Coming Home to Indigenous

Place Names in Canada

7-color, 33" x 42"

80 lb with aqueous finish

Commissioned by the Canadian-American Center at the University of Maine, in response to the Canada 150 event of 2017. Honoring the sovereignties and traditional place names of our northern relatives.

You can purchase this map directly from the

Canadian-American Center.

WRITING

M. Pearce. "What Shall We Map Next? Expressing Indigenous Geographies with Cartographic Language." In U. Dieckmann et al., eds., Mapping the Unmappable? Transcript Verlag, 2021. pdf

M. Pearce and S. Hornsby. 2020. "Making the Coming Home Map." Cartographica 55(3), Special issue on Decolonizing the Map.

EXHIBITED

Bending Lines. Leventhal Map & Education Center, September 10, 2021–March 4, 2022.

Diseño y utopía: Acciones inmediatas para un mejor presente. Abierto Mexicano de Diseño, October 2020.

Diagrams of Power. OnSite Gallery Toronto, 2018; Onomatopee,

Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2019.

AWARDS

Winner, Thematic Map Award, 45th CaGIS Map Design Competition, 2017. (Tie with Lauren Tierney / NatGeo's gorgeous The Melting of Antarctica.)

FEATURED in

Critical Visualization | Peter A. Hall and Patricio Dávila.

NY: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Spirit Bear | Spotted Fawn Productions in partnership with First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. Stop-motion animation.

Data Feminism | Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance | ed. Patricio Davila. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2018.

Mapas 838/839 | Cultura UNAM, Mexico City, 2018.

Aalaapi | Aalaapi Collective. Théâtre d'aujourd'hui, Montreal.

Sometimes I feel like throwing rocks,
but I would be afraid
that I would lose my name
and lose my territory
and damage my Mother.
—ssipsis, 1972

To honor the names and their caretakers.
To protect sovereignty.
To foreground Indigenous protocols.
To get it right, for once.

To make something beautiful.
To contribute something useful.
To specify.
To provoke questions.

To be quiet and listen.

To structure projection, size, and fold in dialogue with maps by Natural Resources Canada.
To represent borders with place names, as they are experienced.
To indicate that place names participate at all time scales.
To let meaning come from an accumulation of feeling.

To be wary of my assumptions as they continue to come up.
To be okay with not knowing what's next.
To remember it's none of my business.
To trust the design process to show the way.

To work against complacency, condescension, and dystopia.
To shift societal expectations for what a map can do or be.
To call it cartography, not counter-cartography.
To remind people that print is not broken.

Photo by Margaret Pearce