The Truth About Territory
Over the course of the National Humanities Center Institute on Contested Territory: Southeast Asia 1945-1975 through the National Endowment for the Humanities, I learned about the contributing factors to the definition of territory. For instance; how territory is defined, claimed, argued about, and taken away. Territory is far more than just a physical space that a leader governs and taxes. Territories are full of people from different backgrounds, religions, experiences, and ethnicities. Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular, is a place where many local powers and foreign governments have tried to establish their mark and expand their own territory to fulfill their imperialistic agenda.
The map that is shown is a map of South Vietnam and the different ethnic groups that reside within. There are three umbrella ethnicities, with multiple ethnicities within each umbrella. When I first looked at this map, I was fascinated that all of these ethnicities are present in South Vietnam. After closer analysis and further learning about territory, it began to become even stranger to me that a foreign power would have the audacity to try and take when there are so many interests at play. Many colonial powers considered their interests alone without the thought of how they were carving up locations primarily in the Global South. The idea of territory, then, becomes much harder to describe. It also becomes much harder to figure out to whom the territory belongs. The perspective of the people who live in a particular space are frequently at odds with those who come in and try to make the space theirs. My understanding of territory as something that can be fought over and “won” is complicated by the idea that just because an area is titled something or is officially run by a leader, does not mean that the territory belongs to that person or group of people.
Map of South Vietnam
July 25th, 2018
Breanna Holtz, 26, Social Studies teacher in Oregon
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Forever Maps
5 years ago the AP Human Geography teacher at my former high school announced that she would be moving to Rhode Island. She informed me that I would be taking over the course. I fell in love with the material and am constantly looking for ways to make geography more meaningful for students. Every year I feel I get a little better at getting young scholars to think about the five themes of geography: absolute and relative location, place, human/environmental interactions, regions, and movement. Last Friday I had an experience that will forever change to way I teach.
On the second day of the Contested Territory seminar Chris Bunin quickly and effectively taught us how to use ArcGIS software. Groups received an assignment that was due on the first Friday. Our instructions were to focus on one of the five themes of geography and create an ESRI story map based on the territory of SE Asia. Our group chose to focus on bombing in Southeast Asia during the Vietnamese/American War.
Working with my group on the assignment created an a-ha moment. Our topic was unexploded ordnance from the bombing of SE Asia. We all were thinking about human-environment interaction as we scoured the internet looking for data, articles, and images. We worked on how to use the software. We had brainstorming sessions to storyboard our presentation. This is exactly what I want my AP Human Geography and AP Capstone Research students to do.
The biggest a-ha moment came when the other groups presented. I looked at my fellow participants and saw the wonder as we viewed the aesthetically beautiful story maps. I kept thinking, “We collectively created these and they are awesome.” We were not only proud but also amazed at the power of the assignment. We learned from embedded videos, recorded first person accounts, biographies, and multiple maps where the information had probably never been conceptualized in that particular way.
My students will have a-ha moments when they learn how to GIS. It will take many hours for me to be able to do what Chris Bunin did for us. This is an investment of time that I am ready and willing to make.
Storymaps
Friday, July 29, 2018 group presentations of ESRI storymaps
Spencer Swindler, 44, social studies teacher Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
forever-maps
You Cannot Copy That Map
In a lecture on the lived experiences of the local peoples of the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam, Dr. Christian C. Lentz, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Chapel Hill, shared this map of the Northwest Region of Vietnam and a short anecdote about why this map is of particular importance. He was in the middle of doing research in Hanoi at the North Vietnam Archives Center #3, and faced opposition when he attempted to make copies of many of the maps dating to the French colonial era in Vietnam, whether they be from the French or a Vietnamese production. This map alone Dr. Lentz was allowed to reproduce. This map represents for me the numerous layers that the themes of “contested” and “territory” manifest in Southeast Asia in this time period.
This seemingly little tidbit that he shared in the midst of his lecture is what really stuck with me, and cemented my understanding of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The “contest” for Vietnam extends much further past the initial creation of this map in 1952. The idea that a visiting scholar such as Dr. Lentz was strictly forbidden to copy any maps other than this one speaks to how hotly contested the memory of the Vietnam War is still today. As Dr. Lentz told the story, I created a mental image of a Vietnamese archival official standing over Dr. Lentz’ shoulder, closely monitoring what the American scholar copied. How do we remember this conflict? From which perspective? Controlling what can and cannot be recreated is an attempt to steer the narrative, which is very much still being written.
Dr. Lentz’ story on the “Black River Region after Northwest Campaign (Oct-Dec 1952)” map simplified for me all the complexities that contributed to the warfare in Southeast Asia into a single map, a visual representation of a territory that meant so many different things to so many different actors, each pulled into a conflict that continues to this day to be contested. I can only hope through continued scholarship, communication, and openness, that one day, the archival official will instead say, “Yes, you can copy that map.”
July 2018 - NEH Summer Institute
Maggie Childress, 24, Teacher, Wake County, North Carolina
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