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Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Wakara's Waterscapes: Storytelling, Cartography, And Rhetorical Sovereignty On The Shores Of The Green River, Abbey O'Brien
Wakara's Waterscapes: Storytelling, Cartography, And Rhetorical Sovereignty On The Shores Of The Green River, Abbey O'Brien
Honors Theses
In the mid nineteenth-century, Wakara, a prominent Ute leader, witnessed the invasion of his homeland by Mormon settlers and mountain-men. He met the scouts and explorers who were sent out to examine the land and waterscapes, and who drew maps along their way. It was those same maps which were eventually used as tools to justify colonial expansion all across the Utah territories, Wakara’s home. But Wakara resisted. Employing his understandings of the roles that cartography and the written word played in Mormon and settler discourse, Wakara created his own maps in order to assert his Indigenous authority over the …