The very concept is embedded in the colonial relationship itself, implying as it does that there is some land that is not sacred. Moreover, the federal government did not allow “sacred land” as a legal land-claim defense until the 1970s, and its documentation must meet standards defined by the federal government, a bizarre requirement since the federal courts seldom demonstrate much wisdom in cosmological or religious matters. Thus Indian spiritual connections to the environment are frequently examined and negotiated in light of contemporary residential development, land management activities, and outdoor recreation as well as legislative activities and the outcomes of litigation. Spiritual connections are seldom straightforward however. Stephen Jett suggested that there may be varying degrees of sanctity for Navajo, although he is unclear about whether such a continuum emanates from his own analysis of the situation or from Navajo interpretations. In addition, James Griffith explained in detail the multi-valent possibilities of places where ideas of sacredness held by the Tohono O’Odham, Yaqui, Mexican, and Anglo American peoples intersect. Also, Linea Sundstrom attempted to set the record straight for the Black Hills using archival documents in an ethnohistorical reconstruction identifying what is held sacred in the area, since when, and by whom, including at least seven tribes. The secular popularity of the subject of sacred lands has not come without repercussions. People are dehumanized and cultural complexity trivialized when non-Indian environmentalists furate on indigenous ecological spirituality and activity while ignoring other significant aspects of community and culture. Bruce Willems-Braun makes this point about marginalization of the Nuuchah-nulth of British Columbia, square pot who often have been denied an active role in debates over wilderness preservation because a perspective on the environment has frequently been imposed on them rather than asserted by them.
Three decades ago Brian Goodey called on geographers to work as researcheradvocates in support of Indian tribes and their economic development. Sincethat time, land use, economic development, and tourism, especially related to gambling, have undergone rapid change in Indian Country. When coordinated with tribal interests, research into these areas generally has been viewed positively by tribal governments. There are a number of geographers and their colleagues who are working for tribes directly or as consultants, or are pursuing research on these topics independently. Data problems are a major concern among these researchers, especially difficulties encountered in using census and Bureau of Indian Affairs or Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development , the Canadian equivalent of the BIA, data for analysis of population and economic and community development. A critical issue in tribal planning is the need to establish a framework for government-to-government relations between tribal and city, county, and state governments when work must be accomplished in a regional context. A major applied research effort on this topic was carried out and summarized by Shirley Solomon, a geographer working with the Northwest Renewable Resource Center in Seattle. This collaboration produced extensive coordination of tribal groups and local governments. One study found that access to health services was severely restricted on the Round Valley Reservation in northern California not only because of its extreme distance from comprehensive medical facilities, but also because trained medical and dental professionals could not be consistently retained. Another found that Montana Indian women were twice as likely as non-Indians to have to travel outside the county to a birthing facility and even more likely to have poor obstetric care anywhere near where they live.
None of this will come as a surprise to readers familiar with rural life, especially life in Indian Country. But geographers are novices to health care planning and are only just beginning to realize their expertise may be of use in examining aspects of health care such as location, access, travel distance, and sense of place. The new multicultural conceptions of health and well-being now beginning to replace standard medical-geography models undoubtedly will encourage more interest in Indian health issues. Federal legislation in the 1980s and 1990s made gambling a potentially significant component of reservation economic development, the impact of which was examined in two edited books and several articles by geographers. The case studies indicate rapid growth in gambling accompanied by some economic benefit accruing to most participating tribes. Long-term stability, increasing competition from other gambling facilities, subsequent social polarization, and the politics of wealth redistribution both inside and outside reservation boundaries are recognized as problems. Regional studies for Connecticut, the Dakotas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma also are included in these publications. The sale of American Indian arts and crafts and the associated appeal of cultural tourism have long played a role in Indian economic life, although the benefits have been distributed unevenly from region to region. In the past, such activities were generally directed and controlled by non-Indians, and the bulk of revenues and proceeds went to non-Indians. While there are some exceptions, this pattern often continues today. Several geographers have studied the consequences of tourism for Native populations and the increased effort to gain local control of tourism facilities and activities. Geographers also have begun applying postcolonial or other social theory to American Indian studies. Generally anglophonic postcolonial studies have emerged from and focus on the British colonial experience; accordingly, postcolonial American Indian research is well represented within Canadian universities, most notably the University of British Columbia. These researchers seek to deconstruct and assess the imprint of a European worldview on the lands, minds, and bodies of Indians. They draw inspiration from postcolonial literature and French intellectuals Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
These diverse theoretical currents are brought together in studies of colonial surveillance and control of Indian spaces, the appropriation of such spaces through ethnocentric cartographic or other textual representation, and the various Indian responses to such practices. Nicholas Blomley has employed similar themes, investigating Indian blockades in British Columbia as a mechanism for tribal reappropriation of space, and Robert Galois has attempted a revised empirical overview of historical Kwakiutl settlement free from earlier colonial biases. Explaining the mechanisms of group representation and identity is fundamental in several studies: Berry’s comparative work on waterscapes and representation for Paiute and non-Paiute communities in northern Nevada; Dennis Crow’s inquiry about reservations as “low places”; Deur on the Makah whale hunt revival; Galois on the period of colonial consolidation in British Columbia; Peters’ examination of the apparent conflict between “city person” and “Indian” identities in Canadian cities; and Silvern’s study of treaty-rights conflicts in Wisconsin. Also, the spatial aspects of gender are influential in the way places and people function. Karen Morin examined British women’s constructions of Indians as Others in historic “contact zones” like the railroad depots of the American West, Peters explained the role of Indian females in subverting urban spaces in Canada, and Wishart considered the role and status of women in Pawnee society, and the general place of Indian women as subjects of geographical research. In an unusual link to demographic study, Robert Jackson sifted the evidence of population decline in the US Southwest and developed the thesis that deaths were related not only to disease, but also to place/space destruction and reductions in cohesion, identity, and sense of place. In a similar vein, R. Douglas K. Herman provided insight into changes in Hawai‘ian identity in response to colonization and corresponding shifts in environmental knowledge and language. The question of whether there exists a pan-Indian sensibility about place and space also has been of some interest. In a 1976 interview, N. Scott Momaday proposed and described what he termed a pan-Indian ecological sensibility bound into Indian identity, an ethos distinguished from those of non-Indian North Americans by the presence of what he termed a sense of “reciprocal appropriation.” Then geographers David Stea and Ben Wisner wrote of a panIndian ecological worldview projected outward in solidarity with other indigenous or Fourth World peoples. Since then a few geographers have examined pan-Indianness as an evolving identity crucial to understanding the link between place and action, drainage collection pot and one has written about the men’s movement’s appropriation and wild distortion of elements of this identity.56 Others have shown how Indian identities are materialized in places as disparate as battlefield and massacre sites, cultivated gardens, migration corridors, and interior landscapes of the mind. The Inuit have been of particular interest, as shown in studies attempting to explain their mental landscape representations or “mental maps,” their navigational skills, and their secondary position to environmentalists’ identification with stranded whales and stripped seals. Place names or toponyms are also of longstanding interest to geographers, and another intersection where the work of anthropologists has been influential. Most recently the intimate links among social structure, individual and group identity, and place were illustrated by geographers studying Chinook Jargon, Inupiat, Hawai‘ian, Navajo, and Inuktitut place names. The study of Indian and Inuit maps accelerated during the past ten years and helped revitalize cartography as a discipline with an historically and culturally situated subject matter, and not merely a narrow technical one. A group of writers have examined the interpretations made of Indian or Inuit maps by nineteenth- and twentieth-century explorers and government agents, and the discourses into which these documents entered, including those of contemporary scholarship.60 Map exchanges between Indians or Inuit and Europeans or Euro-North Americans occurred everywhere in North America, but extant examples and thus much of the research effort is concentrated in the continent’s interior plains from Texas to Saskatchewan, and in the Arctic.
These maps are seen as emanating from different assumptions and discourses about the world as a home for humans and non-human others when compared to what Europeans and Euro-North Americans were producing. Indian maps actively disrupted European discourse on geography, history, and identity, and represent one side of what was and still is to some extent an unbridgeable gap in worldviews. The other side, the European and Euro-North American mapping of Indian Country, has also come under scrutiny. This cartography spans the last five hundred years, but geographers have tended to study comparatively recent examples. They have questioned these maps, often finding them ideological weapons serving non-Indian interests rather than the simple and innocent mimetic representations that the general public and their makers imagined them to be. Several others deserve attention because they emanate from Indians or Inuit themselves and represent a new trend of “mapping back” or “counter-mapping” the colonizers. A Zuni Atlas was published because Zuni elders, in their effort to press a land claim, decided it was time to make certain protected geographical information available to the public for the first time. In part this atlas is notable because it reveals some Zuni sacred sites in order to demonstrate land occupancy beyond present reservation boundaries. But it does so using maps drawn at a scale too small for the reader to navigate. Thus the sites were revealed for litigation purposes, but still kept safe from unwanted visitors. The Inuit have been especially active in counter-mapping. First, they created a map series containing their own place names inscribed on Canada’s official topographic maps, then they assembled the Nunavut Atlas, an extensive compilation of wildlife patterns and other environmental data gathered from Inuit elders. These may be viewed both as attempts to overcome disruption of the traditional oral transfer of geographic information from one generation to the next and also as nationalistic outpourings in anticipation of the creation of the new Territory of Nunavut in 1999. Robert Rundstrom has taken note of these developments and their implications in an article and map review. GIS are a completely new technological development within the past two decades but are understood as a natural extension into the digital era of gathering and mapping geographical data. To put it most broadly, GIS are computer systems for the gathering, storage, and manipulation of geographical coordinates and associated statistical data about anything on the earth’s surface, expressions of which can be made in either paper or digital form. They are more than computerized mapping systems because they can transform information in ways uncommon or unknown in traditional map making and they easily link with orbiting satellites and the remotely sensed digital images that satellites transmit. In the past five years, a national American Indian GIS association has developed and is closely linked to the leading corporate manufacturer of GJS software; tribes, therefore, have been very active participants in GIS applications and research. Continued efforts to link the US Census Bureau’s Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing file maps with tribal information has also helped some tribes initiate detailed spatial data analysis of the lands and people administered by tribal government.