Prompt: 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.”

Sparke’s article “A map that roared and an original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation” talks about the land claim and ownership between the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people versus the federal and provincial government of BC. In 1984, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people brought a case against the provincial and federal government over hereditary and ownership of 58,000 square kilometres of territory. The Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people used cartographic tools to gain recognition of their native sovereignty from the Canadian court. When the presiding judge, Chief Justice Allan McEachern sees one of these maps that they had drawn, he described one of their maps as “the map that roared” (468).

In his article, Sparke puts forward the suggestion that McEachern may have been referencing the ‘paper tiger’(468), which is a translation of a Chinese phrase that means something appears threatening and dangerous on the outside, but actuality is internally ineffectual and powerless. Initially the judges found the map to be threatening to the law but really was ineffectual. Sparke also goes on to the question whether McEachern’s statement was in reference to the film “The Mouse that Roared”,1959 political satire film about a fictional country that decides to declare a war on the US with the aim to lose quickly and benefit from the financial aid that US has previously provided. Both of the references imply that the Judge McEachern was not going to take the claims of Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people seriously. He did in fact dismiss the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations’ claims to ownership and jurisdiction. However, the Supreme court decided to overturn Judge McEachern’s ruling in 1997 after the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations filed a land title action.

This case shows how ignorant the government has for Indigenous views. The map is a powerful visual representation that clearly shows the Indigenous perspective on their land and it naturally carries the colonial claims of their land. However, in saying that the map “roared” the Judge Mceachern was failing to recognize the power and knowledge that the map was trying to convey and instead making a mockery out of it. He lacked understanding of the duality of Canada’s origin history and only viewed the Indigenous people’s claim from “his understanding of Canadian History”(470) which were very biased from the Western perspective.

Works Cited

R. v. Comeau – SCC Cases (Lexum), scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do.

Sparke, Matthew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 3, 1998, pp. 463-495.

“The Mouse That Roared.” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053084/plotsummary