Spatializing REPARATIONS: MAPPING REPARATIVE FUTURES

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION (2022)

Moving toward an anti-colonial future requires that justice be spatialized and, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “part of the process of making place.” Making place demands re-drawing the American landscape as literal ground for Indigenous sovereignty by mapping both boundaries of dispossession (backwards) in order to propose boundaries of repossession (forwards). Drawing thus becomes a foundational method towards unsettling what Robert Nichols calls “recursive dispossession,” a process in which historic dispossessions generate property, which in turn reinforces and generates further territorial dispossession. This paper explores the potentials of drawing and mapping as methods for spatializing calls for land-based reparations and for imagining an anti-colonial, anti-racist future. I use two case studies—the Tongva and the Zuni nations—to illustrate how historicizing expansive, pluralistic definitions of territory fundamentally shift the ways that we think about and conceive spatial imaginaries.