This map can be used to frame Native concepts of land with students before exploring the other maps in this set. Give students some brief background on the map without giving away what geographic area they are looking at or what is being visualized.

For fuller information on this map, go here and read the caption and viewpoint below.

Have students spend a few minutes looking closely at the map and even drawing a section they find interesting.

If Non-Chi-Ning-Ga were here in the room with us today, what questions would you ask him about this map?


CAPTION:
An Ioway chief named Non-Chi-Ning-Ga (“No Heart of Fear”) prepared this schematic diagram of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri River drainages for an 1837 treaty council in Washington, DC. In an effort to prove the lands were theirs, rather than Sac and Fox, the map records Ioway place names and ancestral village sites. The tribe’s migration routes for two centuries are marked in dotted lines, from Green Bay on Lake Michigan (on the right) through Wisconsin to the Mississippi River (central diagonal line) to the Missouri (vertical line on left). Although the Sac and Fox did not dispute the history expressed in this map, the U.S. government forced the Ioway to relocate to reservations.

The familiar, tidy story of progress and inevitability of Westward expansion is promoted in many historical American maps, including the growing demarcation of national, state, and county boundaries that etched U.S. colonial power and ideology into the landscape. Maps created by or copied from Native authors conceptualize mobility and relationships between people and places rather than precise measurements and boundaries. A bitter and uncomfortable undercurrent is the reality of the oppression and dispossession of millions of Native people.

VIEWPOINT:
The perspective of Native populations in the 19th century cannot be properly told in maps, because Native concepts about land are not two-dimensional, and qualifying ownership with a paper document was an imported European concept. During the rapid expansion of the United States, the idea of Native homeland, a multi-layered place giving life, sustenance, language, spiritual communion, and kinship, would change to a theory that land is preordained to be “improved” or “developed” for the purpose of commodification. This was a near universal change from Native land management systems that had sustained populations for millennia.

– Akomawt Educational Initiative

Citation: "Non-Chi-Ning-Ga’s Map of the Migration of his Indian Ancestors"
1837. Manuscript map, 41 x 27.5 inches. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 75, map 821. Reproduction 2019.

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CAPTION:
During the 19th century, the United States expanded dramatically westward. Immigrant settlers rapidly spread across the continent and transformed it, often through violent or deceptive means, from ancestral Native lands and borderlands teeming with diverse communities to landscapes that fueled the rise of industrialized cities. Historical maps, images and related objects tell the story of the sweeping changes made to the physical, cultural, and political landscape.

Inquiries:  What is this an image of?  What information is it telling me?

VIEWPOINT:
The perspective of Native populations in the 19th century cannot be properly told in maps, because Native concepts about land are not two-dimensional, and qualifying ownership with a paper document was an imported European concept. During the rapid expansion of the United States, the idea of Native homeland, a multi-layered place giving life, sustenance, language, spiritual communion, and kinship, would change to a theory that land is preordained to be “improved” or “developed” for the purpose of commodification. This was a near universal change from Native land management systems that had sustained populations for millennia. - Akomawt Educational Initiative

Discussion/Essay questions: How does the depiction affect your own viewpoint? How do the Native Viewpoints affect your overall impression of the images? Give an example of how another perspective made you think differently about the image. 

              - “exploration”
              - “frontier”
              - “wilderness”
              - “ceding land”
              - “land ownership”

CAPTION:
This educational poster illustrates the structure of General Land Office township surveys. The top scene depicts surveyors laying out a single section, measuring one mile by one mile and containing 640 acres. The diagram labeled “Township Plat” demonstrates the division of a township into 36 sections, while the “Township Survey” diagram explains that townships are identified in relation to a baseline and meridian (representing an X-Y axis). Each parcel of land has a unique numerical identifier such as the 40-acre tract where the surveyors stand could be identified as the SE 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 1, Township 3 North, Range 4 West, 6th Principal Meridian.

Inquiries:  What is this a map of?  What information is it telling me?

VIEWPOINT:
These divisions remind us of the harmful game of wrongful land dispossession. For Native people, these squares represent a systematic disruption of our ancestral ways of life. This diagram reflects the colonial concept of land ownership: packaged up in little squares, as though one can compartmentalize a way of life and sell it. – Rebecca Sockbeson, Ph.D., Penobscot Indian Nation, University of Alberta

Discussion/Essay Questions: Why is land depicted in this way? Is this a natural depiction of the land, or is this an interpretation? Whose interpretation is it? 

CAPTION:
This map highlights the federal government’s impact on transforming the American landscape by the end of the 19th century. Designed primarily to show the extent of township surveys, it uses a black grid pattern to represent lands that had been surveyed and open to settlement, which included all or most of the area in the public land states. The map shows the extent of Indian reservations (solid grey), military reservations (solid pink), and private land claims (pink cross hatch or pink outline). The latter, which represent Spanish land grants adjudicated during the 19th century, are most prevalent in Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California.

Inquiries:  What is this a map of?  What information is it telling me?

VIEWPOINT:
As the U.S. government took over territory, it introduced the English concept of "land ownership" to lands that were never governed that way under Native stewardship. U.S. land acquisition literally meant that the land in question went from being perceived as "sustaining life" to "sustaining means or income.” It was a big change and it was harsh on Native people. This dynamic overturned the power structure. Systematically Native peoples' life ways and cultures came under threat. Loss of access to land meant loss of true freedom. This process of dispossession repeats itself over and over, forcing Native peoples to begin adopting a foreign way of life as a matter of survival. -Akomawt Educational Initiative

Discussion/essay questions:  How do maps contribute to the English language notion of “land ownership” If this was a map of how to steward or take care of the land, how would it look different? 

CAPTION:
By the 1890s, the U.S. government seized over 1.5 billion acres of Native land by way of treaty, coercion, military force, and executive order. Tables in this compendium itemize over 700 land cessions and treaties enacted between 1784 and 1894, while 67 maps delineate the boundaries of each transaction. For example, the yellow and pink districts in western Montana (numbered 373 and 374) refer to the 1855 Treaty of Hellgate, negotiated with the Séliš (Flathead), Kootenai (Kootenay), and Q'Lispé (Upper Pend d’Orielles). Through a contentious negotiation process mired in mistranslation and differing expectations, the tribes ceded their lands and became dissatisfied with enforcement of the treaties. Hostilities broke out in 1858.

VIEWPOINT:
“Cede” is a very gentle term to describe a deeply violent, forced, and uneasy process. As Native groups suffered losses from epidemics and the destruction of their food sources, they relinquished their lands to the U.S. government, often as a final resort. Native groups were forced to relocate from their homelands, either by treaty or executive orders promising them abundant resources in exchange for territory – none of which were fully realized. -Akomawt Educational Initiative

Discussion/essay questions: How does the choice of vocabulary impact the storytelling of history? Whose perspective is served better by terms like “exploration”, “frontier”, “land cession” in the retelling of 19th century westward expansion? What are other vocabulary terms a storyteller with a different perspective might choose? Give an example. Was the 19th Century Westward expansion of the United States gradual or rapid? Which term describes your viewpoint and why? 

Citation: Charles C. Royce. “Montana 1,” from “Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784-1984.” Washington, DC, 1899.
Also in Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology. "Annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution ." 1895. archive.org/details/annualreportofbu218smit/page/n633/mode/1up