Academic ideas often seem inaccessible at first pass, because academic writing is it’s own particular style. Academic writing has patterns, specific vocabularies and a voice. Sometimes it feels deliberately opaque, like it is intentionally keeping people out. As a trans person, I am exhausted by gatekeeping and want instead people to be able to access what they need. I want theory and complex thinking, and know that both existed before the academy and continue to exist outside of it. Part of my interest in drawing academic concepts is about democratizing them, making the ideas more widely available.
My summer is including getting to draw concepts from Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman’s Walking Lab https://walkinglab.org/ At the moment I am working on chapter six, ’To the landless’: walking as counter-cartographies and anarchiving practices of their book, Walking Methodologies in a More Than Human World. It feels timely. The chapter is very much about the work of maps and monuments in settler colonial states.
Here are some of the images:
Drawing the next image, I thought about how often in grade school we had to colour in a map of Canada. At the time, I resented it, and was confident that I could memorize the map without colouring it in, again. Now, I think about how the colouring was not about memorization, but about indoctrination, about insisting we think of Canada in these blocks.
But mapping and counter mapping is not just about land. Maps can be used to make land into a commodity, the paper promising that you don’t need to be in relation to a place, the map will tell you all you need to know. But they can also be used to describe people, nature as resources, and stories.
Here, as part of Walking Labs, Dylan Miner counter mapped an Anarchist conversation and Anarchist movement between Lucy Gonzáles Parsons and Emma Goldman. https://walkinglab.org/portfolio/to-the-landless-a-walk-with-dylan-miner/
If you are looking for more on these themes, I recommend the podcast Oñate’s Foot, from 99% Invisible and is very much about Indigenous people and colonial statues, and is very much about, to borrow Tavia Nyong’o’s words “a malignant imperialist nostalgia and white supremacist fantasy” .
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/onates-foot/
If you are someone unsure about why people are demanding colonial statues come down, or taking them down when governments won’t Oñte’s Foot may help you think about this in a decolonial way. If you get really inspired, you may want to read archaeologist Sarah Parcak’s advice on how to topple an obelisk safely. https://twitter.com/indyfromspace/status/1267271817439346689?s=20
The second is a book that is an anthology of counter mapping disguised as a guidebook. Except it is not a guidebook, and in some places is very clear about tourists being uninvited. I requested Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i back in January as we were going to Hawai’i in February. It did not arrive before we left, but this week was available for curb-side pick-up. It is like reading love letters to land and place and Kanaka (Indigenous Hawaiians). It is a gift, that also says, I can tell you about this place, but because it is sacred to me, you can not go there, even if others have already told you you can. It makes the borders between people/ancestors/land/gods blurry in ways that honour all.