The Cree can boast the first comprehensive land claims settlement in the history of Canada (Brody 1981; Carlson, 2008; Hornig, 1999).

Matt Sparke’s 1998 paper “A Map That Roared” has always struck me as a unique achievement.  I re-acquainted myself with the ideas and arguments Sparke puts forth in that paper when I had the occasion in a graduate seminar to read his book “In the Space of Theory” which includes that earlier paper as one of its chapters.

I have a pet theory.  Perhaps you can help me with it.  I would like to work through it a bit; to see if I am in the grips of a theory; to see if it is real.  I have this idea that maps are platforms for carrying memes, or units of cultural information.  Those memes are expressed in place names.  In other words, place names are the phenotypic effects of memes. 

It is late February in Eastern James Bay.  Wind-packed dunes of snow move under black spruce behind the new band office building.  Walking to work today over those dunes I thought about Hugh Brody's book, "Maps and Dreams".  I though to myself that those maps Brody found the people of northwestern BC using were not so different from the ones being used here in James Bay, way out across the country and at least 25 years distant from Brody's time in BC. 

Maps make messes.  Maps can also be used to mop messes up.  Consider the apparent cleanliness of colonial mapping: missionaries and mapmakers often willfully exclude indigenous populations from cartographic depictions of 'unknown' north america, leaving pristine, clean white where the 'mess' we'd rather not see resides (Brealey, 1995; Harris, 2002; Law, 2004).
Counter-mapping is a method of upsetting such carefully constructed blank slates.  Even where local resources are included on maps, those who depend directly on those resources may not be made apparent.  When those local folks make known their presence on the land, through the use of maps, they are engaged in counter-mapping (Peluso, 1995).

There is an astounding level of hypocrisy in academia.  Critiques of power abound, while individual academics make containers of themselves, waiting for the manna of power, in the form of tenure, publication and prestige, to fall into open, waiting hands.  The abjection of power's failure to act equally abounds.  Aspiring academics, graduate students, and undergraduates are often caught in various wheels of 'knowledge production,' getting in line to have various potentials assessed, passively collecting what passes for knowledge that literally trickles down the trunks of hoary academia, because that is what they are being trained to do.  These 'lesser' receptacles' potentials, once assessed, using 'objective' criteria, are then treated and calibrated for 'success,' a