Aaron Carapella

• Name — Aaron Carapella • Born — c. 1980 • Birthplace — Warner, Oklahoma • Occupation — Cartographer • Known for — Making maps of original tribal lands of Native Americans in the United States, Canada, Mexico

Carapella is from Warner, Oklahoma. He told NPR that he is "mixed-blood Cherokee" on his mother's side and lives in a ranch house in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. He speaks Spanish, and has a bachelor's degree in marketing from Indiana Institute of Technology. He identifies with the Cherokee Nation. His grandparents on his mother's side, instilled in him a deep interest in Native Americans: My Grandparents would tell me, you're part Native American and that's part of your history. They would give me books to read about different tribes' histories, so, I grew up with a curiosity of always wanting to learn more about Native American history. When he was a teenager, he wanted to find a map of the United States that depicted all of the Native American tribes on it. He went to numerous powwows, but he could never find a map that depicted all of the tribes. Instead, he typically found maps that depicted 50 to 100 tribes. He told Rick Smith writing for Win Awenen Nisitotung that I would attend powwows and scour through the items vendors had for sell. From time to time I would see maps of the traditional territories of our tribes, but thought they looked incomplete, and the names mostly inaccurate. I filed away the idea of one day creating a more authentic-looking one myself. When he was younger, he described himself as a "radical youngster" who was involved in Native American causes and protested Columbus Day. He is a member of the American Indian Movement. Now, he focuses on map making as "a way to convey the truth in a different way".

As of 2014, he has completed maps of the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. The first map of the United States was released in November, 2012, and according to Two Row Times it was the first to show North American indigenous nations in their original languages. According to senior geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Doug Herman, his maps are unique because they include both the original name of Native American tribes and the names they are commonly known by. According to Herman You can look at [Carapella's] map, and you can sort of get it immediately. This is Indian Country, and it's not the Indian Country that I thought it was because all these names are different. Herman also noted that some of the common names for Native American tribes are derogatory. Sometimes one tribe described another tribe with a derogatory term in their language and it stuck as the common name for that tribe. For example, the word "Comanche" is a word in the Ute language that means in English "anyone who wants to fight me all the time". Herman told NPR It's like having a map of North America where the United States is labeled 'gringos' and Mexico is labeled 'wetbacks'. Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you're naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not. For example, instead of finding "Comanche" on the map there is "Numinu" and instead of "Navajo" there is "Diné" (though he also makes maps with the original name on top and the current name below such as "Diné" above and "Navajo" below.) Maps today of Native American lands depict small trust lands and reservations surrounded by vast amounts of lands that were ceded away by treaties or forcibly taken over the years. Carapella's maps show that before 1492, North America was filled with a large number of autonomous tribes. He also wanted his maps to indicate both the size of the tribal populations and the regions they inhabited. The maps were developed with the help of Overdrive Media and Printing in Flagstaff, Arizona. His maps have photographs or illustrations of individuals, artifacts, dwellings, and clothing that are appropriate to the tribe and are placed in the appropriate locations for each tribe. The map of the continental United States that he constructed has approximately 590 tribal nations with original tribal names. Of these tribes, approximately 150 are extinct. Because most of the tribes were nomadic, he placed the names of the tribes in locations where the tribes were before they were pushed out by European expansion. He varies the font size of the names of tribes to indicate their relative population size and land area they inhabited. In addition, about 150 tribes have their current name listed under their original name because many people do not know the original name that these tribes used to be called. Carapella had not planned on making a Canadian map. He had encouraged another person in Canada to make map similar to his United States map, but that did not work out, so he went ahead and made a Canadian map. The Canadian map identifies 212 tribes by their original names. There were many autonomous groups that he could not include because there was not enough room on the map to include the smallest groups. As with the United States map in which he has made many revisions, he expects to continue making revisions in his maps as new information comes in. Today's borders between Canada and the United States and Mexico and the United States are arbitrary with respect to where tribal areas used to be. For example, he estimates that there are about 24 tribes that have populations split by the Mexico-United States border. In constructing his map of Mexico, he noticed that the language and culture of tribes in Mexico are better preserved than the same tribes on the United States side of the border. He speculates that the reason may be that there was a greater effort by the American government to relocate children into American Indian boarding schools. By early 2015, Carapella had completed a map of Alaska and subsequently created a map of all the Indian tribes in North America without borders, which identifies over 1000 tribes. By late 2015, Carapella had completed a borderless map of tribes of South America. In the future, he also would like to make an "old-fashioned driving atlas" in which he can focus on different areas in much more detail.