Mapping Interdependent Space

In the middle of the exhibit, visitors encounter a large wall-mounted map with both Penobscot and English introductions, a language key, and a map of Penobscot land. "Iyoka Eli-Wihtamakw Kətahkinawal" (This is how we name our lands), is a narrative map of Penobscot relations with the Dawnland—the English translation of Wabanaki—visually marking islands and canoe routes with designations from the Dawnland's original stewards. 8 The title of the map centers Penobscot sovereignty through interdependent world-building. Sections in the exhibit emphasize how Wabanaki actively sought to integrate settlers into their world, sharing land and lifeways. Settlers consistently rejected Wabanaki efforts to cultivate good relations with them. One focal point in this history is language. As one exhibit panel reminds viewers: "English is the Foreign Language." 9 This segment details how colonizing practices corroded Wabanaki people's kinship and linguistic ties. More recent language revitalization efforts are spotlighted as examples of mutual world-making, energizing cross-generational connections through language and cultural reclamation. Reflecting on the history exhibit project, curator and Native American studies scholar Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) explained, "The language tells us that 'history' is a collective process of telling and re-telling, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged." 10 In the map's introduction, Penobscot collaborators highlight the interconnected meanings and negotiations between generations, language, land, resources, sustenance, and shared histories with settler occupants. The objects and labels convey directly that language and land are knowledge-producing agents in Wabanaki worldviews.

"This map is a Penobscot guide to the place names given by our ancestors. On this side are the English translations, and on the other side are the Penobscot names. The separate gazetteer is for your reference, for quick connection between Penobscot and English. The names offer a window into the past and allow us to view the landscape at the heart of our culture. The meanings of the names tell us how we interact with the shape and character of the land and how we interconnect with the rivers, lakes, wetlands, falls, eskers, meadows, and rocks across our traditional territory. They indicate where plants, animals, and materials for tools are found. They inform us where and when to plant, tan hides, and hold our seasonal gatherings and ceremonies. The canoe routes, gathering places, and stories show us how the place names connect and why they are located where they are. Together, place names, travel routes, and stories reveal a map given to us from the hearts of our ancestors.

The last piece of the map, of course, is you." 11

Bringing the exhibit visitors into Penobscot narratives of mapped land extends the idea that Dawnland is an interdependent, shared space through the metaphor of what Brooks calls the common pot: "the conceptualization of a cooperative, interdependent Native environment" that "emerges from within Native space." 12 Introducing the narrative map through the "connection between Penobscot and English" and location "place names" that "offer a window into the past" makes legible the ways in which settler encroachment and assimilation have impacted Penobscot naming practices. 13 For example, many words "were contributed directly from the Elders," and in places "[w]here no Penobscot name is available" the writers "included the name from an English source." 14 In the section labeled "The People's Island," or Indian Island (tribally-held Penobscot Nation land), place markers such as "The New Bridge" indicate the bridge that forcibly connected Indian Island to the neighboring settler city of Old Town in the 1950s. 15 "(This is how we name our lands)," visually maps the material and visceral connections between Penobscot people and their homelands as cohabitant collaborators in a world altered through colonization. Yet, as the public display of this map suggests, preserving Penobscot connections to language and land is a project that necessitates non-Native interlocuters who are willing to remap their relations to Wabanaki land as a collective and interdependent care act. The second portion of the map's title, "(This is how we name our lands)," also serves as a guide for interdependent care, and in doing so, recognizes that reaching a wide audience of people requires a translation, a gesture of invitation to view, read, witness, and unlearn, and to learn anew.

Access, Self-Determination, and Liberation

In addition to mapping Penobscot knowledge of Wabanaki homelands in a visual text-map, exhibit designers also digitally manipulate language representation to create intergenerational access to Penobscot place names. The map is a resource for future Penobscot generations to learn how to relate to their home. Penobscot narrative maps thus share with disability justice a valuing of access as an expansive concept that extends to the preservation of language and critical engagements with occupied land. In the collaborative digital project "Access is Love," Sandy Ho, Mia Mingus, and Alice Wong write that "access" is "not only about logistics, but about deepening our shared humanity and dignity." 16 Ho, Mingus, and Wong encourage people "to expand our understanding of what 'access' means" to "think about how we can create spaces—and a world—where all kinds of accessibility are centered and valued." 17 Documenting the long history of Penobscot connections to the Dawnland, the printed version of "This is How We Name Our Lands" widens the kind of access commonly anchored to disability activism by embodying and sustaining Penobscot worldviews. As exhibit curators explain: "Wabanaki children were at times forcibly removed from their homes, and were not allowed to speak Wabanaki. As a result, generations of Wabanaki people grew up not knowing their language." 18 The settler ableist justification for language deprivation historically relied on both ableism and settler colonialism to acculturate Native children through English language training and assimilation during the historic boarding school era. 19 The state limited Native children's access to tribal land and life-sustaining resources through delegitimizing tribal languages as the perceived visible indicators of Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty. "Holding Up the Sky" narrates how Wabanaki access to tribal languages is one means of enacting self-determination as well as seeking redress for legacies of settler ableist institutionalization and boarding school assimilation.

The narrative map opens with a dictionary and "gazetteer" to acknowledge the digital tools of sovereign map- and meaning-making in a prescript, which reads as poetic stanzas to preface Wabanaki narratives. The Penobscot writers explain their intent to represent English and Panawahpskewtek, or Penobscot, languages through a digital version of what Richard Scott Lyons (Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota) calls an "x mark"—textual representation of Indigenous intent within a post-colonial contact world order. In the context of the text-map, this is necessarily set in a settler typeface. 20 According to Lyons, an "x-mark" is "a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one's making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency. It is a decision one makes when something has already been decided for you, but it is still a decision." 21 Considering Lyons's formulation of an x-mark as something that "signifies power and a lack of power," the prescript to the gazetteer reads as an explanatory note, itself a mapping of the contours of language and land: "The map and gazetteer are set in/DejaVu Serif, DejaVu Sans, and Gentium,/ all open-source, Unicode typefaces./ They let us write/Penobscot and English words/together, as equals." 22 Penobscot writers code Panawahpskewtek text in an open access visual format that shows how English and Penobscot languages have shaped each other as they have been spoken in Wabanaki homelands through centuries of colonization. This is a necessary process of representing the Penobscot language—a choice to encode Penobscot letters in settler typefaces alongside English words where the Penobscot is no longer known. This is simultaneously a choice that is coerced through centuries of assimilation in order to narrate a Penobscot map-text, and a sovereign narrative act that anticipates future collaboration. As an act of collective care to anticipate future access to Penobscot land and text, the collaborators write in the exhibit that "to restore" Penobscot language and meaning for words where there is only English available will be "an ongoing restoration that we share with the next generations." 23

The Penobscot exhibit writers remind, or perhaps educate, viewers that access to land and language are vital means of staying alive and living well at a time when Indigenous nations face ongoing cultural and natural resource extraction and deprivation. As "This is How We Name Our Lands," and other components of "Holding Up the Sky" communicate, access to life-sustaining resources cannot be separated from the perpetuation of and continued access to cultural resources and knowledge. Explaining that words in both Penobscot and English depict "how" they "interact with the shape and character of the land" the exhibition text also conveys "how" Wabanaki people "interconnect" with land, natural elements, nonhuman animals, and locations for shelter, food sources, and other practices that sustain health and life. The map narrates the links between language, land, and lifeways, or how the place names "inform" them "where and when to plant, tan hides, and hold…seasonal gatherings and ceremonies." Names on the map also indicate "canoe routes" as well as "gathering places, and stories." Finally, "This is How We Name Our Lands" links the practice of naming to the viewer, who regardless of tribal connection or settler nationality, reads this information from within shared Wabanaki space. The map brings viewers and readers into Brooks' common pot as a guest, an interlocutor in the ongoing process of accounting for Wabanaki land and life, because, as the Penobscot writers close, "The last piece of the map, of course, is you." 24 This final reminder prompted me to recall Patty Berne, Aurora Levins Morales, and David Langstaff's (all of Sins Invalid) definition of disability justice: "a vision and practice of what is yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great-grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories." 25 For those of us who are settlers living on occupied Indigenous land, "Holding Up the Sky" extends an opportunity for us to intentionally learn about the lands we occupy and to practice responsibility to the original inhabitants and living Native stewards of places we call home.