Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1984, pp. 91-108.
Abstract
References to the maps and mapping activities of North American Indians have appeared in scholarly writings for approximately two hundred years and in contemporary accounts of discovery and exploration for more than four hundred years. The topic has received relatively little attention, however, from modern scholars. In view of the recent expansion of Indian studies in both Canada and the United States, this lack may at first seem surprising. In part it reflects the fact that there are relatively few extant examples of Indian maps because Indians and most whites have tended to treat them as ephemera, not for the most part worthy of preservation. In part it also reflects both the geographical scatter of extant examples through the libraries, museums, archives, and private collections of Europe as well as North America and the problems of searching through the vast literature and the large number of dispersed archival collections in which accounts of the mapping activities of Indians are occasionally to be found.
It would be possible to write on this topic with reference to any major region of North America, but areas within and immediately adjacent to the Great Plains are particularly frequently represented on extant examples of Indian maps. While most of these date from the nineteenth century, some are of eighteenthcentury origin, and the earliest (1602) of all the extant examples of Indian maps from within North America covers part of the southern Great Plains.
North American Indians were in no sense unusual among the world's historic nonliterate peoples in making things which we call "maps" and which undoubtedly had many of the functions we associate with maps. Mapmaking is a universal trait~an aspect of pictographic communication that, in Europe at least, probably originated in the Upper Paleolithic, perhaps as early as 20,000 B.P. Within nonliterate societies it probably did not have a clearly differentiated status until after contacts with whites in the historic period. Throughout the world, white aliens solicited from native peoples geographical information about their terrae incognitae, and the response was frequently in map form. This experience was particularly common in North America, where Inuits and Aleuts as well as Indians conveyed information to whites in this way.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln