The roar of the map, the cries of our nations

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 recall the last time I used my GPS and map. Specifically, I was driving to visit a friend in Burnaby, and made sure to type in ‘Burnaby’ for when my GPS asked me for the city of my destination. Interestingly when I got there, the line that separated Richmond and Burnaby wasn’t a gigantic strip of paint on a guarded road that I had expected from reading the map, labeled ‘From here, it is the land of Burnaby’. So how do maps actually…work? What do they actually…do and mean?

A map can actually speak to us. Arguably, a map can actually have an effect on how our society is run, operated and thought of. Think about it. Maps are representations of our land, and lines that separate ‘your’ land and ‘mine’. The words ‘You’re on my land’ wouldn’t exist without the performance and application of mapping techniques and traditions. A map can come to define what is what, and where is where. A map for example is visual proof of where Canada as a nation starts and stops, purely structurally. These maps can speak to us in the way it tells us what is Canadian and what is not, in the most simplistic way of paper and pen, with lines and borders. But is what makes us Canadians purely what fits into these lines and what doesn’t? In Sparke’s words, the map, the “more radical and creative aspect of the Atlas has been to provide a cartographic “musical score” which, once given contrapuntal voicing, can enable its national Canadian audience to rethink the colonial frontiers of national knowledge itself” (Sparke 468). In other words, a map sings to us in the way that it attempts to define what ‘us’ even means. But how can this be dangerous and detrimental to identity restoration of ‘what used to be’? How can maps then become a way of segregating not only the land, but the past and the present?

Judge McEachern makes the statement “We’ll call this the map that roared”. I can see why the map can be a highly distrusted article used to define a nation, or a nation’s identity. Maps have the ability to literally break up, fragment and divide kingdoms and land with, arguably, arbitrary lines of separation and ownership. I am drawn to the lectures of a previous English professor of mine in regards to his research on maps and its effects in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Simplistically, his research and analysis was focused on how maps can come to represent a form of blindness in its ability to simplistically abstract a nation’s meaning down to mere lines of separation and definition.  Land, its meaning and culture, is reduced to pure markings on a page. A map is dangerous (Page 423 of book) in this way, and can be thought of as threatening to a nation’s identity and history. I believe the roaring of the map in Sparke’s article refers to the “simultaneously [evoking of] the resistance in the First Nations’ remapping of the land: the cartography’s roaring refusal of the orientation systems, the trap lines, the property lines…” (Sparke 468). The roaring is the oral and auditory cry of distrust and anger towards the dangerous nature of maps and its ability to literally break apart nations and it’s identities.

I don’t believe the ‘roaring’ starts and stops with a map. I believe the creation, retrieval and maintaining of national identities innately carry a sense of battle, and a need for a roar, for one’s own history and meaning. A roar for identity, a roar for pride and a roar for patriotism. Maps attempt to silence these powerful and meaningful roars with its own loud roars of separation, fragmentation, and a need for selfish ownership. Maps mute the cries for identity.

What would Canada be like without borders?

What would all our nations be like without borders?

What would our World be like without borders?

Words Cited

Carlson, Kathryn B. “Year in Ideas: How Canadian Identity Has Changed and What It Means for Our Future.” National Post Year in Ideas How Canadian Identity Has Changed and What It Means for Ourfuture Comments. National Post, 28 Dec. 2012. Web. 11 Feb. 2015. <http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/12/28/year-in-ideas-how-canadian-identity-has-changed-and-what-it-means-for-our-future/>.

Outhwaite, William. “Nationalism.” The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 423. Print. <https://books.google.ca/books id=JJmdpqJwkwwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>

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): 463- 495. Web. 11 February 2015.