Looking at the land another way. https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/turtle-island-decolonized/
Maps have always been an interesting way to interpret and visualize space. To formulate the physical realm, yet somehow only tell part of the story. Part of reality. Our hubris and our biases leak into maps. There’s Lovecraftian beasts from the deep on the edges. Fonts, styles, a mosaic of cultural norms embedded in our psyche and spewed out onto paper. I’ve been fascinated by them since childhood. I draw maps. Fantasy lands, empires, islands, historical military campaigns, geologic surveys, all of it. Too much of my day is spent on Google Maps. I find strange map artwork in the hinterlands of Instagram and go to the creator’s web-page to purchase their work. Suffice to say, I may be quite passionate about maps. Don’t get me started on the pitfalls of the Mercator projection.
Online one day I stumbled upon the decolonial atlas of Turtle Island. Turtle Island is what North America’s also known as, and has been referred to as, for quite some time. A visual representation of space and place names in different Indigenous languages. North America on its side too. What a map! We’re decolonizing our collection in the library, and I thought this find quite fortuitous. Like two currents of seemingly unrelated thought lined up together. Or going fishing at the start of season, casting, and immediately pulling in a seventeen-pound lake trout with ease. We had space on the wall for this. I checked the license – Creative Commons Non-Commercial. Anyone can download and print the map for noncommercial purposes. Great. So, our MediaWorks team formatted it and printed it out. The Public Services supervisor had it laminated and it’s now proudly on display on the third floor to the right as you come up the stairs. Go check it out and see what your hometown may have been called for hundreds or possibly thousands of years before you were around.
Post by Jarrett Seto, Technical Services Supervisor