Assignment 2:6 – Fear of the Unknown

Hello again everyone.

For Lesson 2:3, I decided to answer Question 3, which is as follows:

3] In order to address this question you will need to refer to Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” You can easily find this article online. Read the section titled: “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (468 – 470). Write a blog that explains Sparke’s analysis of what Judge McEachern might have meant by this statement: “We’ll call this the map that roared.”

I decided to answer this question because I felt that it built off of my previous blog post well, where I spoke about familiar discomfort. Give it a read if you plan on reading this blog because I will, most likely, be referring to it throughout.

In Sparke’s article “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation,”  he mentions a historic moment in Indigenous and Canadian legal history in the section titled “Contrapuntal Cartographies.” In this section, Sparke tells the story of the moment that Chief Justice Allan McEachern denied the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people’s efforts to stake claim to the lands that were historically their own. Upon further research, I discovered that their evidence that these lands were theirs was mostly through oral stories (first stories, as we’ve learned, were often the way to communicate laws of Indigenous people.) When McEachern denied that oral tradition was a valid enough way to establish law, the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people turned to cartography to communicate where their rightful land was in a way that the Canadian legal system could understand.

In a historic moment (not in a good way) McEachern proclaimed that he would refer to the map they created as “the map that roared” (Sparke, 468). This can be taken a few different ways. First, I will speak about the meanings that Sparke suggests and then I will speak about my personal perspectives on what McEachern meant.

Sparke first mentions a movie from 1959 entitled, “The Mouse that Roared.” Upon further research, this movie was known for comedic depiction of Cold War politics. Sparke acknowledges that this could mean that McEachern was trying to make a “derisory scripting of the plaintiffs as a ramshackle, anachronistic nation” (Sparke, 468). This comment could have been an attempt to make a caricature of the Wet’suwet’en people, however, Sparke also mentions Don Monet. Don Monet was a cartoonist that drew under the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people and perceived McEachern’s comments as a form of resistance. This resistance was to the First Nation’s cartography, or remapping, of the land. In their cartography, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people left out a lot of trap, property, electricity, and pipelines. They also left out logging roads, and other marks of “Canadian colonialism on native land” (Sparke, 468.)

My personal interpretation of McEachern’s comments is that they are purely derived from fear and racism. I think that racism is stemmed in fear of what we do not know. When using the word roar, a word that is often associated with fear, McEachern was talking about the map and the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxan people. I believe that seeing First Nations people, who were unfamiliar to him themselves, outline the land in a way that wasn’t familiar to him, McEachern was uncomfortable and most of all afraid of the potential for the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxan people to take control.

This article is not about First Nations, but is kind of interesting in how it speaks about the relationship between racism and fear.

Work Cited

Sparke, Mathew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.3 (1998): 468-470. JStor. Web. 18 Feb2020.

Henderson, Mark. “Racism is learnt from fear of the unknown.” The Times UK, 29 July 2005. Web. 18 Feb 2020.