Colbert, Z. (2024). Owning a River: Whiteness, Property Rights, and Counter-Representations on the Colorado Plateau. Journal of Architectural Education, 78(2), 331–357.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2024.2382000

Excerpt:

“Mapping is a dangerous medium. Through mapping, historical narratives are projected onto the landscape, consciously or unconsciously, and in a world built upon property rights and their enmeshment with whiteness this risks reenforcing racial subordination and violence through mapping. This is precisely the problem of the aerial view. To see the world from high above is a product of military technology, which is a product of conquest, which is a product of property rights, which is enmeshed with whiteness. The fact that the construction and maintenance of whiteness on the Colorado Plateau can hide in plain sight exemplifies the problem. It is very hard to see the outside of a thing you are entirely inside of. Additionally, mapping constructs what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a useful past. Or as UT-Austin professor Bjørn Sletto writes, “cartographic practice is often premised on the extractive documentation and romanticized representations of Indigenous knowledges as… an idealized past.” An individual choosing what is included or excluded from a map leads to selective remembrance and the deployment of historical narratives framed to privilege specific individuals or groups. In the case of the Colorado Plateau, a useful past, like the need to tame and manage the ‘wild’ river to serve urbanization and cultivation, is constructed to project colonial narratives into the future.”