In his paper A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation, Matthew Sparke mentions the incident that occurred of Justice Allan MacEachern’s referral to the map of Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en territory as’ the map that roared’ (Sparke 468). Essentially, this map categorically rejected all the devices being utilized by colonizers on native land: these devices include property lines, logging roads, pipelines and general systems of colonial orientation.

McEachern dimissed the Gitxsan and Wet’swuet’en’s claims with what Sparke calls “a remarkably absolutist set of colonist claims about the extinguishment of aboriginal rights” (470). Despite the fact that McEachern dismissed the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en’s map and all its aforementioned rejections of colonial infrastructre, his use of the phrase ‘the map that roared’ belies an interesting point.

By using the word ‘roar’, McEachern invokes thoughts of a wild, untamed creature using the most primal of its instincts to lay a claim over its territory; he is thus, albeit indirectly, acknowleding that the Indigenous groups to whom the map belongs are the rightful owners of the land.

Eventually, McEachern’s judgement was overturned and a new trial was conducted, which was considered a huge victory in terms of  First Nations rights. The Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people claimed ownership and legal jurisdiction over 58,000 square kilometers of land (Sparke 470) in British Columbia. This case was one of the first of its kind, as it was concerned with geographical ownership and was facilitated by the voices of the First Nations people.

At the very beginning of this section of his piece, Sparke refers to the Atlas, and argues that the ‘template of contemporary Canada is imposed proleptically on a heterogenous past’ (468). Sparke is acknowledging that the cartography present in the Atlas  will “enable its national Canadian audience to rethink the colonial frontiers of national knowledge itself” and to “reconsider the discontinuous positions of native peoples.” The central commonality between the Atlas and the McEachern case is of course, maps. Maps are the very foundation of both geographical and national ownership, and they play an extremely important role in the defining of a nation’s identity and its history.   

Works Cited

Sparke, Matthew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation” “Contrapuntal Cartographies” Seattle: University of Washington.