Mapping Indian Country: Culture Areas, Linguistic Stocks, and the Genealogy of a Map

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, anthropologists employed social-scientific thematic maps to help sharpen their understanding of the indigenous cultures of the Americas and to explain the American Indian past to the broad populace. While anthropologists initially depended on insider knowledge of a range of American Indian informants to create their small scale maps, their works generalized and schematized American Indian cultures. The maps also conveyed the cultural biases of their European or Euro-American creators. Over time, the map depictions are understood as established “facts” rather than “research leads” or pedagogical devices. These maps continue to be utilized by historians, anthropologists, cultural and regional geographers, and in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. But the maps are often employed in an uncritical manner. My poster presentation traces the evolution of these ethnographic, archaeological, and linguistic maps, noting their many uses throughout time and their continuing usefulness today. It also offers important caveats regarding their limitations for present-day scholarly application.

Maps of Indian Country produced from the middle nineteenth century until the 1960s offer one important window onto the roots and routes of scholarly (scientific and social-scientific) knowledge regarding American Indians. Study of the intellectual trends that led to the creation of the maps is one important aspect of such a study. For example, many of the concepts behind the mapping have their roots in Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeografie. These maps often exhibit a conflation of “blood” (ethnicity), land, and language and clear borders that emanate from prevailing ideas of 19th century German nationalism. After illustrating core concepts borrowed from German cultural-geographic thought, the poster traces the evolution of the American school of ethnology.

The research concedes the pedagocial usefulness of ethnographic mapping while exposing the inherent a-historicity of utilizing static maps with fixed borders to explain American Indian territorialities of the past and the limits of imposing the nation-state model in a teleological way. The research provides a useful history of social science while challenging long-held assumptions. It also challenges the predominant notion that the study of American Indian and European interactions should be confined to “contact”/invasion, early colonial history, plains Indian Wars, or latter-day European fascination. Moreover, the research contributes to Native American studies in offering a framework for de-colonizing American Indian internalized views regarding our own nations’ historical borders and boundaries.