Passing down Indigenous memory. Mapping innovation crossovers and social transformation in an outermost region of Europe

Following the eruption of a major social crisis in an Outermost region of European Union (ORs), French Guiana, which gave rise to the French Guiana political agreement in 2017, the French government committed to a full retrocession process of 400,000 hectares of land to Indigenous communities (Native Americans). 400,000 ha of land, its also 400,000 different memories of the land, and certainly even more.

This project aims to strengthen and make visible Indigenous representations in the overall institutional process of land retrocession.

This participatory project implements the creation of an original and unpublished double corpus, previously unseen in French Guiana.

By associating an artistic and a narrative approach, sensibility mapping allows for the visualisation of the intimate aspects of Indigenous stories.

Over the last decade its potential to integrate qualitative data such as emotions and sensations into maps has caught the attention of a few geographers.

Our first goal is to develop a first series of sensibility maps with Indigenous storytellers through an innovative mapping process designed to put the stories about the land memory into full light (O1).

Our second goal is to represent the creative process at work when drawing the first series of maps, using the very same sensibility mapping method and drawing a second series of maps (O2).

Our last and most ambitious goal is to create a hybrid open-data archive designed to foster a new use of the research material through a cross-mapping innovation between geolocated and sensibility maps (O3). The recent research in history of cartography has highlighted the importance of documenting the mapping process itself.

But as of today no visualisation technique has been developed to represent that process.

From a methodological perspective this project is thus timely, as it is from a cultural perspective since it will engage a mapping experiment at a crucial political moment in French Guiana history.