BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE: EXTRACTING SPATIAL INFORMATION FROM HISTORICAL MAPS FOR A DIGITAL ATLAS OF AMERICAN INDIAN TREATIES AND TERRITORIES

摘要

The land base of the American Indian has changed dramatically since the first landfall of Columbus in 1492. Land transfers fr om Indians to Whites were sometimes piecemeal and sporadic, at other times organized and intense. Actions such as treaties, purchases, de facto seizures, a nd other forms of acquisitions, diminished American Indian land holdings to less than five percent of total U.S. territory.Deciphering American Indian land tenure and population change over the past few hundred years is difficult enough, given earlier recorders' incomplete knowledge of the physical and cultural landscapes in the United States. Compounding that problem, treaties were often unratified (and thus unsurveyed), or had poorly defined boundaries at times. Regarding population estimates, we are using spatial data sets provided by the earlier cartographers on their maps and in their field notes and contrasting those data with the official demographic figures, e.g. Lewis a nd Clark. We are cartographically analyzing the historic configuration of American Indian lands using individual maps and map series from the co lonial era through the federal period to the present. The scanned historic maps are being corrected to current map accuracy standards by rubber-sheeting an tique maps to fit current di gital map bases and then by checking the correctness of mapped land tenure. In the past, many of these historic maps have been used for legal purposes in terms of defining the number, location and distribution of Native Americans, as well as determining land claims and reparations.So merely warping these antique maps is not enough since our cartographic predecessors were not familiar with adjusting adjacent map sheets for edge-matching or mosaicking, nor were they as cognizant of the actual delineation of drainage divides which often defined territories. The ability to integrate digital environmental variables provides a more complete understa nding and more accurate interpretation of Native American tribal distributions. Not only having the location of the villages, but to have these villages portrayed in the correct topographic position or within a river floodplain adds to the interpretation of their distribution. Similarly, digitally modeled vegetation cover and bio-diversity landscapes can assist in examining transhumance and seasonal changes of Native American locations and the impacts of modifying their movements or creating barriers to movements. Spatial modeling techniques can provide a wider range of anal ytical possibilities to the use of historic maps and illustrations. The planned output will be a Digital Atlas of American Indian Treaties and Territories for the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution.