Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas

This book explains why Trump was voted in.

Joe Bryan and Denis Wood have used geographical skills, precise language, and historical analysis to crystallize how those aspects of scholarly research can be purchased by the U.S. Army by scholars without scruples. In the first few pages one learns how geographers from the University of Kansas, notably Peter Herlihy, arrived in Mexico to map indigenous lands without telling the tribes he was bankrolled by the U.S. Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. Yes, this happened and happens. We also learn that the American Geographical Society (AGS) was eager to accept the funds from the US Army so that the organization could simply remain existing.The span of Bryan's and Wood's exposition, from Nicaragua in the late 1920s to the young Pierre Trudeau government in Canada in the 1960s and more, shows how time and time again, advanced First World governments used their legal jargon and geographical pre-text in attempts to control or bring into the fold native lands in their reach. As Bryan and Wood note about Herlihy and geographers like him, " they offered a variation on a long running theme of advancing imperial interests through the twinned militarization of geography and saving the Indian."I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the continued modern approach to the dissolution of indigenous lands and rights and to the vast inroads military money has made not just into politics, but into scholarship delivered as unbiased, intellectual property.