Toward a Living Counter-Map
Listening through land: audio, illustration, and memory in motion
Earlier this fall 2025, I was invited into this project with a question rather than a directive: what might it mean to create a counter-map—one that listens, remembers, and shifts? The invitation emerged from conversations with the Colorado Plateau Foundation team and their long-standing commitment to addressing a persistent gap between Native leaders in the Four Corners Pueblo region and the philanthropic resources meant to support them. At its core, this work is about supporting Native peoples at the Plateau—while honoring the relational knowledge that lives there despite socio-environmental inequalities.
Image of illustrated counter-map for the Colorado Plateau Foundation’s base layer for multimedia integration.
It’s an honor to finally share this living counter-map (link here). The work grew out of my engagement with Jim Enote, whose leadership, care, and insistence on listening as practice have deeply shaped my own ethical grounding. I first encountered Jim’s work during my graduate studies at University of California, Los Angeles, while working at the Fowler Museum Archaeological Facility, where I began learning about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Those years — along with time spent visiting Jim’s farm in Zuni, New Mexico — continue to inform how I approach collaboration, responsibility, and care when working with and for Native communities.
Counter-mapping, as I understand and practice it here, is not simply about correcting dominant narratives. It is about telling stories that have been subsumed by hegemonic processes and historical discourse – stories that remain embedded in land memory and inseparable from people. Counter-maps surface intimate, place-based knowledge that comes from deep relationships with land since time immemorial. They are less about fixing boundaries and more about restoring relational pathways in the context of ongoing injustices.
This practice attends to what exists in between, as Jim reminds us. We delineate what is emerging and re-emerging, waiting to be re-membered or imagined anew through assemblage, creativity, and deep listening. In this project, audio, animation, and archival materials operate as layered gestures of collective resistance. Sound carries voice and breath. Illustration marks vitality. Archives hold Indigenous knowledges that refuse closure. Together, they form a map that is always in motion.
In 2022, Jim and I had the opportunity to co-shape a lecture and workshop for the Decolonial Theory and Practice series, developed with the guidance of Dr. Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and dance artist Rashaida Hill (MFA). That program offered another way of thinking through counter-mapping as a shared, embodied, and ongoing practice rather than a finished product across various disciplines.
This journal entry, like the map itself, is offered as a trace: a set of notes toward listening betwixt ways, and an invitation to move with land, memory, and relations as they continue to unfold.
