Wayfinding

by M. R. O'Connor

  “hidden drive at the right time” Peter Berthold, Bird Migration: A General Survey, 2001, 11.

  “pinioned wild goose” Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Shorter Publications, 1829–1883, 2009, 380.

  “How do these geese” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, The Wheel of Life, 2012, 106.

  Navigation Made Us Human

  “that which acts” Norman Hallendy, Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic, first trade paper edition, 2001, 46.

  “How did foragers” Daniel Casasanto, “Space for Thinking,” in Language, Cognition and Space, ed. Vyvyan Evans and Paul Chilton, 2010, 455.

  “Man has been a hunter” Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, reprint edition, 2013, 102.

  “The hunter would have” Ibid., 103.

  “[T]he notion that the world” Derek Bickerton, More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution, 2014, 88.

  “lethal parody of the” Alfred Gell, “How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation,” Man 20, no. 2 (June 1985): 27–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/2802385.

  “We read in it” Ibid., 26.

  “I have to mentally” Kim Shaw-Williams, “The Triggering Track-Ways Theory,” thesis, 2011, http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/1967.

  “Although common sense endows” Endel Tulving, “Episodic Memory and Common Sense: How Far Apart?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356, no. 1413 (September 29, 2001): 1505–15, doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2001.0937.

  “Lest someone worry” Ibid.

  “deconfuser” Ibid.

  “the faculty of visualization” Norman Hellendy, “Tukiliit: The Stone People Who Live in the Wind; An Introduction to Inuksuit and Other Stone Figures of the North,” January 18, 2017, https://docslide.com.br/documents/tukiliit-the-stone-people-who-live-in-the-wind-an-introduction-to-inuksuit.html.

  “Right now hunters go” William Hyndman, Interview with author, May 2, 2016.

  “shaped like an animal’s heart” “Introduction: Place Names in Nunarat,” Inuit Heritage Trust: Place Names Program, http://ihti.ca/eng/place-names/pn-index.html?agree=0.

  “Sometimes we name them” John Bennett and Susan Rowley, Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut, 2004, 113.

  The Storytelling Computer

  “Narrative serves as a vehicle” Lawrence S. Sugiyama and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “Humanized Topography: Storytelling as a Wayfinding Strategy,” American Anthropologist 5, http://pages.uoregon.edu/sugiyama/docs/StoryMapsMainDocument[1].pdf.

  “culture hero” James Alexander Teit, Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia, 1898, 7.

  “All being seated” Richard Irving Dodge and General William Tecumseh Sherman, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience among the Red Men of the Great West—A Popular Account of Their Social Life, Religion, Habits, Traits, Customs, Exploits, Etc., reprint edition, 1978, 552.

  “the Pawnees had a” Gene Weltfish, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, 1977, 172.

  “talked names” Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, 1996, 45–47.

  “Your life is like a trail” Ibid., 126.

  “Merge” Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, 2016, 10.

  “We can construct these elaborate” Robert C. Berwick, “Why Only Us,” Classroom 10-250, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 28, 2016.

  “Stories are how” Wolfgang Yarlott and Victor Hayden, “Old Man Coyote Stories: Cross-Cultural Story Understanding in the Genesis Story Understanding System,” thesis, 2014, http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/91880.

  “How he did this” Ibid.

  “Start description of” Ibid., 38.

  “Start experiment” Ibid., 80.

  “I believe this is a” Ibid., 60.

  Supernomads

  “Well some other tribes” Canning Stock Route Project, http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com/.

  “charge into the spatial” Dale Kerwin, Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes: The Colonisation of the Australian Economic Landscape, 2010, 159.

  “the whole Western desert” David Lewis, “Observations on Route Finding and Spatial Orientation among the Aboriginal Peoples of the Western Desert Region of Central Australia,” Oceania 46, no. 4 (1976): 249–82.

  “try and get him” “Putuparri Tom Lawford: Oral History,” Canning Stock Route Project, http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com/node/3060, accessed February 10, 2016.

  “The earth is the repository” Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture, 2000, 57.

  “There are wells” “Putuparri Tom Lawford: Oral History.”

  “everywhen” D. J. Mulvaney, “Stanner, William Edward (Bill) (1905–1981),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, n.d., http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stanner-william-edward-bill-15541.

  “theory of everything” Robyn Davidson, Quarterly Essay 24: No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet, 2006, 13.

  “a spiritual realm” Ibid., 14.

  “Thus the landscape” David Turnbull and Helen Watson, Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas; A Portfolio of Exhibits, 1989, 30.

  “super-nomads” Scott Cane, First Footprints: The Epic Story of the First Australians, main edition, 2014, 30.

  “follows behind us” Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human, 2000, 205.

  “We are linked by song” Dale Kerwin, Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes: The Colonisation of the Australian Economic Landscape, 2010, 49.

  “resides in mnemonics” Ibid., 83.

  “[The ancestors] know” Ibid., 37.

  “deeper significance” Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, Raymond William Firth, and Adolphus Peter Elkin, Oceania (1975): 271.

  “some of the world’s earliest” Patrick D. Nunn and Nicholas J. Reid, “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More Than 7000 Years Ago,” Australian Geographer 47, no 1 (September 7, 2015): 47, doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539.

  “For example, a man” Ibid.

  “There are no one-scene epics” David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes, 1997, 62.

  “only in its performance” Ibid., 114.

  Dreamtime Cartography

  “vast howling wilderness” “Yiwarra Kuju,” National Museum of Australia, http://www.nma.gov.au/education/resources/units_of_work/yiwarra_kuju.

  “Where, we ask, is” Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, reprint edition, 2013, 309.

  “Whitefellas just reckon go” “Aboriginal Guides,” Canning Stock Route Project, http://www.canningstockrouteproject.com/history/story-aboriginal-guides/.

  “While there are” David Lewis, “Route Finding and Spatial Orientation,” Oceania 46, no. 4 (1975).

  “A single visit” David Lewis, “Route Finding by Desert Aborigines in Australia,” Journal of Navigation 29, no. 1 (January 1976): 21–38, doi.org/10.1017/S0373463300043307.

  “I have a feeling” Ibid.

  “How do you know” Lewis, “Route Finding and Spatial Orientation,” 262.

  “Pintupi’s route-finding” Ibid.

  “All my preconceived ideas” Ibid.

  “Often it is difficult” Peter Sutton, “Aboriginal Maps and Plans,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, first ed., vol. 2, 1998, 407.

  “radical in its fundamental implication” Philip G. Jones, “Norman B. Tindale Obituary,” December 1995, https://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/nbt/obituary.html.

  “A lot of kids run” Hetti Perkins, Art Plus Soul, 2010, 58.

  “I was a boy” Ibid.

  “I failed fully to understa
nd” Lewis, “Route Finding and Spatial Orientation,” 249–82.

  “Aboriginal roads and tracks” Dale Kerwin, Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes: The Colonisation of the Australian Economic Landscape, 2010, 114.

  “Like western topographic maps” Ibid., 47.

  “European maps are not” David Turnbull and Helen Watson, Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas; A Portfolio of Exhibits, 1989, 51.

  “It is a stark country” Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, 1991, 11.

  “undulations hardly deserving” David Lewis, Curriculum Development Centre, and Aboriginal Arts Board, “The Way of the Nomad,” in From Earlier Fleets: Hemisphere—An Aboriginal Anthology, ed. Kenneth Russell Henderson, 1978.

  “some kind of dynamic” Lewis, “Route Finding and Spatial Orientation,” 262.

  Space and Time in the Brain

  “Over a period of months” John O’Keefe, “Biographical,” The Nobel Foundation, 2014, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2014/okeefe-bio.html.

  “In thinking about these results” Ibid.

  “Everything important in” James C. Goodwin, “A-Mazing Research,” American Psychological Association 43, no. 2 (February 2012), http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/02/research.aspx.

  “telephone switchboard” Edward C. Tolman, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” Psychological Review 55, no. 4 (July 1948): 189–208, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0061626.

  “cognitive-like map” Ibid.

  “brief, cavalier, and dogmatic” Ibid.

  “My only answer is” Ibid.

  “who first dreamed of” John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, 1978.

  “Space plays a role” Ibid., 6.

  “Constructor of Brains” Ibid.

  “ineliminable property of our” Lynn Nadel, “The Hippocampus and Space Revisited,” Hippocampus 1, no. 3 (July 3, 1991): 221–29, doi.org/10.1002/hipo.450010302.

  “Space was a way” O’Keefe and Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, 19.

  “hedged his bets” Ibid., 6, 296.

  “The idea was that” O’Keefe, “Biographical.”

  “combined into supra modal” Elizabeth Marozzi and Kathryn J. Jeffery, “Place, Space and Memory Cells,” Current Biology 22, no. 22 (2012): R939–42.

  “If you damage the” Matthew Wilson, Presentation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, December 5, 2016.

  “temporarily structured experiences” Daniela Schiller et al., “Memory and Space: Towards an Understanding of the Cognitive Map,” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 41 (October 14, 2015): 13904–11, doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2618-15.2015.

  “The hippocampal system” Howard Eichenbaum and Neal J. Cohen, “Can We Reconcile the Declarative Memory and Spatial Navigation Views on Hippocampal Function?” Neuron 83, no. 4 (August 20, 2014): 764–70, doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.07.032.

  “The cognitive map is” Hugo J. Spiers, Interview with author, April 12, 2016.

  “When I think about” Harry Heft, Interview with author, March 16, 2017.

  “Wayfinding to a specific destination” Harry Heft, “The Ecological Approach to Navigation: A Gibsonian Perspective,” in The Construction of Cognitive Maps, ed. J. Portugali, 1996, 105–32, doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-33485-1_6.

  Among the Lightning People

  “We talk about emus” Ray P. Norris and Bill Yidumduma Harney, “Songlines and Navigation in Wardaman and Other Australian Aboriginal Cultures,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 17, no. 2 (April 9, 2014), http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2361.

  “Dead too are the” William Edward Harney, Life among the Aborigines, 1957, 38.

  “If you lay on” Norris and Harney, “Songlines and Navigation in Wardaman and Other Australian Aboriginal Cultures.”

  “as intimately as humans” Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, reprint edition, 2013, 122.

  “In its notions of time” Ibid., 132.

  “constantly impressed by how” Isabel McBryde, “Travellers in Storied Landscapes: A Case Study in Exchanges and Heritage,” Aboriginal History 24 (2000): 152–74.

  “Well, everyone else is” Jan Wositzky, Born under the Paperbark Tree: A Man’s Life, ed. Yidumduma Bill Harney, revised edition, 1998, 178.

  “Yeah, that’s my proper” Ibid., 179.

  “I grew up with” Hugh Cairns, Dark Sparklers: Yidumduma’s Wardaman Aboriginal Astronomy Northern Australia 2003, 2003, 16.

  You Say Left, I Say North

  “Probably the apprehension” Zoltan Kovecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction, 2006, 13.

  “[J]ust as we think” Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, 2003, 114.

  “You always know which” Ibid., 131.

  “Speakers of languages” Ibid., 21.

  “Nothing like this” Ibid., 127.

  “partaking of nature” Thomas Widlok, “The Social Relationships of Changing Hai||om Hunter Gatherers in Northern Namibia, 1990–1994,” 1994, 210.

  “Language” Asifa Majid, Melissa Bowerman, Sotaro Kita, Daniel B. M. Haun, and Stephen C. Levinson, “Can Language Restructure Cognition? The Case for Space,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 3 (March 2004): 108–14, doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.01.003.

  “prolonged social interaction” Thomas Widlok, “Orientation in the Wild: The Shared Cognition of Hai||om Bushpeople,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 2 (1997): 317–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/3035022.

  “patchwork of landscape” Ibid.

  “The central point” Kirill V. Istomin and Mark J. Dwyer, “Finding the Way: A Critical Discussion of Anthropological Theories of Human Spatial Orientation with Reference to Reindeer Herders of Northeastern Europe and Western Siberia,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 29–49, doi.org/10.1086/595624.

  “a skilled performance” Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, first edition, 2011, 220.

  “not in but along” Nuccio Mazzullo and Tim Ingold, “Being Along: Place, Time and Movement among Sámi People,” in Mobility and Place: Enacting Northern European Peripheries, ed. Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Brynhild Granås, 2012.

  “tantamount to the organism’s” Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, 3.

  “knowing as we go” Ibid., 229.

  “[I]ndeed he may have” Ibid., 234.

  “the path, like the musical” Ibid., 238.

  “journeys through space” Howard Eichenbaum, “Hippocampus: Mapping or Memory?” Current Biology 10, no. 21 (November 1, 2000): R785–87, doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00763-6.

  Empiricism at Harvard

  “oldest science” Louis Liebenberg, The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, first edition, 2012, xv.

  “have to create a working” Ibid., 116.

  “The modern scientist” Ibid., 57.

  “at least some of the first” Louis Liebenberg, The Origin of Science: On the Evolutionary Roots of Science and Its Implications for Self-Education and Citizen Science, 2013, 17.

  “Sailors today have no need” Charles O. Frake, “Cognitive Maps of Time and Tide among Medieval Seafarers,” Man 20, no. 2 (1985): 254–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/2802384.

  “spatial field of multitudes” “Wave Piloting in the Marshall Islands,” Conference, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, June 20, 2017.

  “so vast that the human” J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, 1992, 109.

  “[S]tandard histories of cartography” Ben Finney, “Nautical Cartography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, first edition, vol. 2, book 3, 1998, 444.


  “All these things” Nāʻālehu Anthony, presentation at “The Hōkūle’a: Indigenous Resurgence from Hawai’i to Mannahatta,” New York University, March 31, 2016.

  “breaking open the turtle” Joseph Genz, “Navigating the Revival of Voyaging in the Marshall Islands: Predicaments of Preservation and Possibilities of Collaboration,” Contemporary Pacific 23, no. 1 (March 26, 2011): 1–34, doi.org/10.1353/cp.2011.0017.

  “The physical and social” Ibid.

  “When I saw the bomb’s light” Ibid.

  “from our scientific” Joseph Genz, Jerome Aucan, Mark Merrifield, Ben Finney, Korent Joel, and Alson Kelen, “Wave Navigation in the Marshall Islands: Comparing Indigenous and Western Scientific Knowledge of the Ocean,” Oceanography 22, no. 2 (2009): 234–45.

  Astronauts of Oceania

  “If you want to cause change” Nāʻālehu Anthony, presentation at “The Hōkūle’a: Indigenous Resurgence from Hawai’i to Mannahatta,” New York University, March 31, 2016.

  “The welcoming of the” Vicente Diaz, presentation at “The Hōkūle’a: Indigenous Resurgence from Hawai’i to Mannahatta,” New York University, March 31, 2016.

  “science and technology” Vicente Diaz, “Lost in Translation and Found in Constipation: Unstopping the Flow of Intangible Cultural Heritage with the Embodied Tangibilities of Traditional Carolinian Seafaring Culture,” International Symposium on Negotiating Intangible Cultural Heritage, National Ethnology Museum, Osaka, Japan, 2017.

  “the process of thinking” Thomas Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, 1995, preface.

  “almost every young man” Ibid., 37.

  “The voyages are often” Ibid., 42.

  “reopened” David Lewis, “Memory and Intelligence in Navigation: Review of East Is a Big Bird. Gladwin Thomas. Harvard University Press,” Journal of Navigation 24, no. 3 (July 1971): 423–24, doi.org/10.1017/S0373463300048426.

  “With such abounding” Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, 37.