UC GIS Week

Status of California Native American Tribal GIS Knowledge Build

This past July 31st and August 1st, 2025 – the 1st California Native American Tribal GIS Summit was held in Sacramento in the Cal/EPA Building. There were 22 presentations that included CA Tribal perspectives of their uses of GIS based technology, federal and state agencies collaboration in working with Tribes, Tribal non-profits utilizing GIS – all using GIS to help manage Natural Resources, protection of cultural landscapes, and environmental justice support. This summit was first of its kind in California. Both UC Davis and UC Berkeley also participated and provided their efforts in working with CA Native American Tribes with the usage of GIS based solutions and potential new water governance model. The concepts of Tribal GIS data sovereignty, rematriation, ground-truthing, land back, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), decolonizing mapping, and cultural burning were discussed and explored. This summit provided to provide the need for the government to provide GIS based data for future natural resources changes, including CA Tribes in water and natural resources management policy making, and more GIS based training for CA Native American Tribes – both federally and non-federally recognized. The proposed presentation will provide a summary of this important and historic summit. The concepts of “Tribal GIS data sovereignty, rematriation, ground-truthing, land back, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), decolonizing mapping, and cultural burning” will be discussed. Mapping solutions and concepts will also be illustrated. The presentation should take about 25 minutes. Planning for the 2026 California Native American Tribal GIS Summit is underway, and we encourage UC participation – presenter, exhibitor, or participant. www.catribalgis.org – location of the 2026 summit status.

(Re)Thinking the ‘Z Axis’: A Case for Relational Ontologies in Vertical Worlds

Current cartographic standards for representing vertical terrain are embedded in two-dimensional, top-down, colonial perspectives, holding the possibilities of the vertical world at bay. For example, topographic maps marginalize the vertical world through a type of compression. To signify steepness, we place contour lines closer together, providing the slope less space on the map. In other maps, the vertical is represented through artistic hatching or shadowing. A more modern tool, like LIDAR, scans the landscape from the top-down and builds verticality into a model where the user can manipulate the view of each crevice. Vertical or volumetric spaces sit in tension with the space often made visible by the Cartesian system. Vertical spaces are not often a space of conquest, a space of property, or even considered a ‘human space’ (Elden). Rather, what we find is a space where the geologies, ecologies, and biologies operate with increasing entanglement under the influence of the consequences of gravity (i.e., everything must hold everything else together on a vertical landscape lest it fall). With this, my project asks: how do we create a relational mapping system based in critical cartographic theory that allows for both a different representation and also, fundamentally, an epistemological shift in how we understand the world through the undertheorized ‘voluminous space’? And how might this system better represent the dynamics of a rapidly shifting world under climate change? My proposal is to make a presentation on these questions for the audience of US GIS Week and to engage them in a thought experiment around what it might take to create these relational representations and get feedback on these possibilities.