How cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce is charting a new way to see the world

The river that most contemporary maps label “Mississippi,” a French adaptation of an Ojibwe name, is undoubtedly one of the world’s most charted. Not incidentally, it’s also one of the most manipulated—leveed, diverted, dredged, and dammed to control flooding and ease passage for commercial traffic. Most contemporary maps of its 2,350-mile course reflect all that engineering.

But cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce, who works out of her home studio in coastal Maine, is concerned with all that those maps don’t show: how the Mississippi looked before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reshaped it, and how Indigenous people living alongside it, past and present, have adapted to its fluctuations and flood cycles. Pearce believes that revealing those layers of understanding—amplifying Indigenous knowledge, history, and presence—can inspire us to more sustainably address issues like habitat loss, aging infrastructure, and increasingly severe flooding.

It’s why Pearce, a Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and National Geographic Explorer, is promoting a vision of an indigenized Mississippi with a series of large-scale map installations placed all along it. The project, which she calls Mississippi Dialogues, is a collaboration with tribal nations whose traditional territories include the river, and it aims to correct what Pearce calls a “pervasive misunderstanding” of the Mississippi as a line, a thing to be crossed or traveled up and down rather than a living artery at the heart of many homelands.

“What we see now is all Army Corps maps,” she says. “We just see the locks and dams, the ways that the river is controlled and paved. And this map is opening up an unpaved river.”

The project is a high-visibility example of an Indigenous-led movement—both within and outside the field of cartography—to challenge what generations of mapmakers, historians, and policymakers have chosen to prioritize, and reclaim what they’ve left out. But Pearce’s work is no simple rebuttal. It’s an artful reminder that maps can be more than scaled diagrams. Hers are repositories of stories and memories. They are text rich, with narratives that unspool, a few lines at a time, across soft washes of color. And they link eons of history, showing modern highways wending past details from creation stories and sites of 19th-century colonial violence.

Packing all that into a legible map requires painstaking effort. A map set she recently finished of Inuit homelands in Canada, commissioned by the University of Maine, took more than 200 drafts to complete.

That’s not the only way in which Pearce’s work rewards patience. Her Mississippi project is seven years in the making, years she spent visiting tribal communities, elders, and culture bearers all along the river, collecting stories and insights about river stewardship that she weaves into the maps. She seeks permission to learn and to share Indigenous place- names considered cultural property (though some knowledge remains reserved for Indigenous communities), and her maps might encompass the homelands of dozens of peoples.

Even mapping her own backyard involves significant legwork. To make a map depicting place-names in the Penobscot language, Pearce spent three years visiting sites across Maine with Carol Dana, a language teacher and elder from the Penobscot Nation. Dana praises the cartographer’s way of working, which she says is about more than just relabeling. “Trying to make people more aware of the place-names that we named them originally,” Dana says, “for us to see it and experience it, it heals us.”

Increasingly, it’s not just tribal nations and organizations embracing this approach. Last year, Pearce became the first ever cartography-focused recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, an $800,000 prize popularly known as the genius grant. It will help fund the Mississippi project’s first two installations—of an envisioned 14—to be put up as soon as this fall in a city park in Minnesota and at a nature preserve in Illinois.

Pearce knows others look to her work as a blueprint for what “Indigenous cartography” can be, but she rejects the label, believing that mapmaking is “infinitely expandable and flexible,” with many means of mapping Indigenous ways of life. “The more I hear the idea of ‘Indigenous cartography’ pushed into a corner and labeled as a particular way of mapping,” she says, “I just really want to smash that open and show people that it’s an entire world of possibility.”