(Re)Mapping Native Denver

Keywords: Indigenous Peoples' Self-Determination, Counter-Cartography, Decolonization
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Settler imaginaries are realized in material space through settler science regimes, organized through the institutionalization and disciplining of knowledge practices to perform, mediate, and maintain settler order. We trace the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Denver, Colorado, and how Denver’s Native community refuses otherwise. We situate the ether that surrounds the making of the (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit, including generations of resistance by Denver’s Indigenous communities, the spatialization of urban settler colonialism by institutions of knowledge, and our commitment to honoring Indigenous protocols. In doing so, we argue that the curations assembled enact an Indigenous politics of refusal, one where each curation (re)maps a Native Denver. More than an art exhibit featuring the sacred stories by Denver’s Native community that stood as a site of public facing education, (Re)mapping Native Denver dismantles the logic and power that sustains the settler imaginary. We demonstrate the potential and necessity of Native assembled counter-cartographies—forming a relational assembly of maps that no technology can break.