Owning the Map - Indigenous Cartography on the front line of climate change.⁣ ⁣ At the entrance to the Lost City of the Tairona in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, there is the “Mapstone”, but it has never been clear what is being mapped. ⁣ ⁣ Can we learn from the Kogi what it really signifies?⁣ ⁣ At the entrance to the Lost City archaeologists found the ‘Mapstone’ but they could not, and still cannot read it. It contains cartographic information they still lack. The question “how do you lose a city” goes to the heart of their different understandings of the reading landscape. The Mapstone was constructed on different cartographic principles from the invaders’ maps, and those principles underlie the efforts of the Tairona’s descendants to protect and defend the earth from what is being done to it. ⁣ ⁣ The Kogi understand the mountain as a precise and connected macrocosm of the planet. They see it as part of a transcendental living being and they map the interconnections and nodal points of its biology. Their offerings are a form of earth acupuncture for the health of their ancestral territory – and ours. ⁣ ⁣ But now the Kogi find themselves having to defend their work against the plunder which is destroying the capacity of the world itself to sustain life. They need to negotiate their right to protect the mountain and the world and to do that they have invented a new mappable concept – the Black Line that is meant to separate their world from ours, to prevent ecological catastrophe. So they have mastered our GPS mapping system and bent it to their own use, in legal and constitutional struggles and in teaching us how to read the landscape. At the same time, they reject the role of official cartography in so far as it has been used as a tool for exploiting the land and digging out the substances of life from the earth.⁣ ⁣ Text by: Tairona Heritage Trust⁣ Photo by: Jaguar Siembra