There is a proverb that says
“in order to find where you are going, be prepared to get lost”.
Normally, maps and atlases help us get to know a place and move through that place toward somewhere else. Maps use a grammar of borders, place names, and geographic features to express selected ways of knowing and navigation and can paradoxically leave us feeling more estranged from the lands and waters. Maps have been essential for turning territories into resources and people into owners or trespassers.
The Great Lakes Commons Atlas & Workbook project aims to get lost from the common ways people relate to maps. One desired outcome of the project is a diverse, connected, and active community animating a beautiful, shared, and sacred movement to protect the lakes for all of creation and for many generations to come. Another is to trouble, discover, and honour our relationships and responsibilities to these Great Lakes, not only as individuals or members of an organization, but as a body within its larger waterbody.
Welcoming back the Salmon — by Paul Baines
The energy and appeal of this work has been inspired by many -- those who practice kinship with creation, those who infuse social movements with natural laws, and those who seek justice while guided by reunion. For the past 6 months with a small group of Great Lakes Commoners have been researching the project’s intent and 3 major sections.
Part 1 curates a series of maps, illustrations and spacializations that reveal uncommon truths about the Great Lakes and illustrate invitations into ancient futures.
Part 2 highlights and adapts sets of ideas, examples, and tools that foster emergent thinking and being. Here we learn about “who is water?”, the honourable harvest, becoming a good ancestor, and the intelligence of the living earth.
Part 3 is a series of workbook practices that help readers connect to their watershed, but also to their uncomfortable positions of estrangement and loss. Working with Parts 1 & 2, these practices help us name what we are deeply searching for. They are routes towards belonging, repair, and renewal.
How does your work on water justice and protection align with this project? How could this Atlas & Workbook better align with your work? Does your work focus on one of these parts or braid several?
Our goal is to publish a book with the potential for an online accompanying resource. We have been working with the themes and experiences of colonization, healing, embodiment, trauma, spirit, Indigenization, the sacred, kinship, non-human agency, grief, and desire. Rather than trying to celebrate and create maps that keep us from getting lost, we want to unflatten our biographies within geographies.