At some point I definitely need to read and study more about Indigenous mapping, in general. The concept itself being called "mapping" in english already sets off some alarms in my brain.
While it isn't something I've personally specialized in before, growing up, a huge part of our understanding and relationship to the Land came from reading a place. Since Ancient times, we've marked stone and trails to keep track of flocks or herds of local animal populations, the status and location of bodies of water, the history of a place, it's ecological rhythms and how we have participated in them through hunting, tending and sowing, stories of who lived there (both human and non-human), and how they lived, and tracking every important event in their yearly cycles, or in their larger history.
Alarms are raised by the fact that we call it mapping, instead of what it really is: reading. We didn't make maps the way europeans do. Maps are a smaller, simplified representation of the land that you can carry with you and read anywhere. For us, that's impossible, the map is the land itself. The writing is laid right there for anyone with eyes, and knowledge, to see. And more importantly, it requires being in that place to be able to read it. You cannot read our traditional "maps" without their natural context. The symbols depend on their surroundings to be interpreted, and are often related to very localized or regional history. For example, sites were certain battles took place had special monoliths placed over the graves, that narrate their story in an interconnected manner. The moment you remove the "map", the monolith and it's story, from that place and even away from each other... there's no way to read it because you no longer know exactly who, what and where each piece came from. Some symbols are universal, sure, but most are extremely dependant on context, and cannot be interpreted properly without that surrounding context. It's less like a map, and more like separating words and even letters from a paragraph and expecting each to make sense independently... that's not how writing works.
Which is also why I'm always so heartbroken and frustrated at seeing our monoliths in museums. Alone and away from the Land they belong to. Those are not only headstones, they are pieces of the map of the Land that guide our way through it in more than just a spatial way, it is how we keep track of our relationships in it, of our history and ability to remember the past and learn from it, to move forward aware of it's lessons and within the complex context of each place with the people as a part of it... all that you've effectively destroyed by removing them from their own site.
