This page was created by Collin Hardwick. 

Local Networks: Toward a Decolonial Map of Pullman

Place

Such postcolonial approaches to mapping apply to the experiences of American Indians, as well. Indeed, Byrd asserts the close ties between the goals of American Indian studies and Postcolonial studies, stating that "if anything, bringing indigenous and tribal voices to the fore within postcolonial theory may help us elucidate how liberal colonialist discourses depend upon sublimating indigenous cultures and histories into fictive hybridities and social constructions as they simultaneously trap indigenous peoples within the dialectics of genocide, where the only conditions of possibility imagined are either that indigenous peoples will die through genocidal policies of colonial settler states (thus making room for more open and liberatory societies) or that they will commit heinous genocides in defense of lands and nations" (xxxiv).

Of course, as this 1881 plat map of Pullman shows, such an approach has been used in order to delegitimatize Native claims to land in the United States, on the very lands used by Washington State University.  According to WSU Historian Mark O'English, the 1881 map planned for hundreds of settlers who had yet to arrive, yet the land was divided in anticipation of potential growth, taken from Native inhabitants by the colonial imaginary long before the plat map's plan for the area was to be fully carried out. Thus the very act of mapping Pullman in such a way was a colonial act, one upon which we continue to build as we engage with and utilize colonial discourses of measurement. 
 
In the light of the plat map of Pullman and its legacy, it is crucial that those working and living at WSU continue to recognize that their university was built on the traditional homelands of the Palouse and Nez Perce tribes. Keith Basso has written extensively on a Native understanding of land, place, and shared wisdom, specifically with regard to the Apache tribe, but he surmises that it is at least in part a shared philosophy among many, if not most tribes of American Indians (63). According to Basso, the Apache view the land as a "repository of shared wisdom," and places are even the "possessions of particular individuals," as well as resources for storytelling (63, xvi). Basso outlines the place-making of the Apache people as a type of history which is place-based first, and only secondarily time-based (31). Because of this, the names of places are stories in themselves, which persist but are also remade each moment, for each person, as sources of shared wisdom and even morality, foundational to Apache culture (60-70). One of Basso's Apache guides directly states the comparison between this logic and the colonial logics of the plat map: "white men need paper maps...we have maps in our minds" (43). Though Basso's experience with one tribe cannot obviously be extrapolated to all, his notes on the general trend of ties between American Indians and land, which run so counter to western colonial logics, challenges any digital map of Pullman which might be based on discourses of measurement.

How, then, to fashion a useful decolonial map in response? One answer already lies with those tribes which continue to maintain their connection to the land and water of the Palouse region: the best and most obvious decolonial maps may not reflect Western logics of mapping at all. But when it comes to digital tools, the question then becomes one of whether or not they can contribute anything in such a context. I think they can.
 

This page has paths:

This page references: