American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Indigenous communities have successfully used Western geospatial technologies (GT) (for example, digital maps, satellite images, geographic information systems [GIS], and global positioning systems [GPS]) since the 1970s to protect tribal resources, document territorial sovereignty, create tribal utility databases, and manage watersheds. The use of these techniques and technologies has proven to be a critical step for protecting cultural sovereignty by communicating the importance of Indigenous cultural knowledge to people outside the community. However, the inappropriate use of these tools negatively affects the expression and preservation of cultural heritage and cultural survival because of differing ontologies and epistemologies. This is not to imply that these techniques and technologies are inherently inappropriate for Indigenous cartographic representation; rather, we perceive them as flexible and capable of being adapted to suit traditional Indigenous cultural geographies if used in an informed way. Thus far, Western cartographic techniques and technologies have overwhelmingly been used to present positivist representations of space, although some mapmakers are beginning to expand these tools in innovative ways. This article contributes to this expanding dialogue by calling for a focus on cartographic language as a potentially useful means of incorporating Indigenous and non-Indigenous conventions in the same map. To illustrate this, we look at the example of ahupua‘a resource management in Hawai‘i and demonstrate how the innovative use of cartographic language can better express Indigenous cultural knowledge of natural resources. The protection of Indigenous cultural knowledge and cultural sovereignty continues to be a challenge that unites Indigenous people worldwide and was most recently acknowledged and defended in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 2007. The declaration notes Indigenous peoples’ shared histories of colonization and dispossession of traditional territories and resources and reaffirms Indigenous rights to self-determination as an inherent human right.