Translating land
Cultural development encounters in Canadian and Alaska Indigenous land studies, 1968–1981
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7959751 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lasse Rau (Columbia University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1361-1386 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Planning Perspectives (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0266-5433 • E-ISSN: 1466-4518 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02665433.2025.2481152 |
| OpenAlex | W4410771978 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 32 |
The 1970s saw an increase in the planning of oil infrastructures across lands in the American North claimed by Indigenous groups. As a result of this, federal pipeline inquiries in Alaska and Canada turned into testbeds for the legal and anthropological study of Indigenous land claims, their evidentiary regimes of land use, and legal and cultural definitions of Indigeneity. Studies of northern Indigenous subsistence in Alaska followed economic definitions of Indigeneity embedded in development discourses of modernization. In contrast, the anthropological research produced in Canada by state-backed anthropologists in partnership with Indigenous groups between 1973 and 1981 embraced Indigeneity and its land use practices as cultural systems in need of translation and monetization. This article studies the resulting graphic, bureaucratic, and methodological artifacts of Canadian land use studies to reveal the structural components that enabled anthropological mappings to be used as evidence in development inquiries. By employing frameworks of semiology and cultural anthropology, the Canadian mapping practices strengthened the position of anthropologists as ‘translators’ and ‘interpreters’ between planners and their subjects. The article posits that the shift from spatial to comprehensive development planning made land use the basis of a narrow cultural, economic, and legal definition of indigeneity
Civil engineering · Economic geography · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Geography · Indigenous · Land development · Land use · Political science · Engineering · Environmental Science · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Ecology
Making Canadian Indian Policy
System and Structure
Northern Pipelines and Southern Assumptions
Social Science Research and Northern Development
The Map As Natural Language
Early Inuit Studies
Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and Beyond
Conversing with Some Chickadees
Toward a General Theory of Action
Cold War Anthropology
Weaponizing Maps
The Iconography of Landscape
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy
He Forced Us Into the Fray
Take My Land, Take My Life
Goodbye, Great White Father-Figure
Anthropology and the development encounter
The Training of Historical Ethnologists in America
An Inconstant Profession
Anthropologists and Development
The Return of the Native
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |