Margaret Pearce Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display) Pearce, M. W. (2017). Coming home : to indigenous place names in Canada (S. J. Hornsby (Ed.)). Canadian-American Center. The map honors Indigenous place names in Canada and the assertion of Indigenous authority through place names. Commissioned by Dr. Stephen J. Hornsby, Director of the Canadian-American Center, Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada was researched and designed by Dr. Margaret Wickens Pearce. The map depicts Indigenous place names across Canada, shared by permission of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and people. The names express territorial rights and describe the shapes, sounds, and stories of sovereign lands. The names mark the locations of the gathering places, the communities, the places of danger and beauty, and the places where treaties were signed. The names are ancient and recent, both in and outside of time, and they express and assert the Indigenous presence across the Canadian landscape in Indigenous languages. The map does not depict all of the Indigenous place names of Canada, nor are all Indigenous Nations and communities represented. Beyond the map’s names are thousands upon thousands more, an ever growing and expanding atlas of intimate, geographical knowledge and experience. The intention of the map is to create respect for Indigenous homelands and sovereignties, and a feeling for and understanding of the place names.

[portion] of "Coming Home (Indigenous place names map). Published in 2007 by Margret Wikens Peirce. On this map Georgian Bay is called Mnidoo-gamii Ojibwe for "Spirit Lake".

Pearce, M. W. (2008). Framing the days: Place and narrative in cartography. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 35(1), 17-32–32. ABSTRACT: One of the themes of critical cartography is the question of how to map space as it is experienced. The conventions of Western cartographic language—the visual variables and their grammar— are structured to communicate spaces of homogeneity and modernity, not the spaces shaped by human experience. How then can we map place? I review some of the ways in which mapmakers have addressed this question in their visual and written works and propose another technique for uncovering place, using narrativity. Through the example of a historical map project, I consider the dialectic of place and narrative and demonstrate how this dialectic can be encoded in cartographic language. KEYWORDS: Place, narrative, cartographic language, graphic variables. and a passage that is a personal fav. of mine... Voyageurs... structured their landscape with their own unique measures of distance. Their more precise means of estimating distance was temporal, the distance that a canoe could travel in a day and the activities that shaped that day. Each day was broken down into “pipes,” or smoking breaks, granted in regular intervals of about every half hour to hour. A pipe was a break but also the distance between breaks; each leg of the day was expressed in pipe measure. Songs were another temporal unit translated to horizontal movement. North West Company voyageur Alexander Ross bragged, for example, that he could paddle fifty songs in a day.

Margaret Pearce
Coming home to indigenous place names in Canada, 2017.
Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display)
For more information/links: #cartobibliography tinyurl.com/34hn54c3
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William C. Wonders Map Collection #WCWMC