ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of rural and Indigenous understandings of space, place, and place finding techniques, also known as process cartography. The chapter describes the diversity and multiplicity of process cartography, along with its role and importance in mainstream geospatial technologies. Process cartography is characterized as an alternative way to understand society’s relationship to place and space. Rural and indigenous understandings of space often resist mainstream assumptions of binary thinking, time linearity, the culture–nature divide, and assumptions in which spirituality is separated from matter. This chapter also provides an overview of the ways in which rural and indigenous knowledge has been incorporated into the production of georeferenced maps. I discuss the emergence of participatory research mapping methodologies (PRM), participatory GIS (PGIS), and cybercartographies, all of which incorporate indigenous views, needs, and realities. I provide criticism on paternalistic practices of data collection affecting indigenous populations. In fact, rural and indigenous people often lack access, participation, and control over the geospatial technologies developed using their knowledge. Finally, I highlight the ways in which geospatial technologies often serve state and corporate interests rather than those of rural and indigenous populations.
