Layered Land Grabs: Ambiguous Critical Cartographies of Indigenous Dispossession

Keywords: dispossession, land grant, Indigenous geography, critical cartography, ambiguity
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the wake of Lee and Ahtone’s 2020 article “Land Grab Universities,” many Land Grant Institutions have begun the process of addressing their ties to the Morrill Act of 1862, including identifying the Indigenous Communities adversely affected by the violence-backed dispossessions that supported their founding. Geospatial techniques provide an entry point into this research, allowing one to locate university parcel data within treaty cessions and territories, but can easily oversimplify the complexities of Indigenous relationships to land and risk reifying colonial impositions of ownership and property. Historical complexities are also easily overlooked— quantitative GIS methods often miss the layered dispossessions, community movements, and coalescences that characterize the 17th-20th centuries. Drawing upon research into Cornell University’s entanglements with Indigenous dispossession, this paper proposes a critical cartography that embraces ambiguity within dispossession research. Ambiguity, following Pearce and Louis (2008), confronts colonialist binaries of land, including those inherent in treaty negotiations and subsequent land cessions, and instead provides cartographic tools that may better convey Indigenous “depth(s) of place.” Dispossession research should embrace an ambiguity or “fuzziness” (following Mackenzie et al 2017) in its cartography as a means of counteracting colonial constructions of lands and their exchange. Such confrontations contribute to more meaningful and genuine actions for universities wishing to address their relationship to dispossession.