Amiskwaciwâskahikan

  • Sumo

Amiskwaciwâskahikan is the Cree name for Edmonton. This series of maps lays bare the city’s colonial logic by superimposing Aboriginal over conventional maps of the space we know as Edmonton. The pipeline’s historical breadth, connecting Fur Trade contact to the present day, will demonstrate the city’s ongoing colonial commitments, but it will also demonstrate how colonialism literally changes shape over time, moving from a logic of exclusion (“Indian” reserves outside the city limits) to a logic of containment (inner-city poverty is disproportionately Aboriginal, e.g.) – a translation in which the Hudson’s Bay privatization of river city tracts played a major role.

Early materials will come from (contested) Treaty 6, Papaschase and Hudson’s Bay maps, supplemented by the 2004 Urban Aboriginal Oral History Project. 20th and 21st century information comes from Edmonton’s Open Data.

Method: Collect and digitize Treaty 6, Hudson’s Bay and City of Edmonton maps from 1750 to 2000. Augment the maps with a Hypercities collection containing important contextualizing materials including, if possible, oral narratives.

Scope: A medium-sized, stand-alone project in the first instance, this will likely ground the Rossdale Flats project. It will also constitute the first Edmonton-based contribution to hypercities and thus might invite more Edmonton-based contributions to that site.

Platform: hypercities

Authorship: Heather Zwicker and public partner

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