replaced by Europeans, but that's not at all the same question.
This map is mostly a still picture of where different tribes and ethnicities were when they first encountered Europeans (or written history).
"indigenous" French, for example, is harder to define because there was no written history or very little. Are the people who painted the Lascaux caves [0] the "indigenous" French? After them there were Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures that evolved; where they descendants of the Lascaux people or part of a group that settled the area?
Same thing with Greenland and eastern Canada, the Viking made some descriptions of the natives that more or less matches what Europeans latter observed. But it's not clear they were talking about the same culture [1]
Well said.
The difference is likely linguistic. When it comes to Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about nation states, empires, kingdoms, or other political structures. When it comes to the Americas or Southern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about tribes that are pigeonholed into larger cultural groups based upon their similarities. In some cases, that may be fine in the sense that it differentiates how societies functioned. In other cases, it is used to trivialize the degree of development reached in the Southern Hemisphere and the Americas even though there is evidence of developed societies.
As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others).
There have also been some relatively recent discoveries that (especially North American) Native American societies were considerably more advanced than Europeans encountered because old world diseases advanced ahead of European settlers and wiped out native civilizations before Europeans were on scene to capture it in writing. But this also isn’t European supremacy, it’s understandable ignorance—it’s taken significant advances in archeology and technology (I think much of the evidence of advanced civilizations came from Lidar mappings of settlements which have long since been engulfed by jungle or forest).
> As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others).
I’ve know relatively little about the indigenous Britons, but we know that there were Celtic tribes in Britain prior to the Roman conquest, and we even know the names of many of said tribes. The fact that this isn’t commonly known isn’t some sort of European superiority as you suppose, but rather that we haven’t done a good job of educating people about British history.
One reason not to include them on the map is that would illustrate the nature of waves and conquests thought-out the ages until relatively recently when territories congealed. however, this would undermine the notion that the Americas had little turnover of land control and that there was less intertribal warfare and that extra continental conquests are different.
e.g. The Eastern Shoshone were, at the time of early European contact, in Alberta. Their territory on this map doesn't even touch Canada. Why? They were forced out (with violence) by the Iron Confederacy long enough ago that they no longer claim any land in Canada.
Tribal territories change, often radically and especially so when nomadic tribes are involved. Hard, immutable, and sharply defined borders are a modern construction. If territory wasn't actively defended, it was free for the taking. Some territories might have had such plentiful resources that they could be shared in peace, but most probably had to be fought for. That's why you see so many territories overlapping. Several tribes may have used a territory and still consider it "theirs", even if their control was never solid.
We tend to think of the land as offering limitless bounty to hunter-gatherers, but just the opposite was true. Compared to land under agricultural or pastoral use, even well-tended land used by hunter-gatherers was far less productive. If another tribe moved into your tribe's territory, that meant less food for your tribe. So, you had to defend your territory. Constantly.
New Guinea is a good place to study if you want to learn about traditional hunter gatherer societies because tribal territories and conflict remained distinct well into the 20th century and have been studied extensively. As late as the mid 20th century, when two strangers met it was customary for them to sit down and try to establish the nature of their relationship. Who was on whose land? Was the person who was not on their own land in any way related to anyone who belonged on that land? They'd recount genealogies for hours towards this end. It was serious business because, if the trespasser had no connection to anyone in the territory he had entered, the other person was socially obligated to run them out of the territory with violence.
Today, we mostly think of strangers as potential friends or, at least, people bringing money to local businesses. Hunter gatherers had to think of strangers as a resource drain that needed to be cut off for the good of their society. It's an alien way of thinking that we've largely forgotten, but it's reflected in this map. People died violently practically everywhere you see territories overlapping, and those borders are just a snapshot in time.
As for peaceful co-existence... This is a modern myth. Hunter-gather societies in New Guinea, although they had no large-scale war or pitched battles, had constant, internecine, low-intensity tribal conflict. The death-toll due to violence of this kind of conflict adds up over time. Jared Diamond, in one of his books, estimated that deaths due to violent conflict in the tribes he was studying was actually higher in just the first half of the twentieth century than in Germany through two world wars. The world wars were catastrophic technological horrors, but they had a start and an end. Not so with tribal conflict. It just goes on.
What we don't seem to understand very well is the nature of territorial claims prior to European contact. It is overly simplistic to paint these aboriginal groups as small tribes that claimed small geographic spheres since they ranged from nomadic groups that migrated across large territories, to small villages dependent upon fishing or agriculture, to relatively advanced large cities. Yet regardless of the type of society they formed, our understanding of how they regarded their geographic sphere is tainted by the mostly Western histories written of them from the time of contact. Not only are these histories tainted by religion and politics, but they are tainted by how those historians understood the world.
The word "native" in the national anthem has nothing to do with indigenous peoples though -- it's a poor translation of "Terre de nos aïeux", which is really more along the lines of "land of our forefathers"... and is a reference specifically to the Quebecois, who settled in what is now Canada long before the British conquered them in 1759.
So... yeah, you can mangle the lyrics to make a point about European settlers, or you can keep the lyrics as written and make a snide remark about how the British should give Quebec back to the Quebecois. Neither version is really very flattering to the concept of Canada as a nation!
A Quebecois friend, after a bottle (or two) of wine, once told me there's no such thing as "Canadian Culture".
It's all either from Quebec or a response to something Quebec did.
How true is it?
I don't think there's a single Canadian culture. There's many. And no, I don't think much of English Canadian culture comes "from" Quebec. In fact most people in English Canada have very little actual concept of Quebecois culture. The language divide is real.
Quebec is its own distinct nation & culture within Canada.
And frankly if Canada is defined most in response to something, it's the US and its revolution. Loyalist refugees firmed up the foundations of Upper Canada (Ontario) political culture, and the Canadian tradition of "peace, order, and good government" likely has its genesis as a response to the perceived excesses and dysfunctions of the American political tradition.
And all of this is leaving out the first nations, which was the original topic of TFA.
Weren't a lot of them criminals that were offered to leave the US? Or who harbored allegiance to a foreign regime? Wouldn't use the term "refugee" for that...
> the Canadian tradition of "peace, order, and good government"
Citation needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Canada_Rebellion
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buil...
Refugees is precisely the right word for many (not all) of them.
You could probably make a case that there isn't much of a unified Canadian culture, but rather a large number of Canadian cultures. The indigenous peoples of Canada clearly have their own cultures; so do the Quebecois and the Acadians. After that you start getting more into "imported cultures"; there are large British and American influences across the country but also large minority groups which -- especially in the prairies -- have have made contributions to local cultures.
It has been said that where the USA is a melting pot which turns immigrants into Americans, Canada is a mosaic in which every piece retains its original nature; immigrants are encouraged to retain their cultural practices rather than discarding them in the name of conforming to "Canadian" culture.
We also work to add more areas to the map over time — this isn’t a ‘finished’ project.
Will you be releasing more info about your research methods and pedagogical theory? Really interested to know more about how you make the sausage.
Also, wrt to Africa specifically, I do remember when I was doing history grad school about 10 years ago that one of the more provocative hypotheses at the time was that some or all tribes may be colonial constructs. Curious if you've engaged with that hypothesis, and more generally how you're going about mapping territories in Africa.
Great work, and I hope that you persevere and not let the haters get to you.
P.S.: Are you looking for any volunteers? I do full-stack web dev and have experience w/ Mapbox.
The BC Treaty Commission has a website with a map showing them at their various stages: https://www.bctreaty.ca/
Is land a place of our ancestors? Is land something spiritual? Is our land defined by where we know the plants and animals and mountains? Is it something we can own, or never own in any way? How do we draw borders over history when borders shift? These are all interesting and great questions. Chew on them.
There are plenty of news stories out there if you want to read more about the early goals of the map, but essentially it was about education. This isn't trying to be a legal or academic resource -- it's not an attempt to map an "accurate" picture of Indigenous lands before colonization or anything like that. It's not depicting a particular year, either.
Increasingly, our goal is first of all to map Indigenous people according to their own conception of traditional territories. We don't mind overlaps and we don't mind being "wrong", since a lot of times this whole concept of traditional territory is difficult to pin down. Our goal is to have Indigenous folks look at the map and see themselves represented.
Everyone pointing out the blankness of Europe, Africa, and much of Asia are totally right to do so. This blankness is due to 1) a lack of resources. This was a volunteer project by myself alone for years, and it was hard enough to put together the dataset and then try to manage fixes for North America, let alone engaging with all the complexities of the entire world and all the histories and differences contained there. There's thousands of shapes on the map, and messing any of them up can have serious consequences for people. Then, 2) because it takes a lot of understanding and expertise to even attempt to map parts of the world where we don't have deep connections and knowledge. We can't just run roughshod into Africa and Asia and start mapping random ethnic groups when we know so little. Those connections take time to build. We have gotten caught up in trying to improve and add places where we are more able to define Indigenous, but it doesn't mean we think there are no Indigenous people in other places. It just means we are going to take longer to understand those places and we'd rather do it well than do it quickly. And 3), ensuring we are focusing on the right things. We aren't necessarily trying to get the whole world done and then be like "we're done! let's wrap up!", but rather to have the map and website managed by Indigenous people who can direct things in a good way for the long term. Which may mean focusing on capacity building more than map expansion, at times.
We really welcome fixes, thoughts, anger, and everything you have to direct our way -- don't hesitate to contact us. We are also really into building relationships with other interested organizations. This is very likely a project that will take many years to come to improve, and we are really driven to make something that is meaningful and valuable to Indigenous people. Again, we have no desire to be an academic or legal resource, and regarding this as such is misunderstanding the project.
Finally -- the data is totally open and available! Just check out our API page in the Resources section. But try to use the data in a way that understands how it's going to constantly shift, might be totally wrong, and is often not verified directly by communities.
Thanks everyone for the discussion!
Map link on click leads to
https://native-land.ca/maps/treaties/point-elliott-treaty/
which leads to, among several others,
https://www.duwamishtribe.org/treaty-of-point-elliott
All very clean and direct. This helps me at least understand these concepts a little more easily. Thanks to the folks who made this.
>A few notions that underlie this idea of being “Indigenous” in a particular place in Africa may seem obvious, but need stating:
>The importance of knowing ones’ ancestors and their ties to the land
> Knowledge of local power structures and traditions
> Knowledge of religious and spiritual traditions that are tied to land and living in a particular place
> Knowledge of language, ethnic traditions, and governance
> That language and ethnicity may intersect in unusual ways, and neither is necessarily an indicator of indigeneity
The criterion seems to be, "how much alienation of European modernity have you absorbed?", which is just kinda strange to me; everyone in Africa who is not an Afrikaner has been there for tens of thousands of years and has some measure of a relationship to their ethnic traditions, so what would be the threshold? Native Americans have a similar situation where there's a spectrum of "alienation".
The displacement of the more primordial human lineages such as the Hadza and Khoisan happened ~8,000 years ago in the Bantu expansion, from which the majority of African languages we know today descend.
As told by the history and traditions orally passed down from generation to generation, from elders to the young, we know that our ancestors did not consider themselves to "own" land. And they certainly did not have treaties amongst themselves and others before colonizers arrived.
Land is something that all spirited creatures, from humans through to the deer through to the tiniest of insects and fungus, share. We never "own" it, but merely coexist with it for a limited period of time.
The land is as much, or as little, ours as it is the bison's, or the elk's, or the snapping turtle's.
We may drive away the bear, or he may drive away us, but in the end the land is where it will be and how it will be.
None of us "own" it. It isn't "native land". It is just land.
For what it's worth, I'm indigenous and maintain close ties to my family's pueblo in New Mexico.
[edit for spelling]
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...
The closest indigenous nations to me, that I'm most familar with, those of the NW Coast, certainly had sophisticated property rights, both physical (ie. hunting grounds) and intellectual (particular rights to use songs, stories and figures in art).
It's pretty brutal but in the end, that's kind of what it is. If you dissolve all governments, teleport us on a new world and wait to see what happens, ownership will develop based on this. No one "owns" Jupiter at this time. If one day someone manages to deny access to Jupiter to others, while having access to it, that person will probably reasonably "own" Jupiter.
The concept you are referring to as "land ownership" is not uniquely European, it has been present in African and Asian nation-states for ages, maybe it's Afro-Eurasian...
And the map of the middle east avoids Ottoman/Turk and British doings.
It's not like that was 1000 years ago; There are people today that were alive when that happened, or knew people who lived through it.
> the whole thing is a big fucking mess.
The map could be interesting as a historical resource. Selectively framing it in terms of 'native land' sadly turns it into one giant irredentist manifesto.
Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Territory and Language Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903173 - July 2015 (7 comments)
The Black Sea area probably has had too much turnover to be useful. India is also underrepresented.
Come to think of it South Africa also has a history of displacement by colonialists and also others looking for opportunity in the wake of the colonialists.
Do Irish, Scot and Welsh Celts count as indigenous - these were all colonised by the English? Similar question with groups that have held the same territory across history, such as Indians, Mongolians, Pakistanis, Saudis, etc... are they indigenous? Many were colonised but have since reclaimed their land.
Are you going to include Uyghurs? They have been colonised across large parts of South East Asia, and up to today are being driven from long held lands.
>Reconciliation: >the restoration of friendly relations. >"his reconciliation with your uncle"
Clearly implying that we are not on friendly relations right now. Mind you, 75% of natives have abandoned the reserves and joined Canadian society. Our multiculturalism and diversity accepts them.
But why did the government censor the opposing debate? If you watched that debate, they never actually debated. They all agreed with each other.
This is because we aren't on good terms with the natives and allowing debate on the subject would inflame the problem. We have to say we are going to get friendly, even though we never do.
>The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.
>John A Macdonald, 1887
He was a conservative prime minister who created legislation intent on destroying the natives. Worse yet, Pierre Trudeau, our current prime minister's father, in addition to a future prime minister. Liberal Jean Chretien wrote the 1969 white papers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_White_Paper
They never did it. What an absolute shame. We almost fixed the disaster that it has become today.
Our current government will look like they are doing something to fix the problem. But in reality will not actually do anything.