Weaponizing Maps

Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers. Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy. The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.

Joe Bryan, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and papers on participatory mapping and indigenous rights that draw from his research with indigenous communities in the United States, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. He has also participated in mapping projects with indigenous communities in the United States and Central America as an independent consultant. Denis Wood, PhD, is an independent scholar living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He lectures widely and is the author of a dozen books and over 150 papers. From 1974 to 1996, he taught in the School of Design at North Carolina State University. In 1992, he curated the Power of Maps exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design (remounted at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in 1994), for which he wrote the book The Power of Maps. His other books include Rethinking the Power of Maps; Making Maps, Third Edition (coauthored with John Krygier); and Weaponizing Maps (coauthored with Joe Bryan).