A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [222]
The words ‘Piankishwa sold’ suggest that the map is a record of an already agreed land transaction, but in fact this deal was never ratified by the British colonial authorities. It was illegal, breaching official treaties. In any case, it is unclear what it could have meant to the Piankishwa Indians. The Wabash Company used interpreters, but plenty was lost in translation.
They have deposed that they served as interpreters … with the chiefs of the different tribes of the savage nation of Pinkashaws, relative to the purchase of lands as above mentioned, specified and written in the aforesaid act … the said witnesses, in their quality as interpreters, have done for the best in their souls and consciences and have faithfully and plainly explained to the said chiefs … to which they have set their ordinary marks, with their own hands.
Although this report says everything has been ‘faithfully and plainly explained’ to the chiefs, the Piankishwa could have had no concept of European-style land purchase. Settler approaches to land were completely alien to Native Americans, who thought of their land as both a literal and a spiritual birthplace – not territory that could be given away or sold.
The map above is a transcript and interpretation of the marks on the buckskin map. It primarily identifies and names rivers, but additionally shows the road built between the forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes and two dotted boundary markers; it identifies some other native settlements without naming them, and shows the areas occupied by the Piankishwa, Wea and Kaskaskia peoples. The map below is a modern topographical map of the area depicted in the buckskin map.
What the map shows above all is rivers. In the centre, running down the spine of the deer, is the Wabash River – hence the Wabash Land Company – into which other rivers come in as straight, angled lines placed like vertebrae, except for the Mississippi, which runs down the left and curves around the bottom to the right. It shows the rivers, where the people are grouped together, not the land over which they roam and hunt. This is a map about communities, not geography, about habits of use, not patterns of ownership. So, rather like the map of the London Underground, it does not show accurately the physical distances on the ground. Instead, it indicates the the time it takes to travel between them. The Native Americans, like everybody else, mapped what mattered to them. Tellingly, although the map includes all the rivers, it shows almost exclusively the settlements of the Indians. Virtually none of the European settlements are there. St Louis, for example, which was already a great centre of trade and communications, just is not shown. European maps of the same area do effectively the same in reverse, showing the European settlements but not the Indian ones, plotting the space not in use. Two quite different readings of the same physical experience: you could hardly have a better demonstration of a central Enlightenment problem, the difficulty of any society in trying to understand another.
If the Indians didn’t understand the notion of exclusive land ownership, the Europeans could not grasp the Indians’ intense spiritual relationship to their land, the notion that the loss of earth was in some measure the loss of heaven. David Edmunds, Professor of American History at the University of Texas, elaborates:
I think the Native American relationship with the land is very important. You have to understand that land for tribal people is not a commodity. It was never a commodity, it was a place where you lived, that you shared, that you utilized, but it was not something that you particularly owned. One could not any more own