{"id":214,"date":"2024-02-18T16:03:52","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T16:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gildedgreen.com\/indigital\/?page_id=214"},"modified":"2026-02-26T15:33:36","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T15:33:36","slug":"digital-remapping-and-place","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/gildedgreen.com\/indigital\/digital-remapping-and-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital (Counter)Mapping and Place"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This module introduces a variety of concepts and artists related to Indigenous explorations of place, land, and mapping. We will encounter some artists who engage in counter-mapping – the practice of disrupting settler mapping system and the labels and assumptions they impose upon the land – using digital tools. We will also encounter artists who use digital tools to craft digital places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading and Learning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Choose one<\/strong> of the three readings below to explore. Each deals with a different approach to digital mapping or place-crafting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hunt, D., & Stevenson, S.A. (2016). Decolonizing geographies of power: Indigenous digital counter-mapping practices on Turtle Island. Settler Colonial Studies, 7<\/em>, 372 – 392.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dallas Hunt (Cree, and a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation) and Shaun A. Stevenson write about how settler digital mapping systems impose upon the land, and describe artistic counter-mapping projects designed to subvert those systems and center some Indigenous understandings of lands and places.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Byrd, J. A. (2016). ‘Do they not have rational souls?’: Consolidation and sovereignty in digital new worlds. Settler Colonial Studies, 6<\/em>(4), 423-437.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jodi Byrd (citizen of the Chickasaw Nation) writes about the popular 2010s video game Dark Souls<\/em> and how the design of popular commercial video games often embodies a settler relationship to place\/land\/environment.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Loban, R. & Apperley, T. (2019). Eurocentric values at play: Modding the colonial from the Indigenous perspective. In P. Penix-Tadsen (Ed.) Video games and the global south<\/em> (pp. 87-100). ETC Press.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rhett Loban (Torres Strait Islander) and Thomas Apperley discuss their project to modify (or “mod”) a popular game in the “4X” (“EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”) genre of strategy games to meaningfully include Indigenous peoples where before there were primarily European colonial powers and empty lands to be colonized by them.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Reflect After Reading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n