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.”
The map that the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people presented in Delgamuukw v British Columbia was sarcastically called “the map that roared” by Judge McEachern. This map was an attempt by the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people to “outline their own sovereignty in a way the Canadian court might understand”(Sparke 468) so that their title and rights to land would be recognized. Although McEachern did not rule in favour of the Aboriginal groups, as Sparke argues in his article, the map “roared” in more ways than one and is part of a challenge against Western cartography known as counter-mapping.
McEachern dismissed the map as a “paper tiger” in that the map’s bark was bigger than its bite. After all, in the Western and colonialist view, Indigenous cartographies were anachronistic, their legitimacy long extinguished (if it ever existed), and so the judge could not understand this map. I believe that the judge may have held the view that this map was too “primitive” and thus ascribed an animalistic characteristic to the map, one that an ‘advanced’ being as he would not be able to comprehend. But in fact, Western cartography is prolepetic, projecting the future on to the past which just does not make any sense. Therefore, not only does this map roar against the forms of colonialism Sparke outlines such as orientation systems, property lines, pipelines, etc.; the map also roars of its own existence before colonialism and its existence in the present. Just because Western cartography may be seen as the standard does not mean that Indigenous ideas of land and place cease to exist. The hybrid nature of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en’s map show that Indigenous ideas of cartography can be fluid and incorporate other cartographies. On the other hand, Western cartography is rigid in time and space and hence limited.
Sparke also mentions that McEachern unconsciously recognized Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en “agency and territorial survival” (470) by saying that this map roared. This agency is also expressed in how the map finds the intersections between Indigenous and Western cartography. The two do not need to be separate and it is high time that the government and the public recognized that. In the article about counter-mapping I have hyperlinked, it mentions innovative ways of doing cartography that is based on this hybrid nature. The map and what it represents has never stopped roaring and with these new types of cartography, the roaring of the land that we all live on can hopefully be understood by everyone.
Works Cited
Louis, Renee Pualani, Jay T. Johnson, Albertus Hadi Pramono. “Introduction: Indigenous Cartographies and Counter-Mapping.” Cartographica 47:2 (2012): 77-79. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
Sparke, Matthew. “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): 463-95. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.