Indigenous peoples mapped their worlds in forms that rarely looked like a European chart. Aboriginal Australians hold geography in songlines, sung routes such as one running about 3,500 kilometres from the Central Desert to the coast at Byron Bay. Nahua painters in central Mexico drew territory and history together on amate bark paper, as in the Codex Xolotl, probably painted before 1542. The Raʻiātean navigator Tupaia drew a chart of 130 Pacific islands for James Cook’s crew in August 1769. Marshall Islanders built stick charts of ocean swells, a system first made public in 1862. The East Greenlander Kunit carved the coastline into wooden blocks that he sold to the Danish explorer Gustav Holm in 1885. Since the 1970s, indigenous communities have used counter-mapping to win land, most strikingly in the creation of Nunavut in 1999. These traditions encode distance, direction and resources as surely as Mercator did, but in song, story, touch and the motion of a canoe. The sections below run in rough chronological order, from deep time to the courtroom.
The Western and Central Deserts before 1788: Songlines from Uluru to Byron Bay
Long before the First Fleet reached Sydney Cove in 1788, Aboriginal peoples had laid a web of songlines, or dreaming tracks, across the continent. Each follows the route of a creator-being in the Dreaming, and its song cycle, dances, stories and paintings describe the landmarks, waterholes and other features along the way in order. Someone who knows the song can find the way by singing it in sequence, which is how people crossed the deserts of the interior. Some songlines run a few kilometres; others cross hundreds of kilometres and the lands of many peoples who speak different languages, with each section of the song sung in the language of its country.
Some join distant ecosystems. One runs about 3,500 kilometres from the Central Desert to the place now called Byron Bay, on the coast of New South Wales; desert peoples travelled to the sea to learn fishing, and coastal people travelled inland to sacred sites such as Uluru and Kata Tjuta. The anthropologist Robert Tonkinson, writing in 1978 about the Mardudjara of the Western Desert, found that by learning songlines men came to know thousands of sites they had never visited, all held in what he called a cognitive map of the desert world. Margo Neale of the National Museum of Australia describes songlines as corridors of knowledge crossing land, sky and water. The rock at the centre of many of these routes is described in our guide to Uluru.
Texcoco and the Valley of Puebla, 1224–1585: Painted Histories for Nahua Lords and Philip II
In central Mexico, mapmaking and history-writing were the same craft. Cartographic histories painted on amate bark paper laid out migrations, battles, alliances and lineages across a landscape of hills, rivers and towns drawn as glyphs. The Codex Xolotl, probably made before 1542, follows the history of the Basin of Mexico, and Texcoco in particular, from the arrival of the Chichimeca under their ruler Xolotl in the year 5 Flint, 1224 in the European calendar, to the Tepanec War of 1427. It survives as six amate boards, each about 42 by 48 centimetres, annotated in Nahuatl. The French scientist Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin took it to Europe in 1840, and it is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
A similar story is told by the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, one of five 16th-century indigenous maps from the Valley of Puebla. It follows the ancestors of the Cuauhtinchantlaca from the mythical cave of Chicomoztoc, through their service to the Toltec rulers of Cholula, to the founding of Cuauhtinchan near the Amozoc-Tepeaca range, a span of about four centuries from the 12th to the 16th. After the Spanish conquest the Crown tapped this skill. Between 1579 and 1585 towns across New Spain answered questionnaires of more than fifty questions issued on the orders of Philip II, and the answers, the Relaciones geográficas, came back with maps drawn by indigenous painters, sailors and local officials. Many of the surviving manuscripts are divided between the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, the Benson Library at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Glasgow Library.
Raʻiātea and HMS Endeavour, August 1769: Tupaia’s Chart
Tupaia was born around 1725 at Haʻamanino Harbour on Raʻiātea, in the islands Europeans call the Society Islands, and became a leading priest of the Taputapuatea marae. His training covered genealogies, the calendar and star navigation: island lists with their reefs and harbours, the bearing of each island, how long it took to reach, and the sequence of stars to follow. Driven out by warriors from Bora Bora around 1763, he settled on Tahiti, where he met Joseph Banks during the 1769 transit of Venus.
He joined Cook’s HMS Endeavour in July 1769, and on 15 August began work on a chart of the Pacific with Cook, Banks and several officers. The chart showed some 130 islands within a radius of about 3,200 kilometres, and Tupaia could name 74 of them. Research by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, published in 2019, argues that he devised a hybrid system for the purpose: each island he drew at the centre was given a northern bearing marked “avatea”, the noon sun, so that his island-to-island wayfinding could be translated into the terms of a compass. On their reading, the chart traces linked voyaging routes from Rotuma west of Samoa, through Tonga, the southern Cook Islands and the Austral group, to Rapa Nui, with a second route through the Tuamotus and the Marquesas to Oahu in Hawaiʻi. Tupaia guided the expedition to New Zealand and Australia, and died in Batavia on 20 December 1770. The voyaging skills behind his chart are the subject of our guide to Polynesian navigation.
The Marshall Islands and Ammassalik, 1862–1898: Swell Charts and Carved Coastlines
A century later, two objects from opposite ends of the world drew European attention. In the Marshall Islands, navigators lashed together the midribs of coconut fronds into open frameworks, with shells or the junctions of sticks marking islands. The curved sticks show the swells, how they bend around islands and where they meet. Marshallese navigators recognised four main ocean swells, the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing, and read their refraction around an atoll’s underwater slopes by lying down in the canoe to feel its pitch and roll. There were three kinds of chart: the abstract mattang for teaching, the meddo for part of one island chain, and the rebbelib for all or most of one or both chains. Charts were memorised before a voyage rather than consulted at sea, and each was so personal that only its maker could fully read it.
The system was first made public in a notice by a resident missionary in 1862. It was described in detail only after Captain Winkler of the Imperial German Navy, commander of SMS Bussard, was stationed in the islands under German rule in 1896; he published his account in 1898. The charts fell out of use after the Second World War, as electronic navigation spread, canoe travel between atolls declined, and US nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and other islands disrupted Marshallese life. Today’s republic is profiled in our Marshall Islands country guide.
In East Greenland, Gustav Holm’s Danish expedition of 1883–1885 reached the Ammassalik coast, now Tasiilaq, where the Tunumiit had probably had no direct contact with Europeans. On 8 February 1885 a man from Umivik named Kunit sold Holm a set of carved wooden maps of the coast from Sermiligak to Kangerdlugsuatsiak, and on 21 March he returned with another of a peninsula. In Holm’s published drawings one is a flat block with the indented coastline carved along both edges, and another a stick with a row of knobs standing for offshore islands. In December 1885 Emile Hansen-Blangsted told the Société de Géographie in Paris that he doubted Greenlanders could have carved the maps, and Holm rebutted him in print. The maps went to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and were later transferred to the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk; Post Greenland put one on a stamp in 2000.
Kalimantan and Nunavut, 1973–1999: Counter-Mapping Wins Territory
In the 20th century indigenous mapping turned from a curiosity collected by others into a political tool. In Canada, the Nisga’a leader Frank Calder took British Columbia to court over aboriginal title, and in the 1973 Calder decision the Supreme Court of Canada recognised for the first time that such title existed before colonisation. The government then sought treaties with peoples who had never signed one. As a first step, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada ran the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, in which hunters, trappers, fishers and berry-pickers mapped the land they had used in their lifetimes. Those maps underpinned the negotiations. The land claims agreement was completed in September 1992 and ratified by nearly 85 per cent of voters, Parliament passed the Nunavut Act on 9 July 1993, and Nunavut became a territory on 1 April 1999, covering about 2 million square kilometres of land and water.
The word for this practice came from Indonesia. In 1995 the forest-policy scholar Nancy Peluso coined “counter-mapping” to describe forest users in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, who commissioned their own maps to contest government forest maps that ignored their claims. The term now covers community mapping and participatory GIS around the world. Critics note that it can reproduce settler boundaries, and can leave out the knowledge of women and minorities even within the communities it serves. These are the newest entries in a lineage that began, as the oldest maps in history show, with marks scratched on bone and clay long before any atlas.