Abstract
William Commanda (1913 – 2011),
Indigenous leader, recipient of two honorary doctorate degrees, and subject of
a thesis on his environmental legacy (Thumbadoo 2017), was carrier of wampum
shell belts of Algonquin heritage; these are ancient mnemonic conceptual
devices of spiritual, historical, narrative and record-keeping importance that
underlie his cognitive mapping practice.
Cognitive
cartography is a relatively new field of inquiry in the social sciences,
initiated via cognitive psychology, and today, multidisciplinary research is
undertaken by neuroscientists, geographers, anthropologists, computer and
information scientists as well as psychologists. Research is dominated by
location-based theories that explore how we acquire, learn, code, process,
store and decode information related to the geographic world and how we use
this knowledge to make spatial choices and decisions. Yet Indigenous thinking
suggests that geographical acuity requires the intersection and integration of
cosmic, temporal and spatial knowledge, and further, that this is of critical
importance in these times of dramatic earth and climate change.
William Commanda was
a much-travelled and respected Indigenous leader and canoe-maker. He identified
himself as Mamiwinini; he translated this to mean we travel every day; we
always move. Thus, motion played a critical role in his cognitive map. During
contemporary times, guided by the prophetic heritage of his ancestors, embedded
in the concept Ginawaydaganuc, Everything is related, he mapped his traditional
homeland of North America, known to his people as Turtle Island, through
numerous journeys, social and political activism, language and cybernetic
influential storytelling, demonstrating reflexivity, performance, agency and
geo-narrative animation. This paper, following the trajectory of
post-representational theory, examines the role that two contemporary spatial
and temporal cartographic innovations, the cybercartographic digital atlas
(Taylor et al) and social media, and cybernetics play in integrating place,
time and movement on the land, concomitant with interrelationship with the
sensory, observational and experiential, in William Commanda’s cognitive
mapping practice.
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IJAHSS by IPRPD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.