by MaFe Gonzalez
“Before You Are Here: Decolonial Cartographies and the Indigenous Bay Area” The event was part of Native Heritage Month, and it was the release of the Before you are here Map. It was truly inspiring and wonderful to see how traditional cartographic paradigms can be challenged, decolonized and expanded to create cartographies that uplift Ohlone voices and perspectives, exploring the histories and representations of Bay Area Indigenous territories and their present manifestations. The Before you are here Map is a map that weaves together multiple spaces and times to illustrate the Bay Area as an ambiguous, relational, and deeply contested site. We had the opportunity to hear about the process of creating this special map -that has no north, that can be seen from multiple points and that has as origin the location of the Lisjan Nation- from the authors of this work: Corrina Gould (Tribal Chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation), Gregg Castro (T’rowt’raahl Salinan / Rumsien-Ramaytush Ohlone) and Clancy Wilmott (Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualization and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography, UC Berkeley).
