Indian Cartography Summary

SUMMARY

Indian Cartography

The poem starts with the motion of opening a map of California from the Father of the Author Deborah Miranda. The Dad was tracing “mountain ranges, rivers and borders like family bloodlines” over the new places we have in California like Los Angeles, Paso Robles, Santa Barbara, etc. Then the father’s boyhood was separated by the Lake Cachuma where he learned how to swim in the most difficult way, where he walked across the silver scales to see the salmon coming back. But the river was not there, in the map was gone.

The government paid the Indians to move out of their own land.

Deborah’s Father do not know where they went, he began to imagine how the valley used to look back then when he was a kid. He might “sees shadows of people who are fluid (…) and the stories of our home” in which they are not in the map anymore.

Respond

The poem was really interesting and sad at the same time. We use maps to locate places that are really in there. But the man in the poem was looking at the map as a memory and family album. His boyhood was in the map before, but thanks to the government is gone now. The only thing that is left for him is the imagination and the memories that are left to see the map.  In some way the way she wrote the poem was to stay alive and to heal, by the way she I describing her dad. Also the maps are not only indicators of political and boundaries, it illustrates life, social conditions and memories. One of the most intense sentences I read in the poem was “The government paid those Indians to move away, he says; I don’t know where they went”. To my prospective the Indians did not wanted to move because they were owners of that land and the government need to respect, I think since the Indians did not move they were killed by the government; that is why the Father don’t know where they went.

Deborah Miranda gives a really vivid image of the making of geographical maps, because in California has been a lot of changes in the physical and natural ways since the Indians lived here. Her poem gives an idea of how Indians look at their homeland all destroyed, and all what is left is the good memory from it. I also encounter in the poem a kind of discrimination from the government. It was more important industries and other places rather to not taking it away from their real owners, which are the native Indians.