Mapping traditional knowledge: Digital cartography in the Canadian north

Digital cartography offers exciting opportunities for recording indigenous knowledge, particularly in contexts where a people's relationship to the land has high cultural significance. Canada's north offers a useful case study of both the opportunities and challenges of such projects. Through the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Inuit peoples have been invited to become partners in innovative digital mapping projects, including creating atlases of traditional place names, recording the patterns and movement of sea ice, and recording previously uncharted and often shifting traditional routes over ice and tundra. Such projects have generated interest in local communities because of their potential to record and preserve traditional knowledge and because they offer an attractive visual and multimedia interface that can address linguistic and cultural concerns. But given corporations' growing interest in the natural resourc

Legal issues in mapping traditional knowledge: Digital cartography in the canadian north

Digital cartography offers great potential for mapping the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities. This is particularly so because of the close relationship between such knowledge and traditional lands. Yet the mapping of traditional knowledge also raises distinct legal and ethical considerations which should be at the forefront in the design and implementation of indigenous digital cartography projects. This paper examines these considerations through the lens of digital atlases jointly created by Inuit communities and Carleton University’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC)