Bhambra, Gurminder K. 'Decolonizing Critical Theory?: Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations.' Critical times (Berkeley, Calif.) 4.1 (2021). Web. (Sections 5 and 6)

--> 2020 statue toppling

'Although the removal of a colonial statue from its pedestal – both physically and cartographically – will not singlehandedly decolonize the map or territory, it does call attention to the power of decolonial movements to transform the map through direct action and the power of mapping to imagine decolonial worlds-in-the-making.' (152)

--> Ie palestine

'Decolonizing the map – and decolonial mapping more broadly – goes beyond the practice of anti-colonial mapping (which is characterized by its resistance to colonialism), and seeks to reclaim place-based, ancestral, Indigenous knowledge while also enacting the contemporary world-making practices of Indigenous and colonized peoples in the present.' (152)

--> De centering colonialism versus targeting colonialism

'In this respect, decolonizing the map is an affirmative practice that decenters the colonial geographical imagination by revalorizing Indigenous world-making practices – whether in the form of conventional cartographic products (i.e., maps) or performance-based mappings.'(153)

'Decolonial mapping refers to the spatial practices and cartographic techniques that center on Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to land, including but not limited to spatial narratives, place ontologies, more-than-human relations, navigational guidance, and territorial demarcations.' (153)

'This is a reminder that Indigenous women’s leadership and expertise, as well as gender equality, are in fact Indigenous protocols that are necessary to decolonial mapping.' (153)

--> Cartography colonial and male, as an opposite

--> Adopting processual approaches to decolonisling maps

'This is especially true if we understand decolonial mapping as a process of articulating Indigenous self-determination in relation to place. Any action Indigenous peoples take to assert, engage, rebuild, or reclaim their relationships to land and how those relationships are visualized on maps can be seen as decolonial mapping, no matter the specific methods chosen.' (154)

--> Three forms of Indigenous mapping - ancestral, anticolonial, decolonial

'This mapping [Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project] effort was neither purely ancestral nor anticolonial but rather represents a collectively informed model of ongoing and culturally centered participatory mapping.' (154)

'The maps reflected and served Inuit practices and purposes even if infused by an externally motivated intent to engage in counter-mapping that ultimately helped produce the Territory of Nunavut in 1999. The project illustrates an overlap between anticolonial (the need to articulate land claims) and decolonial mappings (the ability to enact Indigenous spatial practices and knowledges in cartographic form), which validates localized Indigenous cartographies produced with the 'experiential knowledge and understanding of local indigenous experts' (Freeman 2011, 29).' (154)

'Decolonial mapping thus also exists beyond Western standards of universal legibility – in short, not everything is for everyone.' (155)

--> Occupation of space - space for specific in groups allowing for a bonding and healing to occur without the moderation of the oppressor

'In this way, decolonial mapping does not just decenter colonialism, but also decenters the intellectual imperialism and White privilege embedded in expectations of standardized legibility that result in the homogenization of Indigenous peoples and cultures.' (155)

'These artworks document complex mappings, yet they do not operate as an orthogonal-centered cartography constricted by abstracted measurements of distance and direction. Each work of art depicts multiple places of significance along with symbols of their place stories, all set in spatial relation to one another.' (155)

--> artworks/maps as knowledge, art, and relations

'The songs connect several Indigenous peoples who share the 'bird,' and thus chart a vast geography from the Pacific coastlines (Kumeyaay) to the desert inland of Arizona (Hualapai and Havasupai), from what is currently Los Angeles (Gabrieleno) to northern Mexico (Cocopa), and they are filled with cartographic insights and ecological signposts that shaped their historic movement and guide their ongoing ties with one another (Dozier 1996; also, see Jaskoski and Apodaca 1989).' (155)

--> On interconnectivity

--> Storytelling and songs as a form of mapping and knowledge-sharing

--> Decolonization from the global south

'There is a need, therefore, to develop new methodologies and cartographic practices based upon the co-creation of knowledge with and among Indigenous peoples (Kozel 2007). However, it is important that such mapping projects be designed to serve the needs of Indigenous communities themselves rather than primarily serving the interests of 'parachute' cartographers whose primary goal is to extract knowledge from Indigenous communities for external use.' (156)

-->

Who benefits question

--> Relations to my own artistic practices and questions

'As these studies suggest, Indigenous mapping can also provide a basis for supporting environmental protection against the destructiveness of large infrastructural megaprojects and the extractivism of capitalist development deeply rooted in colonialist–statist discourse and praxis.' (156)

'Decolonial cartography certainly requires critical theoretical work, yet this must not be decoupled from the decolonial praxis of Indigenous and colonized peoples both within and beyond the academy.' (156)

--> Put in the work !!!

--> Collaboration not research

'If non-Indigenous cartographers plan to engage in mapping activities on Indigenous lands, Lucchesi maintains that the self-determination and sovereignty of the community must be upheld by following the protocols of the community and allowing those protocols to shape the methodology of the work.'(157)

'To put it concisely, the practice of Indigenizing the map under conditions of ongoing colonial oppression is a profoundly decolonial act – even more so to the extent to which the cartographer refrains from explicitly deconstructing or critiquing colonialism but rather refuses altogether to reproduce the colonial geographical imagination as the centerpiece of cartographic attention.' (157)

'As a remedy, Palmer and Korson propose the development of what they call 'Indigital story maps' that can incorporate multimedia sources (audio, video, and additional interpretive content) to enhance the richness and depth of mapping as an Indigenous story-telling practice. Moreover, they advocate for a participatory approach to story mapping that recenters Indigenous knowledge by enabling 'communities to incorporate their own voices, languages, names, and stories into maps.' ' (158)

'For the authors, decolonizing the map involves cartographically documenting and prioritizing Indigenous experiences of place both historically and in the present.'(158)

--> Personhood and place

Danika Medak-Saltzman. ‘Empire’s Haunted Logics: Comparative Colonialisms and the Challenges of Incorporating Indigeneity’. Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 11–32, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.2.0011.

'Although the truth of it is inconvenient and unpalatable, the reality that settler colonialism--which Patrick Wolfe tells us is a process rather than an event (1)--is ongoing makes it all the more conspicuous that the function and effects of settler colonialism remain largely unseen by those who benefit from them.' (1)

--> On Palestine

''Indigeneity' is all too often invoked as a term--rather than a concept- which reduces it to jargon, removes it from its vital context, and embeds it in writing that otherwise betrays a very limited intellectual and scholarly understanding of Native experiences, issues, and histories'(1)

--> Tokenism, identity politics, preformative

'In doing so, instead of framing and engaging Indigenous studies, Indigenous experience, and Indigeneity as foundational and essential to critical examinations of North American experience, history, and racialization processes, the significance of Indigeneity has instead been undermined and relegated to the realm of the inconsequential: a prehistory or background to the real stories, relegated to the first/last week of class (or to Native history month), and absent from discussions of the civil rights era and contemporary sociopolitical protests in North America, to name but a few examples.' (2)

--> Oppression olympics

'We cannot simply expect that theoretical frames that are useful in making sense of the experiences of other racialized groups will be equally relevant when applied to Indigenous peoples and context. Surely there are cases where this wholesale application works, but it is far more common to see such 'inclusion' of Indigeneity as more of an attempt to fit an Indigenous round peg into an all-other-racialized-groups square hole, while avoiding actual engagement with how and why the Indigenous case complicates such theoretical frames.' (3)

'Yet the very nature of haunting has been useful precisely because, as Avery Gordon tells us, 'to be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects,' (9) even when, or perhaps especially when, these social effects of the past are dismissed as irrelevant and ahistorical or attributed to bitterness that ought to be 'gotten over.''(4)

--> Haunting as being tied to consequence and societal influences

'However, wholesale applications of postcolonial and cultural studies notions of haunting and the trace to the specificity of Native American and Indigenous peoples' experiences presents a distinct problem: precisely because the "fact" of Native vanishing has become part of a 'commonsense' belief that renders Indigenous peoples always already ghostly presences, postcolonial notions of haunting and the trace simply cannot serve as recuperative, or decolonial, strategies for Indigenous peoples.' (4)

--> Existence as resistance

'This pervasive, public, scholarly, and media supported and encouraged manner of thinking about--or more tellingly not thinking about--Native peoples is part of the unseen fabric that binds settler colonial societies together, legitimating the presence of all non-Native peoples on stolen land, whether they arrived by choice or by force.'(4)

--> Dehumanization as well, forced to be in past tense, etc

'Settler colonial societies are haunted by the need to keep these unpalatable truths and their human consequences hidden.' (4)

--> This goes hard!!!

'Rendered another way, the logics of empire that haunt settler colonial societies are vestiges of the goals and spirit of colonialism that haunt in order to maintain the foundational narratives of Indigenous absence/inconsequence that justify settler colonial presence on Indigenous lands and manage to absolve guilty consciences in the process.'(4)

'These ghostly presences are deep seated and lingering, and they leave indelible traces of themselves that can be read--if we manage to free ourselves from the influence of these specters of colonialism, by learning to see them and resist their influence--to reveal seldom-considered perspectives on the past and present.'(5)

--> On hauntology

'In this way, the specters of colonialism help to justify and promote the very pattern of non-engagement with Indigenous intellectual traditions and Indigenous studies scholarship that this article seeks to trouble.'(5)

--> 1 excuse; Indigenous people are too small to be statistically relevant - counter, who committed the ongoing genocide to reduce populations?

--> Reframe how we conceptualize academia/traditional periods/history

'Although attempts have been made to dismiss these concerns as 'semantics,' we would do well to recognize how resistance to renaming national activities 'colonial' or 'settler colonial' (to be more accurate) and questioning or rebounding given time periods (to make visible the significant events that take place across conventional historical periods) are themselves products and evidence of the influence levied by the specters of colonialism.'(6)

'Thus, in order to tease out Indigeneity and Indigenous experiences from the tangled strands of intertwined histories, we must not only recognize the way that the haunted logics of empire are working to prevent us from doing so, but--and even if we have only been exposed to thinking that focuses on how the colonizers influence the colonized--we must also honor that historical influences levied on local and global events have always run both ways and ought to have disciplinary implications.'(7)

--> Nice