This is a project out of the University of Victoria's Ethnographic Mapping Lab, under the direction of Prof Brian Thom. The purpose of this project is to develop a cartographic technique for expressing Indigenous territoriality without the use of polygons to define territorial boundaries.
This project is in the developmental phase, drawing on Google Maps API, and deck.gl in order to produce a visualization that focuses on relationships between people's home places and the places that are significant to them across the landscape. We encourage you to draw on this code, contribute features to it, or repurpose it to your own project contexts.
The main code is the file called "problematicpolygons.html" in the "pages" branch of this repository. There are associated CSS and js files in the /assets of the "pages" branch (see: assets/js/ppoly.js and assets/css/ppoly.css). In the "legacy" branch of this repository are an earlier iteration of the project, developed in 2020, which had much more basic user functionality and used old versions of Google Maps API and Google Sheets. These files are here for archival purposes only.
The project was designed as a code template which can easily be repurposed to be used with other datasets -- the code on this GitHub page is shared under a very permissive licence, and stands independent of the actual information for a particular area being represented.
The data table that this code draws on (currently call on by the code as a JSON from a Google Sheet), is populated with information from several publically availalbe ethnographies, with a heavy focus on place names and related use and occupancy-type data which was readily mappable based on the information in the source material. The "Problmatic Polygons" feature map draws on information from eight ethnographies centred on southeast Vancouver Island and the lower Fraser River area. The "Smakwuts" feature map is focused on representng several published oral histories about monumental boulders, and their connections across the Coast Salish cultural landscape.