Weaponizing Maps ― Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas

Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers. Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy. The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.

Joe Bryan, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and papers on participatory mapping and indigenous rights that draw from his research with indigenous communities in the United States, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. He has also participated in mapping projects with indigenous communities in the United States and Central America as an independent consultant. From 2000 to 2004 he was a co-director of the Indigenous Communities Mapping Initiative.

Denis Wood, PhD, is an independent scholar living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He lectures widely and is the author of a dozen books and over 150 papers. From 1974 to 1996 he taught in the School of Design at North Carolina State University. In 1992 he curated the award-winning Power of Maps exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York (remounted at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in 1994), for which he wrote the bestselling The Power of Maps. His other books include Rethinking the Power of Maps and Making Maps, Second Edition (coauthored with John Krygier).