Since the arrival of settlers in the 16th century, the Canadian Government has dispossessed First Nations people of their land and culture through a history of colonialism. This has led to over a century of contentious relationships between First Nations and the Canadian Government in which First Nations have often struggled with the revitalization and reclamation of their culture and land due to oppressive systemic structures. Cartography has been one approach, among many, adopted by First Nations to facilitate self-determination in recent decades. However, the role of cartography has been one focused on western technocratic approaches of drawing territorial boundaries as part of the land claims process. Such approaches may assist First Nations in documenting land use and negotiating territorial rights and as such move them towards self-determination. Conventional western cartography is inherently incapable of representing the rich spatial nature of First Nations’ sense of cultural place. More recently, cybercartography has emerged due to technological advances in software and web-based publishing that has the potential to encapsulate First Nations’ oral history and culture by providing digital multimedia elements (i.e. audio, imagery, and video) within a digital spatial context. The use of cybercartography in this manner is quickly increasing over time, but research is lacking in understanding how new representations of First Nations history and culture through cybercartographic frameworks explicitly facilitate, or prohibit, First Nations ability to attain self-determination. To address this gap, this study evaluates the ways in which contemporary cybercartographic technologies may facilitate the process of self-determination through an application development and interview process with a local First Nation on Vancouver island, BC. The research process throughout the project are evaluated using the Indigenous principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP) and uses this as a framework to understand how the experiences of the Nation relate to the broader narrative of self-determination. The results of this study suggest that using a community-engaged approach to cybercartography facilitates community-specific requirements of self-determination, mainly because community engagement can lead to the development of tools that match community objectives and needs. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that the OCAP principles have the potential to be used in future studies for evaluating the efficacy of technologies that are intended to facilitate self-determination in First Nation communities. / Graduate / 2021-04-16

This thesis draws on a community-engaged digital-mapping project with the Vancouver Island Coast Salish community of the Stz’uminus First Nation. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which conventional cartographic representations of Indigenous peoples are laden with methodological and visual assumptions that position Indigenous peoples’ perspectives, stories, and experiences within test-, proof-, and boundary-driven legal and Eurocentric contexts. In contrast, I frame this project’s methodology and digital mapping tools as an effort to map a depth of place, the emotional, spiritual, experiential, and kin-based cultural context that is routinely glossed over in conventional mapping practices. I argue elders’ place-based stories, when recorded on video and embedded in a digital map, produce a space for the “unmappable,” that which cannot, or will not, be expressed within the constructs of a static two-dimensional map. This thesis also describes a refusal to steep maps too deeply in cultural context for a public audience. I detail the conversations that emerged in response to a set of deeply spiritual, cultural, and personal stories to mark how the presence of Coast Salish law, customs, power structures, varying intra-community perspectives, and refusal came to bear on the production of “blank space” (interpreted colonially and legally as terra nullius) in this project’s cartographic representation. Finally, I conclude that Coast Salish sharing customs are embedded within networks of Coast Salish customary legal traditions, which fundamentally affects tensions that arise between storytelling and digital mapping technologies, between academic and community accountabilities, and between collective and individual consent. / Graduate / 2019-10-13