“Poetry is language condensed; Blackfoot cartography is landscape distilled.”

Cartographic Poetry is the first book-length, multidisciplinary study of five maps drawn in 1801 and 1802 by several Blackfoot and Gros Ventre people for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Representing some of the oldest documents created by Indigenous people on the North American prairies and foothills, these maps preserve invaluable evidence about places on the landscape, and about historic Blackfoot views of their territories. The maps were intended as navigational tools, but the landforms and locations on the maps hold significance for the Blackfoot well beyond wayfinding, and have for many centuries. Informed by a career-long fascination with this priceless archive, the Piikani Nation’s placenames project, and fieldwork efforts to align Indigenous places and present geography, Ted Binnema, François Lanoë, and Heinz W. Pyszczyk study the maps as ethnohistorical sources. Exploring their beauty and utility from historical, linguistic, and archeological perspectives, the authors analyze the maps, their placenames and features, and the tours and trips they may have supported, along with providing present-day photographs of many of the maps’ landforms. A final section of the book outlines how Indigenous maps contributed significantly to Western geographical knowledge and maps of North America from the 1500s onward. Cartographic Poetry will appeal to anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, historians, cartographers of the Great Plains, and to all readers interested in how Indigenous peoples perceived and navigated their territories in this early period of colonial encounter.

With a Foreword by Jerry Potts Jr. and an Afterword by Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn.

Dr. Binnema entered the historical profession after teaching high school English and social studies for several years. He has been teaching at UNBC since 2000, where he now teaches in the fields of Canadian and United States history, aboriginal history, and environmental history. He has written several books that examine various aspects of environmental history, aboriginal history, and the history of science. Common and Contested Ground (2001) examines the human and environmental history of the northwestern plains of North America from AD 200 to 1806. With Gerhard Ens of the University of Alberta, he published The Hudson's Bay Company Edmonton House Journals, Correspondence, and Reports: 1806-1821 (2012). That book consists of primary documents and a long essay offering a new interpretation of the history of the northern plains and Athabasca region between 1806 and 1821. "Enlightened Zeal": The Hudson's Bay Company and Scientific Networks, 1670 to 1870" (2013), is the first book to examine the relationship between science and a major chartered monopoly over its entire lifetime. Dr. Binnema also co-edited two collections of original articles, New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada's Native Pasts (2007) and From Rupert's Land to Canada (2001). He has also published many scholarly articles including articles in Environmental History, The Canadian Historical Review, Journal of the Early Republic, Western Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of Canadian Studies.

Ted Binnema's profile page

François Lanoë is Assistant Research Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and Research Associate at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. He works on the pre-contact archaeology of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America, from early settlement during the last Ice Age, to interactions with Euro-American colonial powers. He has worked with tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy since 2013, leading to several publications on Blackfoot archaeology, ancient DNA, and oral history.

François Lanoë's profile page

Heinz Pyszczyk, retired staff archaeologist with the Government of Alberta, is an adjunct professor at the University of Lethbridge. His primary research interest is Canadian fur trade archaeology and ethnohistory. His most recent publications include: The Last Fort Standing. Fort Vermilion and the Peace River Fur Trade, 1798-1830 and Fifty years of fur trade archaeology in northern Alberta forests: what have we accomplished? He has also published numerous articles in a wide range of topics in Canadian archaeology. As Parkland Archaeologist for the Government of Alberta, he first became interested in the Ki oo cus map in 2010 as it covered parts of his regional mandate.

Heinz W. Pyszczyk's profile page

"Cartographic Poetry is a major contribution. It illustrates Indigenous Knowledge of the northern Great Plains as expressed through maps. Indigenous peoples shared their deep understanding of their land and landscape by drawing maps of their world that showed both physical and metaphysical realms." Rosalyn LaPier, author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet

"Cartographic Poetry is the first detailed study of these five Indigenous maps as ethnohistoric documents. The authors describe the cartographic conventions of the mapmakers and provide their identifications of the named places. Given the recent interest in the study of toponyms, this book will be a valuable resource to researchers, members of First Nations communities, and the public.” Gerald Oetelaar, Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary