#WhyIMap: The catalyst for the Indigenous Mapping Workshop

Steve DeRoy is the Co-Founder and Director of The Firelight Group. He is also the Founder of the global Indigenous Mapping Workshop initiative and Leader of the Indigenous Mapping Collective in Canada. Steve is from the Buffalo Clan, is Anishinaabe/Saulteaux, and a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation from Manitoba, Canada.

Ahead of the 2023 National IMW Australia in Narrm (Melbourne), we sat down with Steve to discuss his mapping journey and vision for First Nation peoples around the globe.

How did your journey with mapping begin?

When I was in high school I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I liked technology and art but I didn’t know how to apply those skills. My next door neighbour at the time worked at the US Geological Survey (USGS) and enthusiastically told my Mum about this new growing field called GIS (Geographic Information Sciences). This was motivation enough for me to apply to a college that had a cartographic technology program and I quickly learned that mapping was a means of combining art and science in a really neat way.

I fell in love with the idea of telling a story through a map. But it wasn’t until I met this First Nations fellow in Northern Ontario that I began to understand how I could apply my knowledge and skills.

There were a lot of big forestry companies who were cutting and logging Northern Ontario and he shared with me how they were using maps to protect their cultural sites and places of importance. All I could think was — WOW — that’s what I want to do.

In the late 1990’s I found a job out West. This was at a time when the province of British Columbia was going through a treaty negotiations process with many of the First Nations in British Columbia. Mapping played a significant role in terms of communicating and understanding the extent of these areas that they were trying to negotiate. It was there that I found myself in rooms with people that were a lot smarter than I was, learning all of the different ways you could tell a story through maps.

A pivotal point in my career was when I moved to an organisation that had a program called the Aboriginal Mapping Network. I was the Coordinator for that program and we ended up hosting a conference, bringing people together to learn about maps and mapping tools. That sparked this idea about Indigenous mapping - although we didn’t call it Indigenous mapping at the time. I saw firsthand how much people in Indigenous communities loved maps and even once I’d left the organisation, it’s something I held on to.

In 2010 we launched Firelight, and around the same time Google invited me to California to go to a workshop they were running called the Indigenous Mapping Network Workshop. I saw how First Nations people in the United States were using Google tools to map their territories in a variety of ways which made me realise that everyone should, and could be mapping. 

From then, Firelight began running annual Indigenous Mapping Workshops across Canada, supported by Google Earth Outreach and our growing partner network. A few years later we saw the initiative expand across seas to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia. 

What is it about the Indigenous Mapping Workshop that makes it unique?

It’s Indigenous-led and Indigenous peoples driven. When people register for an IMW, we find out what they want to learn and build a custom curriculum to support those wants. That is why our workshops are constantly evolving and changing.

The IMW is also technology partner agnostic. We create a space to teach and inspire - showing people what tools are available and how to use them, but it’s up to the people to figure out what story they want to tell and what tools they want to use to tell that story.

What are some challenges First Nations people in Canada face? How can maps help?

In Canada, First Nations have signed treaties with the crown of England. A lot of the issues we have are around implementing and maintaining Aboriginal treaty rights. The work we do at Firelight looks at the rights and title of Indigenous peoples and how they might be affected by crown and government decisions.

There’s a whole bunch of ways maps can be used to implement Indigenous peoples’ rights. For example, you might do a land use and occupancy study or a harvest study. You're using maps to say these are the areas we want to protect in order to maintain them for the future. Maps are critical in the communication process between First Nations and governing bodies.

What’s your vision for the Indigenous Mapping Workshop?

To build a global Indigenous mapping community where we can facilitate learning and knowledge-sharing across countries, driven by the Indigenous people of those countries.

When Moka Apiti, Leader of the Indigenous Mapping Wananga hosted the first IMW in Aotearoa (New Zealand), one of the most fascinating things to me was seeing the different ways they were mapping and the different mediums they were using. For example, they had been flying drones for a long time over their cultural sites and creating immersive tours of these cultural places. They were very comfortable using drones for mapping rivers, mountains, and archaeological sites, something that just wasn’t widespread in Canada.

Depending on where you are in the world and depending on your access to technology you might have different approaches to mapping - and that’s worth sharing. When Moka came to Canada, people kind of lost their minds over how cool it was.

What would you say to someone considering attending the Indigenous Mapping Workshop?

Stay curious. It’s the key. People can be really afraid to click things. Just click it. See what happens. It doesn’t matter if it breaks. Especially in this environment of learning. Yeah, you might lose some practice data but you’ll walk away with an understanding of how you can use and apply these tools in your work. 

Are you interested in learning how to utilise maps and mapping tools to support your Indigenous land rights? Apply to attend our four day face-to-face workshop in Narrm (Melbourne).