here’s a roundup of the maps of “North American indigenous
territories” I’ve seen on tumblr in the last two weeks. please
note the following: - save for the second one, none of them are
dated. “pre-contact” is not a date. “colonial” is not a date.
the first could mean 1500 or 1850 or anywhere in between. the
latter could be any one of those dates, all the way up to the
present. an ahistoric map is an uncontextualized map which means
it is an essentially useless and ignorant map. - they all
contradict each other. which one is right? they were all drawn
by white academics, so it’s hard to really know, huh? - they all
have major flaws and inaccuracies. there are at least 500
different tribes in N. America—none of these maps save the
second to last one have that many listed, and that one is of
Northern California alone! Academics and cartographers will lie
to you and say that it’s hard to know which lands belonged to
whom in the “pre-contact days.” This is a reflection of their
unwillingness to dialogue with indi