Where Are You Local?

Traveling back from a camping trip recently, I listened to a fascinating Ted Talk by Taiye Selasi. Entitled Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m local, it inspired this blog post. I highly recommend your taking a listen, it brings up many interesting points. However, for me as a cartographer, my mind immediately went to how interesting it would be to map out the places where I am local as defined by Ms. Selasi; I was intrigued by what this might look like. So I set out to create such a map for myself.

YOUR Challenge! I encourage you to create your own Where Am I Local? map! It doesn’t have to be fancy. Put pins in Google Earth, or hand draw your map. Illustrate it with images of why the places are significant if you really want to get into an art project! If you send it to me I’ll add it to this post.

OR – since realistically I know most of you are likely too busy to actually do this, simply comment on this post about the one place that has most contributed to who you are today, and how this place has shaped you.

Creating my own Where Am I Local? map was more of a challenge that I had anticipated in some interesting ways. Even thinking about the “three Rs” (Rituals, Relationships, Restrictions) that Ms. Selasi suggest we use to determine where we are local, I found it difficult to decided what places to include in my map. I was not setting out to simply create a map of every place I have been, but – as I thought more about which places to include or not – instead creating a map of those places that have contributed to defining who I am.

I drew an invisible line in my head as to whether a given location was significant to me – has this place affected my life in some way? Would I be the same person without the experiences I had in a given place? Or have I experienced a place in a significant way without even ever having been there? Say where my ancestors are from, or if there were a place that I had always wanted to visit and thought about frequently, enough so that it affected me even without ever being there.

I started this exercise with my current town of Southwest Harbor, located on Mount Desert Island, Maine. I grew up in Massachusetts, but I have so many memories and experiences on Mount Desert Island as a child, as a young adult, and now in my middle age as I’ve made this Island my home. This brought up the question of scale. Elsewhere, I might designate an entire country as significant. But closer to home, down to what level of scale do I go? Certainly, Mount Desert Island in itself; but then I felt I had to go closer in, the various place on the Island that have impacted me. I included Mount Desert Campground, where my family started camping when I was still in a crib, but then do I indicate the specific campsites of A7 & B3? (I did, BTW.) It took me a while to get off MDI, and then out of Maine! I found that the more impact a geographic area has had on me, the more detailed I was about including locations in that area.

ASIDE: As I got less detailed and increasingly vague in marking locations as I zoomed out from MDI, to Maine, to New England, and then beyond, I was reminded of a 1928 map, “A Bostonian’s Idea of the United States,” one of two satirical maps by Daniel K. Wallingford that put certain U.S. citizens’ provincialism—and pretentiousness—on display.

As I am a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professional (OK, mapping nerd) with fancy mapping software at my fingertips, I created a heat map of my significant places. This lent itself quite well to emphasizing those areas where I had many more detailed (larger scale) locations marked, as opposed to, say, just a country.

As with any good process, I found this particular mapping exercise raised more questions than it answered. What is most important to me? For instance, I ended up including places where I have family, even those that I have not been to. What about other places that I haven’t been to, but that have had a large impact on society as a whole, and therefore an indirect impact on my own life? How do the prevailing attitudes of a region in which we are raised affect our own opinions, and how do different attitudes in different regions affect how we interact with and perceive people from other places, how we treat each other?

How DOES place shape who we become as a person?

Where Am I Local?  – My Map

Taiye Selasi’s Ted Talk:
Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m Local