October 15, 2026 Summer 2026
Cartography, and the ways we as humans relate and represent spatiality and with our non-human kin, have long been foundational to our relationships with land and to the dimensions it holds beyond the physical. I am constantly in awe of the invisible and visible strings that connect us.
So much of contemporary cartographic pedagogy has been dismounted from the ancestral technologies from which it emerged and reformatted into a Cartesian default. In this process, something is often lost: the understanding that maps are not only representations of space, but records of relationship, memory, movement, and belonging.
Braids as Maps and Seed Carrying, Liliana Peña, 2025
The memories we hold in our bodies, alongside the memories and knowledge that we carry with us, create (k)new spatialities.
As a spatial ecologist and landscape architect, I often feel a particular kind of grief around how we remember and annotate place. It is a grief connected to the loss of collective remembering, to the ways systems of knowledge have been separated from the people, plants, waters, and places that hold them.
Teaching Indigenous Cartography & GIS with Yvonne and our students this summer offered me a form of collective remembering that I had only dreamed of. We began our course with an introduction that was taught to me through Pasifika contexts, but that, more importantly, offered a way of knowing one another through the modalities of our names, the ancestors we carry with us, and the waters that have shaped and nurtured us. It became a form of hoʻolauna, an introduction not simply to who we are, but to the contexts and relationships that have made us.
There was something powerful about beginning this way. Before maps, before methods, before assignments, there were relationships.
Co-learning with the first cohort of this course left me excited about the possibilities of relationality and its boundlessness. I began to think more deeply about the body itself as a cartographic vessel, and about our bodies’ relationships to the landscapes and geographies we inhabit, remember, and carry.
Something that stayed with me deeply was the way our conversations continually returned to this question: How does the body remember place?
A few years ago, I stumbled upon one of the largest African burial grounds in New York, near where I work. That encounter became a catalyst for deepening my practice around diasporic geography, ancestral memory, and the ways land holds what history attempts to erase.
Alongside our students this summer, I began a process of uncovering through cartography alongside them, layering archaeological pollen and plant remnants recovered from New York’s African Burial Ground. These plants were not botanical specimens. They were carried as extensions of our biocultural knowings, offerings, medicine, food, and ritual knowledge. Their presence in the burial ground became another extension of diaspora and ancestral technologies.
I titled the project “Held Ground” as a cultural-cartographic investigation into grief, displacement, and botanical memory. I am exploring cartography as excavation: beneath burial coordinates drawn from primary excavation records, I map the native ranges of the plants found in the graves, and beneath those, their West African relatives and documented ritual uses across the Atlantic.
Together, these layers begin to trace relationships to land, medicine, and mourning that persist even when land itself is taken twice: first through enslavement, and then through erasure. The method of which we encourage during this course is exploring this cartographic practice through collage as both a spatial representation and grief practice. Collaging allows fragments to remain fragments while still becoming part of a larger story. It gives us a way to sit with what is incomplete, what has been displaced, and what can still be gathered.
The title Held Ground comes from Dagara elder Sobonfu Somé’s and her husband Malidoma Patrice Somé writing on communal grief, where grief is not something we are meant to carry alone, but something a community holds together.
This idea has stayed with me.
What does it mean to hold one another through what has been lost? What does it mean to understand land not as a backdrop to memory, but as an active participant in it? And what becomes possible when cartography is practiced not as a tool for possession, but as a practice of relationship?
The framework of holding kinship and memory as cartographic methods asks us what remains when land is taken, and what plants, memories, and rituals can teach us about what was never truly lost.
I concluded this summer with a renewed sense of kinship and intimacy. Not only with our students and collaborators, but with landscapes, ancestors, plants, and memories that continue to shape how I understand/ commune with place.
Perhaps this is what I am learning to hold onto: that kinship is not a fixed object something we map, it is the in-between spaces, the network, the mycelium of re-indigenizing our methods of collective geography and place-knowing.