As a child, one largely isolated from the rest of the world by geography and circumstance, I learned of other lands through books. For a time, I was fascinated by the prospect of finding a map that would lead to buried treasure, despite the fact that our waters were nothing like the warm South seas, and the only pirates in evidence were of a very different, much more respectable sort. But to a child, anything seems possible, even if, deep down, we know it’s nothing more than fantasy.
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I would come to appreciate, in any real way, maps of a more basic sort: the kind that chart our world, showing us how to plot our path through land and life alike. It is, for me, a concept fraught with discomfort; after all, maps have always been a fundamental tool in the processes of colonialism and conquest, and they were certainly used against our peoples for exactly those purposes. It is, perhaps, one of the reasons that I find myself less interested in cartographic maps than I am in topographic ones: Cutting corners to get from Point A to Point B as rapidly as possible holds no fascination for me, but a visual and tactile exploration of this land that was given to us? That’s a whole other journey, an expedition of the spirit.
Mother Earth herself is her own cartographer: an artist in a collaborative mixed-media project with the elements, sketching and carving and summoning both world and map from her own sand and sky — and, if our stories are to be credited, creating both in microcosm upon the back of our Grandmother, Turtle.
Sometimes, the hard and rocky plates of this land move and shift and combine to recreate that story, to form a version of Turtle whose shell is separated by seams in stone that is older than old, shell plates incised with charts and guides to point the way, left by the Ancient Ones to help us navigate the path.
It is a far less exotic journey than an expedition to the South Seas aboard a pirate ship ending in a search for gold, a search conducted on a palm-jeweled island along a path set by a paper map where X marks the spot of riches and fame. It is far less romantic than the stuff of legend that has built up around three Spanish ships and doctrines of discovery and a mythos of Manifest Destiny, all played out against a backdrop of rape and pillage and genocide disguised as swashbuckling feats of derring-do in the greater glory and service of a specific deity.
No, this is a map most ordinary, one of daily life . . . and one whose landmarks and directional arrows we are often — mostly? — too busy to notice.
It is a deeper journey, one that occurs not merely on the surface of land and sea, but deep within the crevices of this world and the interior one from which so many of our peoples emerged so long ago, one that resides beneath the waters of our great blue lakes and stretches to the sky and far beyond, to the place where the spirits dwell.
It is a the ultimate migration: one that need never displace us, an expedition of the spirit in an infinite journey around the hoop.
~ Aji
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