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The City of Hamilton is situated upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. This land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, which was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. We further acknowledge that this land is covered by the Between the Lakes Purchase, 1792, between the Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Today, the City of Hamilton is home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island (North America) and we recognize that we must do more to learn about the rich history of this land so that we can better understand our roles as residents, neighbours, partners and caretakers. [Source: hamilton.ca]
Above you can read a Land Acknowledgement which recognizes on whose traditional land Hamilton is located, and affirms the importance of action on the part of settlers to educate and conduct themselves in accordance with this knowledge. This acknowledgement is featured here because any project which involves, or takes place on, traditional Indigenous land must have as its foundation a conscious foregrounding of Indigenous claim to and history on the land. An underlying motivator of this project is the desire to make a map which reflects how the land on which Hamilton is located is lived in and through by various peoples; it does not, however, intend to imply that living and having subjective experiences on this land in any way negates or blurs historical or ongoing settler-colonial violence, or diminishes the fact of Indigenous claim. In fact, a hope is that this project encourages deeper thinking about how and why certain words featured in Land Acknowledgements (such as “Turtle Island”), remain absent from standard maps, and how this reflects the impoverishment of language on these maps, a state which this project attempts, if in a small way, to highlight and address.
Words and Maps
For millennia, maps have helped individuals and groups to find their ways around and between places, whether those places are small, like a neighbourhood, or large, like the entire planet (this one, with varying degrees of success). But the physical movement from place to place that maps help us accomplish is only one part of their importance in our lives. We may not talk or even think about it very much, but maps also influence the ways we think and feel about the places they show. Think about it: What would you feel if you looked at a map of your neighbourhood found on a city website, all geometric lines and street names and featuring only two colours, white for most things and pale green for places where there might be grass, trees, or a golf course? For a lot of people, a map like that wouldn’t cause a lot of strong feelings, besides maybe frustration that, despite the map’s supposed simplicity, you still can’t find the place you’re looking for. Now, think about what you might feel while looking at another type of map, this time one made by, well, you.
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Maybe it’s one that you made when you were five years old to show all of your favourite spots to play; maybe it’s the one that you carry around in your head everyday, marked with the ideas and impressions that you remember from specific places, and the words and feelings associated with them. This second kind of map would no doubt look much more complicated — maybe with doodles or symbols that would be nonsensical to anyone but you. Also, it would undoubtedly feature words beyond the proverbial street or building name. This second type of map proves that maps can help us to explore, acknowledge, and celebrate our feelings just much as they can help us find the nearest restaurant, and that these maps can – let’s face it – look a lot more interesting than the standard variety!
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But you don’t need to be a map expert to know that most of the maps that we see everyday aren’t the type that reflect the feelings and experiences of everyday people. They also aren’t usually ones that we ourselves have made (unless you happen, by chance, to work at Google). Why not? What makes the plain, utilitarian, made-elsewhere map more common than the imaginative one made by the people who live in the place everyday? Like many things, a lot of it has to do with who has the most money and power.
An important example of the influence of money and power on maps is Hamilton. This is a city whose maps, like those of many other cities, regions, and countries, reflect the actions, names, and aspirations of privileged people. An interactive map made by the Hamilton Spectator shows this: click here to view it, and click on a few locations to see how many places are named after people who had a lot of money or social influence!
But the powerful don’t just place their own words onto maps; they also deliberately remove the words of others. When European colonizers arrived on the land now known as Canada, places already had names – names given to them by the many Indigenous peoples who lived, and still live, here. There is a map where you can see Indigenous names for places across Canada: click here to view it, and to see the names that colonizers tried, and failed, to erase. It is important to Indigenous place names not only because they have first claim, but because they represent a way of living with the land that is not centred around power and privilege. To Indigenous peoples, relationships with the land aren’t about having power over it. Instead, they see the land as alive in the same way that people are alive, and believe that human thoughts and ideas flow from the earth (Watts). Indigenous place names are words that carry great meaning to Indigenous peoples, reflecting their personal and spiritual truths. But today, these words are rarely reflected on the maps used to represent cities such as Hamilton (Gray and Rück), replaced instead by the words of powerful people from Europe (often long dead) who sought to make their own thoughts, feelings, and desires the only ones displayed.
But just because their names and ideas cover most maps of Hamilton does not mean that the words of the powerful can define what the city is and means! Rather, ordinary people can work together to create maps which reflect a bigger, more complicated, more realistic, and more beautiful vision of their cities and communities. That is exactly what this site is designed to do.
Purpose of this Site
The purpose of this site is simple: to work together to create a map whose words belong to and reflect everyone’s realities, not just those of the particularly powerful. By going to the Home page of this site, scrolling down to the menu, and clicking on “Explore the Poetry Map,” you will see a map of the city of Hamilton which, at first glance, has the place names familiar from most maps (Hess Street, Bay Street, Barton, etc.). But in addition to these, you will also see scattered throughout the city many “pins” (literally resembling little push-pins with a green top). Clicking on each pin, you will be able to read poems which have been written about that particular place by ordinary people, words which reflect what the place means or meant to them, or what they experienced, felt, or thought in relation to that place.
This action of reclaiming a place from power by adding more voices to its story can be described with the term “profane mapping.” You might be familiar with the word “profane” from religion, where it usually refers to something negative or filthy. In “profane mapping,” it instead refers to the things that those in power consider to be negative or filthy – namely, the words and stories of the wider population of a place, who are a threat to their power. To do profane mapping means to represent a place in a way which shows its true richness and complexity, rather than the simplified vision seen on common maps, which contain the words and ideas of only a few people (Orpana). “Profane mapping” can actually be thought of as a type of “countermapping,” a more general word that means challenging our assumptions about a space, often assumptions rooted in power’s attempts to silence other voices (Boatcă).
Poetry is a perfect way of doing “profane mapping” and “counter mapping” because it is one of the best ways humans have for expressing complex and complicated feelings. Take James Street, for example. According to the Spectator’s “Namesakes” map, this street was named after James Hughson, a road builder. It seems quite literal and unimaginative to name a place after the person who built a road there, and even though you might use the road to get to work every day, the name “James Street” probably doesn’t do a great job describing how you feel about it. Now imagine that you wrote a poem about the commute to work – how it feels, may even the way it’s changed over the years – and that those words were placed on the map alongside “James Street”; now, suddenly, the words on the map would be a lot more representative of that place, because they would contain more information about how that place is lived in. Now, picture poems by others describing their experiences around and on the same street – their unique perspectives being added to your own. As these build up, as more and more words are added, the street’s official name really starts to fade into the background, and we can see that the reality of a place has more to do with the many ways that real people experience being in and thinking about it.
This poetry map of Hamilton is not the first of its kind. A similar project has been begun in Vancouver, British Columbia, where people from the community got together and talked about issues important to the community, and then wrote poems that they recorded and used a phone to submit. The poems were placed on a map similar to the one on this website (Balyasnikova and James). Read more about the PhoneMe Mapping Project by clicking here. When contributing to the Poetry Map of Hamilton, there is no need to respond to a specific question or offer your opinion or feelings on an issue that people in the community may be discussing or may be in the news; feel free to do that, but also know that your random impressions, your fleeting feelings, are just as meaningful to making a place what it is as any strong opinions you may have.
If you are interested in contributing a poem to the map – in adding your voice to the chorus of profanity – click on the “Contribute” tab for full instructions. And if you’re just here to explore, please enjoy; this map may be a bit too cluttered with poem-pins to show you how to get from place to place, but it will hopefully offer you a better understanding of our vibrant, changing, complicated city as it is imagined and experience by the diverse range of people actually living in it!
Works Cited
Balyasnikova, Natalia and Kedrick James. “PhoneMe Poetry: Mapping Community in the Digital Age.” Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning, vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 2020, pp. 107-117. Click here to access this article.
Boatcă, Manuela. “Counter-mapping as Method.” Historical Social Research, vol. 46, no. 2, 2021, pp. 244-263. Click here to access this article.
Government of Canada. “Stories from the Land: Indigenous Place Names in Canada.” maps.canada.ca, https://maps.canada.ca/journal/content-en.html?lang=en&appid=0e585399e9474ccf932104a239d90652&appidalt=11756f2e3c454acdb214f950cf1e2f7d. Click here to view the map.
Gray, Christina and Daniel Rück. “Reclaiming Indigenous Place Names.” Yellowhead Institute, https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2019/10/08/reclaiming-indigenous-place-names/. Click here to access this article.
Orpana, Simon. A User’s Guide to Profane Mapping, Draft. 2022. Collection of Simon Orpana, Hamilton.
“Namesakes Map.” The Hamilton Spectator, https://graphics.thespec.io/namesakeMap/index.html#1110. Click here to view the map.
Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20-34. Click here to access this article.
A City of Words: re-imagining place through poetry in Hamilton, Ontario 