Dear Geography and Sustainability Community,
We are a few months away from Geography Awareness Week and our annual distinguished lecture event, which will be the late afternoon (4ish) of Nov. 16 in Strong Hall 101.
Our guest speaker will by Dr. Margaret Pearce, a specialist in indigenous geographies, mapping, creative approaches, and community-engaged scholarly practice.
We will be preparing and disseminating a formal announcement flyer, but I wanted to ask you to save the date and get yourself excited to host Dr. Pearce.
Please consider if your one of your fall classes might benefit from a visit by her. She is excited to meet with our students in a variety of settings.
If you are interested in a possible classroom visit (likely a Thursday or late afternoon Wed), then please email me and my co-organizer Michael Camponovo ([log in to unmask]).
See information below about Dr. Pearce’s talk and biography (which includes honors from National Geographic Society and the Guggenheim Foundation). She is preparing an evocative talk that will no doubt be of interest to many geographers
and those in humanities and social sciences across campus—especially those working with maps and/or indigenous studies.
Thanks for your time,
DA
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Making Room: Cartography as a way of writing
What if you practiced cartography not as tech, but as writing? How would that change the work you contribute in the world? In this time of inattention and complacency, writing through cartography can be a powerful intervention and antidote.
To show you what I mean, I'll take a deep dive into two recent projects that deal with topics many people would rather avoid thinking about: the profiting of universities from expropriated Indigenous lands under the Morrill Act (the Land-Grab Universities
investigation for High Country News), and the U.S. government's violent expulsions of Ho-Chunk and Myaamia governments and citizens from their homelands (the Removals maps for the Field Museum). I hope to leave you daydreaming about how you might change up
your own mapping practice, to make room for telling things the way they need to be told.
Bio
Margaret Pearce is a Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and cartographer living on Penobscot homelands in Maine. She is dedicated to cartographic language as a way of writing about relationality, numbers, and Indigenous ways of being, and
airing our assumptions about time, space, and each other. She holds a PhD in geography from Clark University and was a geography professor for 15 years (at Humboldt State University, Ohio University, and University of Kansas) before dedicating herself to cartography
full-time as an independent artist. Recent works include Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada and
Iyoka Eli-Wihtamakw Kǝtahkinawal / This Is How We Name Our Lands
(with Penobscot Cultural & Historic Preservation). In 2020 she collaborated with the Land-Grab Universities team to map land-grant university accountability to Indian Country, and in 2022 she collaborated with Ho-Chunk Nation and Miami Tribe to map their Removals
for the Field Museum. She is currently at work on a project about Inuit Nunangat and industrial carbon pollution. Her work has been supported by Yaddo, Art Omi, A Studio in the Woods, the Anderson Center, the School for Advanced Research, among others, and
she is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow.
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Derek H. Alderman, PhD
He / Him / His
Dept. of Geography & Sustainability
President-Elect, Faculty Senate
University of Tennessee
Voice: (865) 974-0406
Member,
Federal Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names (DOI)
Founder,
Tourism RESET
Past President,
American Association of Geographers (2017-18)
Email:
[log in to unmask], Twitter/X: @MLKStreet