UCLA

This thesis is a methodological reflection on a years’ work on hereafter.land, a collaborative webmapping project exploring a speculative ecology of the Malartic Mine. In these reflections, I address the ethical obligations of co-creative research, methods and sources used in developing hereafter.land, and how the physical infrastructure of extraction and the digital infrastructure of mapmaking disturb relationalities. I argue that the separation of plant, water, and animal kin so often found in Western spatial science is incompatible with Indigenous epistemologies rooted in relationality. In making hereafter. land, my collaborator Vanny and I developed a webmapping method based on our understandings of good relation as Anishinaabe and Chickasaw people, respectively, that aims to push back against the abstraction necessitated by Western cartographic tools and conventions.