Heather Bruegl (she/her) is a public historian, activist, and decolonial education consultant who works with institutions and organizations for Indigenous sovereignty and collective liberation. She is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a first-line descendant Stockbridge Munsee. She is a graduate of Madonna University in Michigan and holds a Master of Arts in U.S. History. Heather is the former Director of Education at Forge Project and travels frequently to present on Native American history, including policy and activism. Heather respectfully acknowledges that she works and resides on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Three Fires Council- the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi- along with the Peoria, Miami, and Wyandot. Through forced removal, these nations are now located throughout the United States including parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, and part of Canada.

When beginning to think about how to write this essay about land surveying, one concept kept coming to my mind: boundaries.  As someone who travels a lot, primarily by car (I mean, who doesn’t love a good road trip?), you always seem to know when you enter a new state.  There is a sign that lets you know you have entered New York or Michigan, or wherever you may be traveling to, but the sign indicates that you have entered a new space.  The same is true when you are entering different countries.  Currently living in Detroit, I always see the signs for Canada.  And when I travel to a friend's home, there are usually fences or something that indicates where their property ends and the neighbor begins.

But we often don’t think about how boundaries were made to facilitate European colonization of Indigenous lands in what has become the United States. As we know them today, borders can be dated back to the first settlers arriving on the shores.  The British, French, Spanish, and Dutch had colonial settlements in the “New World” and had drawn up these boundaries to ensure each territory was separated.  What they were doing was dividing up land that had been stewarded for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Prior to the colonization, Indigenous territories were communally held by Native Nations with quite a bit of overlap between different communities.  There were and continue to be shared hunting and fishing grounds, but no defined borders or fences to keep each other out.  In contrast, colonists created boundaries that would fit the societies that they were working towards, one based on private property and individualism. These were foreign concepts to many Native Nations.  As a result, this would lead to shady land deals between federal and state governments, colonists and Native Nations; the latter signing treaties written in a language and conceptual framework they didn’t understand with the result usually being forcible removal.

On the East Coast, many modern boundaries began after the American Revolution.  After the war, the newly created United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783, establishing the new country's boundaries.  What the two countries did not adequately take into consideration was the existing Native Nations whose land they were dividing up.  The Indigenous people had no meaningful say on how this new country would take into account the people and cultures that had been living and stewarding the lands since time immemorial.  

The United States continued to grow, eventually expanding to the Pacific Ocean taking land as settlements spread.  In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed. This led to the forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from the Southeast onto lands west of the Mississippi River, like in present-day Oklahoma.  At that time, these lands had not been settled by the United States but were occupied by other Native Nations. Oklahoma remained Indian territory until statehood, while settlements and homesteads continued to move westward and the reservation system was formalized by federal law. 

Reservations are legally designated pieces of land held in trust by the federal government, and Indigenous peoples live on them.  Usually, the land surveyed for reservations are plots isolated from surrounding communities and not the best pieces of land in terms of resources and cultural relevance.  The policing of Native people and culture continued with acts of congress like the General Allotment Act of 1887.  Introduced by Senator Henry Dawes, the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act) was designed to divide land held communally by Native Nations into individual allotments and given to the male head of household.  The legislative history indicates the reasoning behind the Act was to force assimilation through farming and creating a more Euro-centric lifestyle than on a reservation.  In addition to this cultural erasure, the realities of the Dawes Act demonstrate an even more insidious plan to take land away from Native Nations and individuals through the creation of “surplus” land. The “surplus” from the subdivisions of Native lands were sold to non-Native settlers.  A direct example of how land surveying was used to create artificial boundaries and borders that led to the fences and walls built to shut out the land’s Original Stewards.

Borders that we see today are colonial constructs and are used as a way to keep people out.  When the Dutch settled the island of Manhattan, they constructed a wall to keep the Lenape people out.  This wall later became Wall Street.  Land surveying was and continues to be a tool used to keep people out of certain areas, create boundaries and borders that cross Indigenous lands and facilitate land thefts from Indigenous peoples.  It is a practice that is still harmful, not just to Indigenous communities but also to communities targeted for urban renewal.  Surveyors come in and draw new lines, and people lose their homes.  

But like all things, this isn’t to say that land surveying and boundary marking as a practice is all bad.  Land surveying can be used for good and movements, including Land Back.  Land Back is an Indigenous-led movement calling for the return of all public lands back to Indigenous stewardship.  The concept of land surveying could be used to help return public lands to their rightful caretakers by using the cartographical information to match oral traditions.  By combining oral histories and land surveying, we can find the traditional territories for Indigenous Nations to reclaim their relationships with those lands. Using land surveying in a way that helps to return lands helps to right a wrong that is centuries in the making.   Across the country, the land is being returned, and it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that a practice that has been highly harmful can be part of our collective healing.

It is a funny thing.  When I am on those long road trips, I’m not usually thinking about what state border I just crossed or even what state I am in.  Most of the time when I am on those road trips, I am thinking about the land.  I am honoring and sending prayers to the Ancestors who stewarded that land, and I am incredibly mindful of whose land it is, regardless of a settler-imposed border.

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