UCLA

This dissertation examines indigenous visions for Palestine and Hawai’i and efforts by both communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures. The (counter)mapping projects explored in these chapters break away from debates confined to questions of citizenship and state boundaries. Instead, they present a defiance of settler productions of time and feature indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Refusing settler colonial regimes that relegate indigenous lives to the past and indigenous futures to settler dominance, these projects employ historical and imaginative cartographic practices that embrace and insist on better, freer futures. Blending visual analysis with ethnographic interviews, I examine technical and political considerations of individuals and projects for Hawai’i and Palestine that document, archive, and remap indigenous spaces and lands.