Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations

Abstract

This essay looks at indigenous mapping initiatives from the prism of documentary cinema and its activist potential. It starts from the assumption that critical geographers as well as film studies scholars have seldom focused on cinematic cartography in relation to indigenous land claims. Whether funded by national institutions, or individual initiatives of Indigenous artists, moving images – and animation in particular – are means to historicise and complicate the notions of borders and land ownership. The essay is two-fold: focusing first on the reappropriations and subversion of official state maps by Indigenous films; then on alternatives to Western cartographic representations, using cognitive mapping to formulate a more embodied conception of space and the land.