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 story of the “map that roared” begins with a land claim between the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people versus the federal and provincial government of BC. This is a case that is remarkable for several reasons. It highlights how little regard the government has for Indigenous views, as well as highlighting how favourable the law is for Western views. In this dispute, the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people worked very hard to try and at least meet the Western court halfway. The evidence they presented for their land claim included maps that they had drawn of the land, so that the Judge presiding over the case could understand their claim (Sparke). This Judge, Chief Justice Allan McEachern, upon seeing one of these maps, referred to it famously as “the map that roared” (Sparke). This case ended with Justice Allan McEachern absolutely dismissing the claim, for reasons we will go into, but what did he mean by “the map that roared”? What can this statement tell us about how he viewed the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan people? We will be using Matthew Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation”, to help us answer these questions.

In his article, Sparke makes a suggestion as to what he believes McEachern was intentionally saying by using those words, but he also explores what he may have alluded to or subconsciously meant. Sparke points out that he believes McEachern was referencing the colloquial term “paper tiger”. Meaning that the map on its exterior may be threatening to the law, but in actuality is ineffectual. He also points out that McEachern could be possibly referring to the 1959 Peter Sellers movie “The Mouse that Roared”, that was a satire of Cold War geopolitics (Sparke). From these two possible references, Sparke indicates that “the comments might be interpreted as a derisory scripting of the plaintiffs (Wet’suwet’en/Gitxsan) as a ramshackled, anachronistic nation” (Sparke). I believe this was Sparke’s version of what he thought McEachern was trying to say. Sparke goes on though. He brings up Don Monet, a cartoonist working with the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan, as Monet points out that “the Chief Justice’s reference to a roaring map simultaneously evoked the resistance in the remapping of the land: the roaring refusal of the orientation systems, the trap lines, the property lines, the electricity lines, the pipelines, the logging roads, the clear-cuts, and all the other accoutrements of Canadian colonialism on Native land (Sparke).

This roaring refusal may have been more accurate as to how the Wet’suweten and Gitxsan felt about the map, but I don’t think McEachern would have acknowledged or even noticed this consciously. Sparke goes on in that McEachern dismissed the land claim “with a remarkably absolutist set of colonialist claims about the extinguishment of aboriginal rights” (Sparke). Also that “he systematically dismissed Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en claims to ownership, jurisdiction, and damages for the loss of lands and resources since the establishment of the colony” (Sparke). From this I think we can see that McEachern’s comments of “the map roared” were intended more as a derisory comment than anything else. His decision and views on the Indigenous peoples stem from “his understanding of Canadian history”(Sparke), which have obviously biased him to that of Western ideas. If we take the paper tiger example, it is obvious form the get-go then that McEachern did not believe that the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan had a case to argue. That even at that point, he knew that he was going to deny their claim. The map they created was entirely to have the court take their claim seriously, but even at first glance McEachern had dismissed it.

The map may have roared, but it fell on deaf ears.

Works Cited

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.