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Panchanadam, Vaishnavi

University of British Columbia

In recent years, participatory mapping projects initiated by historically and presently marginalized groups, including those undertaken by Indigenous peoples, have been gaining prominence in scholarly discourses. Examined predominantly under the framework of counter-mapping, much of this scholarship is focussed on how Indigenous communities in various locales mobilize traditional knowledge systems to demarcate their territories in resistance to colonial and capitalist incursions. In taking these discourses as a point of departure, this thesis argues that by positing Indigenous participatory mapping initiatives solely in the form of resistance to (neo)colonial dispossessory acts, the framework of counter-mapping occludes their prefigurative and democratic potentialities. Examining Indigenous mapping projects in settler colonial contexts, this thesis proposes an alternative approach to examining these initiatives— as a process of prefigurative world-building where communities can realize their democratic potentialities by participating in decision-making regarding what is mapped and how. Not only do these initiatives serve a generative refusals to dispossessory acts, but they also disrupt coercive territorial and civic boundaries imposed by the colonial ‘democratic’ state. I begin by critically examining the role of cartography, colonial notions of space, sovereignty, and boundaries operate to create and uphold coercive settler colonial borders. I then explore existing approaches to boundaries and borders in democratic theory, revealing how the separation of the territorial and civic questions of borders obscures their interconnectedness and their implication in coercively, contingently, and destructively including Indigenous lands and bodies into the bounds of the settler state. This coercive inclusion is further reified through (neo)colonial dispossessory acts justified by invocations of democratic legitimacy and sovereignty by the colonial state. Indeed, it is these dispossessory acts that projects and scholarly discourses on counter-mapping highlight resistance towards. I then lay out a theoretical framework for examining Indigenous participatory mapping as a form of prefigurative world-building, grounding this framework in cartographic undertakings in the Amazonas and on Turtle Island. The thesis concludes with an examination of the implications of the presented arguments for the theory and practice of democracy, emphasizing the importance of untethering democracy from its dominant, Western state-centric conceptions and redefining it to include subaltern participatory initiatives.

Text

2023-09-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85792

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/