Cartographic Poetry

This first book-length study of five maps drawn by Blackfoot and Gros Ventre cartographers in 1801 and 1802 explores the maps’ cartographic conventions, utility, and beauty.

“Poetry is language condensed; Blackfoot cartography is landscape distilled.” Cartographic Poetry is the first book-length, multidisciplinary study of five maps drawn in 1801 and 1802 by several Blackfoot and Gros Ventre people for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Representing some of the oldest documents created by Indigenous people on the North American prairies and foothills, these maps preserve invaluable evidence about places on the landscape, and about historic Blackfoot views of their territories. The maps were intended as navigational tools, but the landforms and locations on the maps hold significance for the Blackfoot well beyond wayfinding, and have for many centuries. Informed by a career-long fascination with this priceless archive, the Piikani Nation’s placenames project, and fieldwork efforts to align Indigenous places and present geography, Ted Binnema, François Lanoë, and Heinz W. Pyszczyk study the maps as ethnohistorical sources. Exploring their beauty and utility from historical, linguistic, and archeological perspectives, the authors analyze the maps, their placenames and features, and the tours and trips they may have supported, along with providing present-day photographs of many of the maps’ landforms. A final section of the book outlines how Indigenous maps contributed significantly to Western geographical knowledge and maps of North America from the 1500s onward. Cartographic Poetry will appeal to anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, historians, cartographers of the Great Plains, and to all readers interested in how Indigenous peoples perceived and navigated their territories in this early period of colonial encounter. With a Foreword by Jerry Potts Jr. and an Afterword by Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn.