Genuine inquiry and human agency under occupation: lessons from the history of geographic and cartographic reasoning

ABSTRACT Humans often use the words “agency” and “occupation” without questioning these words’ possible implications. Following the logic of such implications can easily lead to assuming disingenuous, dehumanizing and all-consuming “us vs. them,” binaries. Questioning that logic, and the sorts of maps that have historically enabled and promoted it, can reveal other instances where understandings of agency were not reduced, verbally or cartographically, to flattening notions of nation or empire. Not all cartographic work undertaken under occupation, or in response to occupation, has reduced agency to geopolitical binaries, finding it instead in genuine inquiry, in the exercise of conscience, and in the richness of varied human articulations, representations and understandings. This article considers two such historical examples of mapping projects undertaken under occupation, but which visually articulated notions of agency that did not carry disingenuous or dehumanizing implications. The first considers maps presented to occupying authorities in Washington DC to make a case against particular Indigenous communities’ forced removal. The second considers maps drawn to aid the drawing of boundaries after the end of the First World War, contrasting geopolitically strategic but empirically disingenuous mapping projects with those drawn in the spirit of genuine inquiry.