Missing from the Map: Gender, Race and Cartography

Human beings have tried to map our worlds – and our sense of what the world is – since prehistoric times. Maps have been used to wage wars, divide up land and resources, and claim ownership. Traditional western maps have therefore often removed Indigenous peoples from cartographic representations of space, as a prelude to removing or displacing them from real land. The history of maps has also overwhelmingly been told as a story of male map makers, with men’s apparent power to ‘scientifically’ depict the world becoming a metaphor for their power to control it.

This evening brings together an artist and a writer who, in different ways, seek to analyse and resist these erasures, and reassert the presence of Indigenous people in North American maps, and women in the history of cartography. Bobby C. Martin is an artist and an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, whose work blends layers of imagery including family photographs and maps to create new narratives of Native history and identity. Pragya Agarwal’s writing and scholarship has long centred on the ideological and social biases embedded in many of the ‘neutral’ assumptions that make up our worldviews, and has been looking for unnamed and hidden women mapmakers in the archives as part of her most recent research.

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