Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas

by Joe Bryan, Denis Wood

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.

Genres: Geography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 4, 2015

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

An account of the México Indígena project, which sought to map certain indigenous populations in Mexico, and its collapse after it was discovered that one of its principal funders—and the recipient of all of its gathered data—was the US Foreign Military Studies Office, tenuously drawn out to book length with impressions on how maps of indigenous peoples in the Americas have previously been used by indigenous communities and by US military interests.
The implicit claim of the title that using maps for control is somehow novel or unusual rather than the entire point of maps for as long as people have been mapping is obviously questionable (maps aren't being weaponised—they are and always have been weapons), and it's not clear that Weaponizing Maps wouldn't have been better off being a long-form article somewhere purely about México Indígena than a book. If nothing else, though, it does at least comprehensively demolish the credibility of the American Geographical Society, past and present, which is always good.