Before You are Here: Rematriating the Map for Indigenous History, Culture, and Storytelling

Clancy Wilmott
Geography and Berkeley Center for New Media
UC Berkeley

Before You Are Here is creating an innovative Indigenous web map of the San Francisco Bay Area, designed for educational and museum contexts. It seeks to convey Ohlone history and contemporary realities through a spatial lens rather than a purely historical one and represents the latest and most ambitious phase of an ongoing, multi-year collaboration between the Sogorea Te Land Trust—an urban, Indigenous, women-led land trust in the San Francisco Bay Area—and studio.geo-?, a geographic research studio based at UC Berkeley.

Traditionally, cartography has been recognized as a colonial scientific tool employed for land dispossession, mineral extraction, and colonial settlement. However, Potawatomi cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce contends that cartography possesses unique potential to depict, if not reconcile, conflicting knowledge systems within the same frame. At the same time, this potential is constrained in pre-fab web mapping platforms, which tend to homogenize information and limit critical interventions into the foundations of the map. Leveraging insights gained from prior collaborative hand-drawn maps, and embracing the theme of care and repair, Before You Are Here shares Indigenous narratives with the broader public by challenging conventional cartographic approaches and developing a digital web-mapping prototype that can be adopted by other Indigenous organizations.