Maps Strengthen Collaboration Between Tribes and Federal Agencies

In 2021, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden initiated new federal guidance on elevating Indigenous Knowledges in federal policymaking. In 2023, the U.S. Forest Service released its own action plan geared toward strengthening tribal consultations and nation-to-nation relationships.

Maps could be key to the success of these efforts, according to research presented at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2023 in San Francisco.

“What does it mean to take a presidential memo and then operationalize it? How does that translate to day-to-day decisions?” said Kristin Green, a doctoral student at the University of New Hampshire and the lead researcher on the project. Maps, she said, are “ripe for engaging” with those questions.

Through research with the Nez Perce Tribe, Green is constructing a framework to inform federal agencies on how best to elevate tribal perspectives in maps used in policymaking.

Bending Boundaries

Efforts on behalf of U.S. agencies to consult with tribes can fail, Green said, in part because federal decisionmakers may not accept some Indigenous Knowledges as legitimate.

“What I see in maps is the potential for all our unspoken assumptions to be laid bare.”

Information presented on maps is harder to discount, said Margaret Pearce, a cartographer and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member who was not involved in the research. “What I see in maps is the potential for all our unspoken assumptions to be laid bare,” she said.

For example, a 2016 map of the Nez Perce Reservation and surrounding area from a Forest Service planning document marks a large swath of land in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington as “Aboriginal Homeland,” whereas a 2019 map made by the Nez Perce Tribe marks the same area as “Indian Claims Commission Territory.”

The Indian Claims Commission was an independent agency meant to compensate tribes for lands ceded to the United States. It relied on designating areas as exclusive to certain tribes. If two tribes claimed the same land, neither would be paid for it.

A 2016 map (left) created by the U.S. Forest Service names a large, off-reservation area as “Aboriginal Homeland.” A 2019 map (right) created by the Nez Perce Tribe, updated for this article, names the larger, off-reservation area as “Indian Claims Commission Territory.” Click image for larger version. Credit: (left) USDA Forest Service, (right) Nez Perce Tribe GIS Program

The differences in the two maps are important: Labeling the area as “Indian Claims Commission Territory” rather than as a “homeland” indicates that areas outside that boundary are Nez Perce homelands, too. The tribe’s homelands “absolutely extend beyond this area,” Green said. Adding the Indian Claims Commission boundary also makes the source of the boundary explicit, she said.

The two maps serve as a “tangible example” of important ideas presented in Green’s framework, specifically, that boundaries are not universal and context is critical for mapmaking, she wrote in an email. Getting information from all stakeholders onto a map is one way to start to understand all perspectives and strengthen nation-to-nation partnerships, said Pearce.

Tribes’ inherent rights to a place often “go beyond the boundaries listed within the treaty,” said Iva Moss, a Northern Arapaho Tribe member, cartographer, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) educator at Fort Washakie Middle School in Wyoming. “That’s something that people forget when they’re working with maps.” Moss teaches her students to make their own maps of familiar places that incorporate Arapaho place-names as one way to enforce the boundaries of Arapaho homelands.

Tribal mapmaking may differ from typical Western mapping techniques in conceptions of borders, time, and perspective. Green’s framework is informed by previous work that outlines these differences, including a study led by Sierra Higheagle, the water quality program coordinator for the Nez Perce Tribe. Higheagle and her team asked community members to identify locations on Google Maps within and around the Nez Perce Reservation that were important for water quality.

Many responses expressed ideas of connection across boundaries and long time frames that could not be placed on a map. Some respondents said they couldn’t pick just one place because all water and its quality are connected. “It’s almost asking people to do something that goes against the grain culturally of what water is,” said Teresa Cohn, a professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire who helped conduct the survey and is a coauthor on the new study. “Water is an entity. Dividing it doesn’t make sense.”

“How much space does an area need to protect it? What are the buffers?” Green said. “This is something that comes up a lot.”

Higheagle’s work illustrates Indigenous relationships to water and treaty rights that many maps, including those made by the Forest Service, do not reflect, Green said. The framework she’s helping to create is designed to bring this idea—that certain mapping methods represent specific perspectives and leave out others—to light.

The starkest difference between Indigenous mapping methods and those used by state and federal agencies is how they conceive of natural resources, Moss said. Mapping for her is about identifying places of an abundance of animals and plants; the Forest Service’s maps are much more about identifying resources for economic purposes, she said.

But collaborative maps can circumvent this in nation-to-nation partnerships because they include everything—and everyone’s priorities: In a collaborative map, everyone’s perspectives must relate to each other and to the land that the map depicts, Pearce said.

Cocreating Cartographies

“Let them be who they are, as separate entities: Western science and Indigenous Knowledge.”

The researchers used a concept called two-eyed seeing to illustrate how agencies could think about using Indigenous-made maps in policymaking. The basic principle of two-eyed seeing is that Indigenous Knowledge and conventional Western science don’t have to validate each other to both be useful to policymaking. The goal is to gain the benefits of both, rather than trying to integrate one into the other, Green said.

“Let them be who they are, as separate entities: Western science and Indigenous Knowledge,” said James Rattling Leaf Sr., a tribal engagement specialist for the University of Colorado’s North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. “And then try to figure out a third space where they can communicate.”

—Grace van Deelen (@GVD__), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2024), Maps strengthen collaboration between tribes and federal agencies, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240017. Published on 9 January 2024. Text © 2024. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.