Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: Decolonizing Landscape Within Settler Colonial Societies

Geographic scholarship on landscape and colonialism has not substantially engaged with the specific logics of settler colonialism, propelling recent calls to “unlearn” and “decolonize” landscape studies. This article highlights the Indigenous cultural landscape (ICL), a policy tool used since the 1990s to protect aboriginal landscapes globally, as a vital resource for geographers interested in decolonizing both material landscapes and landscape studies. I analyze six ICL studies conducted by the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service, in robust partnership with Indigenous nations, academics, and conservationists between 2013 and 2022. In their approaches to scale, mobility, temporality, visuality, and modes of relationship, the ICLs documented and mapped in these collaborative studies fundamentally challenge settler colonial histories and conceptions of landscape. These conceptual distinctions have clear material impacts, as I demonstrate: In Virginia, the Rappahannock River ICL study facilitated the return of land along Fones Cliffs to the Rappahannock Tribe. Considering the processes, conceptual interventions, and material impacts of the Chesapeake ICL studies together, I argue that the ICL concept can generate and expand Indigenous relational space amid ongoing settler occupation, despite the tensions and limitations of working with the settler state to do so.