{"id":1703,"date":"2026-10-19T13:25:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2026-10-19T13:25:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:25:56","slug":"beyond-borders-how-native-land-digital-challenges-the-mercator-mindset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/issue-7-fall-2026\/beyond-borders-how-native-land-digital-challenges-the-mercator-mindset\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Borders: How Native Land Digital Challenges the Mercator Mindset"},"content":{"rendered":"

In \u201cBeyond Borders: How Native Land Digital Challenges the Mercator Mindset\u201d, Haruru Segawa critically examines the ways in which world maps perpetuate European political dominance and erase Indigenous geography. They advocate for a platform called Native Land Digital that rejects the idea that people are defined by colonial borders and improves how we look at Indigenous history and culture. Segewa\u2019s masterful essay is a reminder that cartography and the way we are taught to look at the world is anything but politically neutral, but accepting that is the first step towards decolonial work. \u2013Arshie Chaudry ’27<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Beyond Borders: How Native Land Digital<\/i> Challenges the Mercator Mindset<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Haruru Segawa ’29<\/strong><\/h5>\n

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Fig. 1 Mercator Projection from World Atlas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Most people encounter their first world map long before they learn how to question the intentions behind its creation. Its lines and proportions settle into memory as simple facts, giving the deceptive impression that a map is neutral. Presumably, you have seen the Mercator projection (Fig. 1),<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>the rectangular world map that generations of students encounter on classroom walls. For Indigenous communities in particular, territories are often erased or overwritten by colonial cartography. Therefore, restorative mapmaking practices are deeply tied to reclaiming land and sovereignty. The \u201cNative Land Map\u201d in Native Land Digital<\/i> (Fig. 2) offers radically different ways of understanding space from the Mercator Projection. Native Land Digital<\/i> challenges the colonial worldview embedded in the Mercator projection by exposing political borders as imposed ruptures rather than natural divisions, using layered representations of Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties to model decolonial cartography that exposes territory as historically contested rather than naturally given.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The widespread adoption of the Mercator projection reflects political history rather than cartographic superiority. Michele Abee shows that the Mercator projection created by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 was designed to assist sailors with straight-line navigation between two points on a flat map. Mercator designed the projection to preserve the 90-degree intersection between latitude and longitude so that sailors could draw a straight line between two locations, measure the angle with a protractor, and reach the destination by maintaining that angle on a compass. However, scientists and publishers soon began applying it beyond this use to general world maps (Abee, 162). In the nineteenth century, influential scientific institutions in Western Europe promoted the projection, and their work filtered into popular atlases and school textbooks (Abee, 162). As a result, the Mercator projection \u201cmoved as a physical and ideological tool\u201d across continents, gaining legitimacy through educational and bureaucratic systems (Abee, 162). Mercator was reproduced and distributed across institutions, and it accumulated an authority it had never earned cartographically, even though it consistently elevated Europe\u2019s visual importance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although all flat maps of a round world are distorted, cartographic scholars argue that every projection involves choices that make it never neutral. As Dodge explains, Western mapping systems became \u201ccrucial to the maintenance of state power\u201d through their roles in defining borders, managing populations, and organizing military and administrative control (Dodge, 297). Their authority comes not from neutrality but from the institutional power behind them. Mapmakers select the information to include, the classification of the landscape, and the features to emphasize (Dodge 299). This can be seen in the Mercator projection, where its rectangular grid causes severe areal exaggeration at high latitudes, making countries like Canada, Russia, and much of Europe appear far larger than they are, while shrinking regions such as Africa, which is closer to the equator (Abee, 152). These \u201cdistortions fueled colonial and ethnocentric attitudes\u201d by visually centering Europe and diminishing Africa, South Africa, and South America (Stimpson, 109). Abee further explains that European states used maps as tools of overseas expansion, constructing \u201cimagined communities\u201d that supported their emerging geopolitical identities (Abee, 155). When these maps circulated globally through schools and atlases, they quietly reinforced the idea that European nations were geographically, and by implication, politically dominant. The Mercator projection, therefore, operates not just as a visual distortion but as a mechanism of ideological power, helping justify territorial control and Indigenous erasure.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fig. 3. Map of North America in Mercator Projection from World Atlas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Native Land Digital challenges the colonial worldview embedded in the Mercator projection through a visual strategy Western cartography has long refused. When North America is viewed through the Native Land Map rather than the Mercator projection, land is organized not by nation-states but through overlapping territories, living languages, and treaty histories that expose national borders as colonial impositions. Unlike the Mercator Projection, Native Land Digital treats territories not as something to be owned, exploited, or divided, but as relational. Its mission is \u201cto uplift Indigenous ways of knowing, and build understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples\u201d (Native Land Digital). Comparing North America in the Native Land Map (Fig. 6) and the Mercator projection (Fig. 3), the Mercator projection draws a sharp, unbroken border between the United States and Canada, a line so definitive it appears geological. In contrast, the Native Land Map shows Indigenous territories extending across the continent without regard for national borders. This continuity becomes even more evident in the language layer (Fig. 7), where linguistic regions flow across the United States-Canada border, demonstrating that Indigenous communities, communication networks, and cultural knowledge systems predate colonial state boundaries.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fig. 4. Map of Territories, Languages, and Treaties in Native Land Map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Native Land Map in Native Land Digital is distinctive for its use of translucent, layered polygons to represent territories, treaties, and languages (Fig. 4). This layered approach rejects Western mapping, which relies on \u201cspatial fixity\u201d and legalistic boundaries that often distort or silence Indigenous spatial realities (Sletto, 147). This matters because, as Sletto warns, when Indigenous lands are forced into rigid, state-defined categories, mapping can \u201cvalidate state territoriality\u201d and inadvertently deepen colonial control (Sletto, 148). When Indigenous territories are translated into rigid forms, the map can make state borders and authority look natural and legitimate, which results in treating Indigenous land as just another layer of information in a planning system, rather than a recognition of sovereignty. The Tohono O\u2019odham Nation, which resided in what is now southern and central Arizona and northern Mexico, knows this firsthand\u2014the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 drew a 62-mile international border straight through their homeland, cutting families off from cultural and religious life (Tohono O\u2019odham Nation). Native Land Digital resists the Western assumption that a person or a people belongs to one place, defined by one border.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fig. 5. Map of Treaties in Native Land Map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The treaty layer (Fig. 5) introduces a visible rupture. Unlike territories and languages, treaties are sharply bounded and often align with the nation divide\u2014between Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Greenland\u2014 revealing how colonial governments imposed legal lines onto land that had previously been organized through relational and cultural systems. The Tohono O\u2019odam Nation\u2019s tribal leaders describe the United States-Mexico border as \u201can unnatural line\u201d dividing Indigenous homelands (Stephanie Innes Arizona Daily Star, 2). The clear-cut line separating treaty regions illustrates how colonial power fragmented Indigenous space through agreements that divided land administratively, even when Indigenous languages and territories remained continuous. By placing overlapping territories and languages alongside treaty-bounded cuts, Native Land Digital exposes the historical process through which colonial states transformed living, relational land into segmented political spaces\u2014an intervention that the Mercator projection conceals by presenting borders as timeless and inevitable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fig. 6. Map of Territories in Native Land Map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Fig. 7. Map of Language in Native Land Map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Digital platforms open possibilities for decolonial cartography that static maps, frozen in a single perspective, cannot achieve. Unlike the Mercator projection, Native Land Digital allows viewers to move through overlapping territories, toggling between layers across time and space. This ability to toggle between layers makes the colonial construction of space newly visible, inviting viewers to question how they learned the map in the first place. This interactivity further helps counter the illusion of fixity that Western maps produce. Scholars of GIS argue that digital mapping can create new forms of public engagement by allowing users to explore relationships rather than simply receive information (Beimers, 94-98). Native Land Digital uses this potential by representing multiple layers that reveal how Indigenous presence exceeds the borders imposed by colonial states.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mercator projection\u2019s staying power has nothing to do with accuracy. It persists because it reflects and reinforces a colonial worldview that privileges Europe, erases Indigenous geographies, and naturalizes political borders. By contrast, Native Land Digital does not simply offer an alternative map. It makes the original problem visible: that borders drawn by colonial governments were never neutral, and that the lands they divided were already spoken for in territories, languages, and treaties that predate those borders by centuries. Digital mapping gives viewers tools to examine these relationships themselves, helping unsettle assumptions inherited from Western cartography. When platforms like Native Land Digital become part of how people learn geography, they open possibilities for recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, correcting historical erasure, and imagining relationships to land that do not depend on colonial boundaries. Changing the maps we use does not automatically change the world\u2014but it does change how we see it, and that is where decolonial work begins.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abee, Michele. \u201cThe Spread of the Mercator Projection in Western European and United States Cartography.\u201d <\/span>Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization<\/span><\/i>, vol. 56, no. 2, University of Toronto Press, 2021, pp. 151\u201365, <\/span>muse.jhu.edu\/article\/797597<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 16 Nov. 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beimers, Henry. <\/span>Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota and Creative Works for Decolonizing the Map: Indigenous Maps and GIS Decolonizing the Map: Indigenous Maps and GIS<\/span><\/i>. Mar. 2022, <\/span>cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?params=\/context\/etds\/article\/2182\/&path_info=Beimers_Henry.pdf<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dodge, Martin. <\/span>Classics in Cartography<\/span><\/i>. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200b\u200bMisachi, John. \u201cWorld Map – Mercator Projection.\u201d <\/span>WorldAtlas<\/span><\/i>, 18 May 2021, <\/span>www.worldatlas.com\/geography\/world-map-mercator-projection.html<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 13 Dec. 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n

Native Land Digital. \u201cNative-Land.ca | Our Home on Native Land.\u201d <\/span>Native-Land.ca<\/span><\/i>, Native-Land.ca, 2022, <\/span>native-land.ca\/about\/why-it-matters<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sletto, Bj\u00f8rn. \u201cSpecial Issue: Indigenous Cartographies: Introduction.\u201d <\/span>Cultural Geographies<\/span><\/i>, vol. 16, no. 2, Sage Publications, Ltd., 2009, pp. 147\u201352, <\/span>https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/44251524<\/span><\/a>. JSTOR.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stimpson, Ashley. \u201cWHAT WE GET WRONG About the World\u2019s MOST MALIGNED MAP.\u201d <\/span>National Geographic<\/span><\/i>, vol. 248, no. 4, Oct. 2025, pp. 108\u201311. <\/span>EBSCOhost<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>research.ebsco.com\/linkprocessor\/plink?id=7b123e94-0544-3884-8dc3-f6d0e8f5d97e<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stephanie Innes Arizona Daily Star. <\/span>Tohono O\u2019odham Leaders: Trump\u2019s Wall Won\u2019t Rise on Tribal Borderland<\/span><\/i>. 20 Feb. 2017, <\/span>www.tonation-nsn.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Tohono-Oodham-Leaders-Trumps-Wall-Wont-Rise-on-Tribal-Borderland.pdf<\/span><\/a>.Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tohono O\u2019odham Nation. \u201cNo Wall – Tohono O\u2019odham Nation.\u201d <\/span>Tohono O\u2019odham Nation<\/span><\/i>, 6 Mar. 2017, <\/span>www.tonation-nsn.gov\/nowall\/<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In \u201cBeyond Borders: How Native Land Digital Challenges the Mercator Mindset\u201d, Haruru Segawa critically examines the ways in which world maps perpetuate European political dominance and erase Indigenous geography. They advocate for a platform called Native Land Digital that rejects the idea that people are defined by colonial borders and improves how we look at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3782,"featured_media":1787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-7-fall-2026"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/368\/2026\/10\/fig-7.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3782"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1813,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions\/1813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}