What the Dataset Cannot Hold: Indigenous Cartography and GIS

October 12, 2026 Summer 2026

Given its history as a tool tied to land extraction and surveillance, the irony of using what Audre Lorde would call “the master’s tools,” in tandem with indigenous cartography was never lost on me. I can see how the pairing of indigenous cartography and Geographic Information System (GIS), seems diametrically opposed, or even ideologically incompatible. At first glance, the pairing seems almost designed to create contention. The title of the course, I’ll admit, reads like an incongruence. But GIS does not negate indigenous cartography or vice versa. I conceived of this class as a way to think through spatial relationships without any epistemic hierarchy.

For context, my introduction to GIS was through my own architectural research. I grew up in Texas after my family resettled there as political refugees from what was then Zaire (now The Democratic Republic of the Congo), and much of my work has since involved tracing relationships between Congo, the American South, and New York. GIS has become one of the tools through which I began understanding spatial histories that had not been legible to me before, including the extent to which New York’s land and banking institutions were entangled with the slave economy. Personally, that experience complicated any easy dismissal of GIS for me. So this technology historically implicated in extraction could actually also make obscured histories newly visible.

When I moved to New York about a decade ago, I always joked that the biggest culture shock for me wasn’t Congo to Texas but Texas to New York. There is something about the south of the U.S that felt familiar. Maybe it is the closeness of the people, the vegetation, the food? In 2025, I went back to Congo for the first time since I left. I remember taking a trip to our indigenous land of bas-Kongo and feeling like I was somewhere in Georgia or on a porch in New Orleans. It felt uncanny. When I went back to New York to continue my thesis work on African Burial grounds in Manhattan and Brooklyn, it actually surprised me to learn about the pervasiveness of the slave economy in New York. We were taught this “South-bad / North-good” dichotomy in history classes growing up, so most of what I learned about how much New York land is implicit in this history has come from my own research through GIS.

Through Indigenous Cartography & GIS, we discussed how GIS can be both interrogated and integrated to expose the limits of its own conventions. Thinking through other forms of more relational, indigenous mapping systems can add additional epistemological layers. This course goes beyond “GIS-bad / Indigenous Cartography-good”—the complexities of both allowed us to work through our own mapping projects. GIS, as a technology of extraction, can reveal histories and even the nonexistence of a certain dataset is intel about the nature of concealment. Absence could be meaningful. A gap in the archive could tell us something about a category that, perhaps, failed to describe the people it purported to represent within a landscape. We looked at cartography as a way of organizing relationships between cultural memory and power. We also asked what happens when spatial knowledge does not arrive in forms that GIS readily recognizes. We studied mapping practices that engaged with oral histories and embodied knowledge as forms of spatial and ecological observation. Inherited memory and relational mapping can show movement across a landscape without a shapefile.

Our conversations with Hakeem Adam and Imani Jacqueline Brown expanded these questions about the technical limits of mapping. We began the course by asking students which waters they were born close to, and in every class, our discussions naturally returned to water ecologies and hydropolitics. Adam shared his recent work, A Belief in Water, alongside One-Fifth of the Earth’s Surface, an interactive web-based project created with Zimbabwean architect Maxwell Mutanda. Imani Jacqueline Brown’s work brought us to New Orleans, where she was raised and where much of her research is grounded. Through her work on Louisiana’s wetlands, oil and gas infrastructure, and plantation geographies, we discussed what it means to map a landscape in which extraction and environmental disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, have fundamentally reshaped both land and water. Brown’s practice gave us a way to think about how mapping can trace the afterlives of the Plantationocene through the petrochemical infrastructures that occupy the Gulf.

By the end of the course I kept encouraging students to think about what kinds of spatial knowledge cannot be adequately represented through conventional GIS datasets and how we can make knowledge relational. The final projects that came out, through this reflection, really addressed this challenge. Anisha Sawaid’s Al Houleh mapped ecological absence and presence in Palestine, tracing the transformation of the Hula wetlands alongside Palestinian land loss and displacement. Anna Flores used shuttle routes and oral histories across O’odham Jeweḍ to map memory and the forms of connection sustained despite state-enacted separation. Jiordi Rosales’ Soft Containment: Fire and the Interfluvial Zone examined fire as a spatial and cultural practice, attending to the conditions, knowledge, and relationships that determine when and how land is burned. Odalys Benitez’s Data Center in My Backyard and Heya Kwon’s Data Resistance Map ’25–’26 turned their attention to data centers, mapping an expanding infrastructure whose physical footprint is often obscured by the language of the “cloud.” The course and these final projects ultimately returned to relational mapping, where seasonality and land stewardship become part of how spatial knowledge is produced and sustained.

Explore the class’ archive.