Dan Cole, the Natural History Museum GIS guru (among other things), has recently co-published a 3-volume set on Mapping Native America. It was printed by CreateSpace and is handsomely done with clear colorful images and lots of good info. He has provided the description below:
Mapping Native America: Cartographic Interactions between Indigenous Peoples, Government and Academia
Edited by Daniel G. Cole and Imre Sutton.
Seven years in the making, the three volumes include a Preface, 42 chapters, plus an extensive Addenda. The volumes are divided as:
Volume I: Cartography and the Government
Volume II: Cartography and the Academy
Volume III: Cartography and Indigenous Autonomy
We do not claim that this work is comprehensive concerning indigenous groups, tribes, and first nations across North America. The selection of maps for any given time-period has depended on several variables: applicable maps and interpreters of maps. There have been limitations in both cases, yet many welcomed opportunities to balance the contributor group of about four dozen scholars have occurred. Not everyone of interest to us proved to be available; and some scholars did not consider themselves to be experts on the cartographic side of their research. In one arena -- Native land claims, we were fortunate to secure contributions from scholars who have participated as expert witnesses in earlier litigation.
Our organizational sense has led us to single out specific cartographic players -- we call them producers -- in Native America since contact.
Indigenous contributions to the cartography of Native America precede EuroAmerican occupation and exploration of the continent. Tribal mapmaking, even if not parallel to the European tradition, has played an important role in the occupation of the continent and too often in the displacement of American Indians. But tribes since the 1970s slowly but surely have initiated and been assisted in the development of the means to produce maps and related GIS technology. Some of that training and expertise have come from both governmental and academic auspices. Contributing to many newer maps that serve tribal land and resource management are various forms of land trusts and other institutional means reflecting newer trends in tribal conservation, especially in terms of bringing tribes into co-management with public land agencies.
Government, early on, from colonial through federal eras, has dominated the scene ever since in terms of tribes, communities, lands, resources, and activities, although this does not mean that state and local government mapmaking is non-existent. But the intervening administrative unit – the territory – played a major role in the negotiation of treaties leading to land cessions. In fact, the earlier meaning of extraterritorial should tell us that tribes retained their sovereignty beyond territorial boundaries and that the establishment of territorial government forewarned tribes of the very real threat of land diminishment. Nonetheless, government mapping has covered nearly all aspects of the cultural and physical environments of Native America.
Academia, dating back to the early 1800s, including such cartographic contributions which are not entirely products of college or university scholars, but their development, design and printing reflect an academic and/or scientific endeavor about Native America. At a much later date, academia is participating in the fieldwork, data-gathering, design and production of maps and atlases. Scholars also have figured prominently as the leaders and synthesizers of the legal cartography of tribal land claims.
Maggie Dittemore
John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.