By some happy accident I was introduced a few months ago to a FaceBook group called "
The Decolonial Atlas" and it's been enriching and decentering my understanding of the spaces of human culture day by day, a running education in the power of geography and maps to forge or rupture connection, to entrench or uproot injustice and forgetting. The other day they had a bonanza of images of cities and towns of the indigenous Americas, some (not by any means all) of which I knew but none of which I'd thought of together.
It's widely believed that before colonization, Abya Yala was a vast wilderness, a terra nullius. The pre-colonial cities and villages of these lands suffer from historical erasure because to recognize their importance would challenge that narrative. There are many today who live atop Indigenous homes yet know nothing of pre-colonial history.
