Publication scientifique
Amerindian maps: the explorer as translator
Several studies of Amerindian maps, notably those of June Helm, G. Malcolm Lewis and James P. Ronda, have drawn attention to native cartographic convention as well as native contributions to the European exploration of North America. Yet these studies rely on the assumptions and standards of European cartography as universal measures of accuracy. Like European explorers of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Helm and Lewis translate Amerindian maps into European terms. They define native convention in terms of absence or failure: the native sketches lack scale; they do not portray “the actual lay of the land”; their topography is a “caricaturization of lakes and other features”. Ronda acknowledges the conventionality of European as well as native cartography, but even he fails to see that implicit in the European (and by extension Euro-American) project of mapping the world's “margins” was a project of imperial conquest
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