Cartographers Without Borders
Indigenous communities are building drones to make their own maps — and using them to fight erasure and exploitation at the hands of the state and capital
By Clayton Aldern
Before the first drone came, the most unusual thing the birds of South Rupununi would glimpse above the canopy could have been mistaken for a lone, tough fruit. It was a transient thing: bobbing up, then pausing, then dipping back into the forest, only to rise again elsewhere at irregular intervals. You’d forgive the birds if they were confused.
To the people below, though, the object was a GPS unit tied to a pole; and if you were to follow the pole down past the canopy, almost to the forest floor where service was sparse, you’d find a hand hoisting it up. Not long before the drone came, this was how the cartographers would stitch together their maps: pin-drop by pin-drop, with smartphones and GPS units, geo-referencing the data with satellite imagery.
But the drone would come. And before launching it into the sky, the cartographers who built it would name it for a bird, and in a little patch of southwest Guyana near the Brazilian border, the kowadad — osprey — would begin to sketch its own maps.
