Rundale

by V’cenza Cirefice and participants

This visual essay explores counter-mapping as a tool of resistance to extractivism. Working with communities resisting gold mining in the Sperrin Mountains and across Ireland since 2020 these counter-maps challenge the “extractive gaze” of industry and state. Macerena Gomez-Barris explains that the extractive gaze underlies the colonial logic of extractivism, it constructs people and places as extractable resources and creates sacrifice zones. Mapping is central in this task, to identify resource rich territories and extinguish Indigenous and rural communities. What futures are imposed when we see the world through the extractive gaze? What stories do these maps tell about our places?

Counter-mapping is a form of critical cartography that challenges dominant power and reminds us that landscapes are more than empty backdrops for the accumulation of capital. Counter-mapping has been used by anti-eviction and anti-gentrification movements, feminist struggles, Indigenous struggles against extractivism, and in Palestinian anti-imperial movements to document the Nakba. Maps can project futures of extraction and depletion, or they can foster futures of abundance, reciprocity and care. By subverting the tool of state and corporate interests, counter-mapping aims to re-balance power and allow communities to re-assert that there are many ways of knowing and being. Counter-mapping is resistance, solidarity, and world-making.

These images emanate from workshops, walks and visits where local people and solidarity activists from Ireland and around the world re-asserted the fact that the Sperrins is not an empty sacrifice zone, but a deeply peopled and storied place full of relations between human and more-than-human. Candace Fujikane asks how alternative cartographies of abundance can help us grow a decolonial love for lands, seas and skies that will help to renew abundance of this earth. Inspired by this work I ask, what other ways of relating exist in the extractive zone?

Capital’s cartographies exist to reduce areas to a wasteland or wilderness in order to extract profit. Maps are very relevant to Ireland, which was a site of some of the first experiments in colonial and capitalist expansion. Colonial figures like Edmund Spenser and William Petty worked to map and survey the land, turning Ireland into an abstract plantation that could be measured in economic units, to maximise extraction and profit. Maps were used to reorder relationships, to simplify and commodify, to make terra nullius or blank spaces that can be opened up for extraction. The extractive gaze could not totally extinguish forms of communality and relational ways of knowing. From understandings of a sentient landscape in contemporary Ireland through fairy trees and forts (See Sinéad Mercier’s, The Men who Eat Ringforts) to the all-island resistance to mining seen through the CAIM (Communities Against the Injustice of Mining) network.

The extractive gaze is active in contemporary Ireland, as the Tellus survey, maps out mineral rich areas to exploit through mining. Already 25% of the North and large areas in the South of the Island has been concessioned for mineral exploration. As well as extractive mapping, cartographies of the North of Ireland have emphasised marginalisation, borders, division and trauma. Yes, this is woven into the fabric of our places, but we are also places of abundance, reciprocity, resistance and aliveness.

Please donate and share Save our Sperrins crowdfunder to raise funds for the upcoming public inquiry.

Beaghmore Stone Circles

A site we made many visits to over the years is Beaghmore (Bheitheach Mhór, meaning big place of birch trees) Stone Circles. Created around 6,000 years ago these seven stone circles, ten rows of stones and twelve cairns sit nestled in the landscape between bog, farmland and forest. Under these impressive stone circles is the source of three important local rivers. We gathered here together as Water Protectors from Ireland, Chile and South Dakota. Ramon, from Chile, highlighted how important it is that we connect with the histories, stories and mythologies of the territory because we are all of our territories. The labels on the map remind us of the deep timescales of our places that resist the short-termism of profit orientated timeframes.

Existence is Resistance

Fragments of the rich diversity of place based resistance is represented in this map. Counter-mapping walks held along the Rivers Foyle, and the hills of the Inishowen peninsula above Lough Foyle. Being together on the land, sharing story and memory reminds us that “our existence is our resistance”. The occupation of the Greencastle People’s Office (GPO), a focal point in the campaign, reminds us that relations of care and solidarity are found in the everyday, in the care work that sustains us, and that sharing tea and relationship building are resistance.  Protests were held in Belfast, against corporate policing of Land Defenders and London, when a delegation travelled for three days of protest, solidarity building and action at the heart of corporate power in December 2021. Resistance is putting our bodies on the streets, fields, bogs and lanes.

Mapping abundance

Mapping abundance is an embodied experience, through resisting mining and extractivism in the Sperrins we put our bodies on the land, visiting sites of social, historical, archaeological, spiritual and ecological importance and walking the lands we seek to defend.

The Water Walkers

This collage maps a Nibi River Walk that took place in June 2023. Through the Making Relatives Collective, a collaboration of Water Protectors from Turtle Island (North America) and Ireland, we organised a three day walk of the River Foyle from source to mouth. Ojibwe elders came to guide us through this ceremony together with a youth theatre group who performed their play about Water Protection in Derry at the end of the walk. We walked to let the water know we are here for it and that we care, we spoke the words, “we do it for the water”. This walk asked us to reframe our relationship to the river. No longer was it just a “resource” or a source of partition and trauma as it traces the border. Instead, we came to know the water as a relative.