"Clues on the Map: Using Historical Maps to Recreate California Indigenous Landscapes in a GIS" Ruth Askevold on GIS Day 09

Last Updated on Friday, 13 November 2009 20:44 Written by Rosemarie McKeon

News

The Indigenous Mapping Network invites you to attend Ruth Askevold's presentation at 
Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility on GIS Day November 18, 2009.  Her talk will be from 5:30 - 6pm. Ruth is the GIS Analyst, Historical Ecology for the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Her evening presentation is titled "Clues on the Map: Using Historical Maps to 
Recreate California Indigenous Landscapes in a GIS". Her presentation will examine how the Historical Ecology Program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) uses maps in a GIS to reconstruct historical landscapes, and how using these maps can help us understand native land management and landscape conditions at the time of colonization.

Historical maps and narrative accounts of the San Francisco Bay area hold clues about the landscapes inhabited by California's indigenous peoples before Euro-American colonization. But because these maps and descriptions were created to protect colonial interests—and are not simply objective mirrors of what existed—they reflect the biases and perspectives of those who made them. Mapping practices included replacing California's Indian and Spanish/Mexican place names with new place names, imposing township and range lines over natural features, and using precision surveying techniques that replaced more descriptive maps. In this way, cartographers attempted to overwrite tribal environmental and cultural knowledge and impose a new order on the land.

This presentation examines how the Historical Ecology Program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) uses maps in a GIS to reconstruct historical landscapes, and how using these maps can help us understand native land management and landscape conditions at the time of colonization. SFEI’s approach includes georeferencing historical maps and textual data (explorer's narratives, newspaper accounts, and related map attributes) and allows for multiple interpretations of sources, as maps are combined and recombined in a GIS. Through examples from various San Francisco Bay Area watershed-based projects designed to support environmental restoration and management, I show how we can find clues on maps and traces on the land that allow us to consider native land management practices. Additional methods such as interviews with tribal members and large- scale eco-archaeological research are also considered.

For more information and additional events see:  http://gif.berkeley.edu/gisday.html
GIS Day 2009 at U.C. Berkeley is Organized by the Geospatial Innovation Facility and co-hosted by the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association (BAAMA) and Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF), with support from the Northern California Region of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).