Reclaiming Space Through Google Maps - DiMe Piece #4

The renaming of space as part of settler colonialism is a hot topic in native scholarship. Tonawanda Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman made representations of space through the perspectives of native women in literature the focus of her book, "Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations." She argued that even though settler mapmaking changed the names of places and features and imposed boundaries where none previously existed, native people have preserved the names and meanings of places significant to them. Native women serve as keepers of that knowledge. Jason Farman's article also discusses traditional mapmaking as a tool of empire. While digital maps, like those created in Google Earth, don't eradicate the problems of misrepresentation and renaming space according to knowledges of the dominant culture (in fact, they create new problems in that regard), they give users the ability to define their spaces and create maps that have meaning for them.

Farman's main goal is to show that the interactivity of Google Earth has the potential to map a digital empire. He writes, "Though the World Wide Web continues to be a mostly unmapped territory for most Internet users, there is still a desire to locate oneself spatially within cyberspace."¹ That's cool, I guess. The important thing I took away was that the nature of Google Earth's interactivity opens doors for users with different spatial conceptualizations to represent their worlds, to some extent, and essentially allows them to "claim" their spaces. For indigenous users, the use of overlays in Google Earth offers the possibility to "reclaim" spaces from settler colonialist understandings. Places and features could have traditional meanings and significance reattached and borders could be redrawn or even erased in these altered representations. Tribes have the option of creating digital representations of traditional cartographies to pass on to future generations, preserving some aspects of their cultural knowledge. That possibility is exciting for scholars of native history, like me; they could increase our understandings of how indigenous peoples create and conceptualize their spaces.

As awesome as that possibility is, Farman reminds of us of the limitations in creating such overlays. Firstly, Google controls how the overlays work which limits how users create and interact with them. That constricts users to working with maps solely in the ways that Google Earth's developer imagine users would.² Secondly, not all of Google Earth's potential users have access to broadband or even the internet, which is required to access the program and add information.³ According to Farman, what that adds up to is that Google Earth's developers only had one type of user in mind - one with broadband internet access.⁴ Though he posits that we're forced read that Google Earth as reiterating "Western dominance over information distribution and adhering to centralized power over user interactions," it seems like he leaves out one thing about Google's prospective user: one who has Western European understandings of space.⁵ Those of us who have grown up with Mercator maps and road atlases that use English pronunciations of names and words see state and international lines as absolutes. The possibility that others may see the same geographical spaces differently and that their representations are just as valid as our doesn't occur to most of us. If those who have differing perceptions of spaces we all inhabit are given the opportunity to share their views, it could lead to a cultural awakening for many of us.

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¹Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media & Society 12, no. 6 (2010): 16.
²Ibid., 23.
³Ibid.
⁴Ibid., 24.
⁵Ibid.