Narrating Place and Identity, or Mapping Miskitu Land Claims in Northeastern Nicaragua

Human Organization, Winter 2003 by Offen, Karl H

This paper draws from my participation in mapping Miskitu community land claims in the spring of 1997 to discuss the relationship between the mapping process and an identity politics of place in northeastern Nicaragua (the Moskitia). In community fora that formed the critical element of the mapping process, Miskitu community intellectuals passionately narrated Miskitu history with recourse to Moskitia geography and the places to be mapped. These public narratives resonated with and mobilized community audiences because they combined authoritative Miskitu identity signifiers, such as the Miskitu flag and biblical lessons, with commonplace toponyms and cultural landscapes. In narrating the relationship of Miskitu identity to Moskitia places, community intellectuals simultaneously critiqued the conventional wisdom of Nicaraguan historiography and transformed the initial aim of the mapping project by shaping the meaning of "community lands" for community members. In this way, the mapping project merged a cultural politics of place with those of identity.

Key words: place, identity, mapping, Miskitu Indians, Nicaragua

This paper draws from my participation in mapping Miskitu community land claims to discuss the relationship between the mapping process and identity politics in northeastern Nicaragua, a lowland tropical and pine savanna region known as the Moskitia (Figure 1). The paper makes use of my wider study over the last few years of how Miskitu identity and Moskitia geography interrelate, specifically how Miskitu identity shapes and reflects changing conceptions of place. The idea of place brings together a cultural appraisal of the environment with a history of lived experiences in a way that constitutes the social processes of identity formation. Thus, group identity is coupled with notions of place. Like many other "indigenous places" in Latin America, the Moskitia is contested, a discursive space that both the Nicaraguan state and the Miskitu re-present through public discourse and political practice.

Using the mapping project as a pretext, I hope to show that a Miskitu cultural politics of identity, that is the political practices rooted in a collective sensibility of what it means to be a Miskitu Indian, is strongly tied to how community intellectuals simultaneously draw from and reshape notions of place in public narrations. My goal, then, is not to assess the value of participatory mapping for promoting indigenous land claims, though I feel strongly that such projects should be part of the strategy to meet these ends, but rather to illuminate the inner workings of the mapping process by showing how it merges a cultural politics of place with those of identity.

In a series of pioneering articles on indigenous mapmaking among the Inuit in Arctic Canada, Robert Rundstrom (1991, 1993, 1995) underscores the importance of process over product. By thinking about maps as long-term negotiated creations of "process cartography," Rundstrom conceptualizes indigenous maps not as static artifacts but as end products of a "process still in motion," an ongoing "dialogue among residents." In this way, Rundstrom (1991:6) sees "process cartography as akin to process geomorphology . . . where the focus is on the dynamics by which terrain features are created [and made influential]." The analogy suggests that places brought into focus by being mapped-i.e., made influential-become part of a social process anchoring identity in place, and that this process is as important as the spatial representations that the mapping project creates. In my experiences, the mapping process reinforced a Miskitu cultural politics of identity with the places and territories that the project sought to map. By its very nature, then, the mapping project transformed its object of analysis: community land claims.

The cultural politics of identity that the mapping project intersected with ensured that Miskitu land claims would be mediated by their changing sense of the Moskitia as a place. This cultural process was most clearly evident in community fora in which community intellectuals narrated Miskitu history and identity with recourse to Moskitia geography, simultaneously mobilizing support for and shaping the meaning of the mapping project for community members. Intellectuals did this, in part, by skillfully employing the power of the Miskitu language, a tongue steeped in cultural-environmental metaphors, nature allegories, and morality parables that are literally and figuratively part of the landscape and constitutive of a Miskitu sense of place. Central to these public narrations were didactic historical accounts that informed the Miskitu of their cultural rights to land as indigenous peoples. Public narratives thus enacted a particular and place-based mode of public discourse and political practice that resonated with and mobilized community audiences. As we will see, this occurred because the narratives combined authoritative identity signifiers, such as the Miskitu flag and biblical themes, with commonplace toponyms and cultural landscapes the Miskitu use to convey their identity to themselves and to others. As such, Miskitu conceptions of place form part and parcel of Miskitu identity and popular discourses, a compelling relationship that stoked the mapping process.