Maps give shape to stories. Whether drawing precontact territories known to Native people, defining the boundaries inked in a treaty, or explaining the trust versus fee parcels on allotted land, cartography relays the consequences of diplomatic interactions. Every semester, students in my history courses spend time perusing the information embedded within America’s evolving maps. Since the dominant narratives of this fall’s elections focused upon the New York mayoral race and California’s redrawing of congressional district maps, our conversation evolved to include the graphing of boroughs and voting blocs. This year witnessed the publication of multiple books that collectively consider how we think about America’s history of land parceling. Pairing those compelling texts with national news threads helps affirm that teaching the meaning behind the historical narrative of the United States of America requires complex storytelling across a variety of mediums.

New York City is not just the modern financial center of the world; it’s the place that gave European settlers another foothold on the continent. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America chronicles pivotal moments in the city’s pre-American history. Shorto explains the antecedents, tensions, and consequences of the two-week period in 1664 when the land that was then called New Amsterdam became New York City following the Dutch surrender to the English. It’s a story about colonialism, diplomacy, and religious factions, focused upon a pivotal time where the land that was once held by the Lenape-Munsee-Delaware people transferred from one imperial nation to another. Shorto emphasizes the incompleteness of all fixed narratives, ending his work by speculating that a hypothetical Lenape citizen could question “how museums, like books, can impart worlds of information yet still not penetrate the mystery of who we are and of the past that lives on within us all.” In effect, Shorto conveys that history is not a spectator sport, but rather one that requires engagement and reevaluation with the land we think we know.

Perhaps no place inspires reflection about the impact of Western expansion quite like Mount Rushmore. Matthew Davis’s A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore traces the national monument’s evolving meaning at the 100^th anniversary of its dedication. Davis shares the details of carver Gutzon Borglum’s life and legacy, highlighting how his most famous work has become an iconic symbol for American mythology. Davis recognizes that although the monument has become a malleable symbol for patriotism, Lakota people have been unwavering in their belief that the Black Hills remain a sacred space in their cultural teachings protected by the boundaries of their treaty maps. Contrasting contemporary American political fervor with the Indigenous Land Back Movement, Davis ensures that readers understand the complexity of the competing ideals that are imbued upon the mountain. Weaving together personal interviews with contemporaneous documents, Davis’s work helps readers understand why the largest monument to the United States’ presidency garners more consideration than its four etched faces can communicate.

If congressional district gerrymandering has shown us anything, it’s that maps can help impose meaning upon the places they characterize. William Rankin’s Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World reveals that maps contain multitudes, including the human desire to assign visual logistics, scientific data, and contextual meaning to places. Rankin illuminates how maps have been used historically to show the arresting percentages of enslaved humans in the pre-Civil War South, housing segregation in 1920s Chicago, and even where commuters most often ran over African American children in 1970s Detroit. Additionally, he shows how the process titled “map biography” enabled the Inuit people to use community memories to show their ongoing engagement with ancestral lands that the Canadian government sought to diminish. Rankin demonstrates that maps offer tangible proof that “different values really do produce different geographies.” The prescient question readers are left to ask themselves is how to change the maps to better reflect the future world they hope to chart.

While the texts and national conversations discussed in this column don’t cover the wealth of narratives that comprise the stories told about the United States, they can offer gateways for discussions. Much ground can be gained simply by asking which historical stories are missing from modern discourse, as often it’s those of marginalized people that should be added to the dominant narratives. Whether it’s an exploration of how we teach settler-colonialism, the theft of the Black Hills, or any other contentious story we choose to diagram, the documentation of what happened helps make the message relatable to the descendants of those whose stories are too often overlooked. The story of the United States of America requires complex narratives across a variety of mediums, and taking the time to discuss how history is connected to national newsfeeds can ensure that those conversations add depth to the zeitgeist.

Ryan Winn, PhD teaches in the Liberal Studies Department at College of Menominee Nation. 

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the Inquisitive Academic or any other opinion columns published by the Tribal College Journal (TCJ) do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TCJ or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. 

References

Davis, M. (2025). A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. New York: Macmillan.

Rankin, W. (2025). Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World. New York: Viking.

Shorto, R. (2025). Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.