Translating land: cultural development encounters in Canadian and Alaska Indigenous land studies, 1968–1981

Lasse Rau

Planning Perspectives, 2025, vol. 40, issue 5, 1361-1386

Abstract: The 1970s saw an increase in the planning of oil infrastructures across lands in the American North claimed by Indigenous groups. As a result of this, federal pipeline inquiries in Alaska and Canada turned into testbeds for the legal and anthropological study of Indigenous land claims, their evidentiary regimes of land use, and legal and cultural definitions of Indigeneity. Studies of northern Indigenous subsistence in Alaska followed economic definitions of Indigeneity embedded in development discourses of modernization. In contrast, the anthropological research produced in Canada by state-backed anthropologists in partnership with Indigenous groups between 1973 and 1981 embraced Indigeneity and its land use practices as cultural systems in need of translation and monetization. This article studies the resulting graphic, bureaucratic, and methodological artifacts of Canadian land use studies to reveal the structural components that enabled anthropological mappings to be used as evidence in development inquiries. By employing frameworks of semiology and cultural anthropology, the Canadian mapping practices strengthened the position of anthropologists as ‘translators’ and ‘interpreters’ between planners and their subjects. The article posits that the shift from spatial to comprehensive development planning made land use the basis of a narrow cultural, economic, and legal definition of indigeneity.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2025.2481152

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