A primary means of conveying this knowledge of the landscape was through the oral traditions involving the Coyote and other First Peoples, and through the family stories of hunting, gathering and fishing, all of which were told during the long winter evenings in the longhouses. When the stories were engaged and the listeners made participants within them, the bends in the rivers, the knolls on the prairies and the shorelines of the lakes would be clearly identified and "traveled." After the storytelling, the knowledge of the landscape just gained would then be relied upon during the next canoe journey up that river or around that lake. The oral traditions, with their uniquely interactive qualities, were the "maps" of the Schitsu'umsh. And as with any "map," the maps of the Schitsu'umsh are also embedded with their values and teachings, with the mi'yep of the First Peoples. See discussion on the oral traditions and the teachings embedded within them. Maps, be they images on paper or verbal images, thus convey much more than simply the lay of the land.

Lewis and Clark, followed by fur traders and U.S. treaty commissioners, also drafted and relied upon maps. But their "maps" were of a fundamentally different nature than those of the Indian. For the Schitsu'umsh, the maps of the suyepmsh have come to represent conquest and defeat, and expropriation of their lands and way of life. The first maps were constructed by the suyepmsh to identify routes over which other suyepmsh could enter Schitsu'umsh lands. Many suyepmsh traveled through the lands, while many others remained, homesteading the rich camas lands or mining the mountain streams and hillsides. These were maps that implicitly sought to identify the "natural resources" of the lands, such as minerals and farmlands. And these were maps that supplanted Schitsu'umsh names with suyepmsh names. The very act of "naming" is an important process in establishing "ownership" as well as political and economic control over that which is named.

One of the earliest maps marked the 1853 route of Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens as he surveyed the country along the Coeur d'Alene River. This route would become part of the important 600 mile Mullan Road, completed in 1862, linking Fort Benton on the Missouri River with Fort Walla Walla near the Columbia River. In 1866 alone, over 20,000 people, 5,000 head of cattle and 6,000 mules traveled west along the Mullan Road. For the Schitsu'umsh "maps" meant "trespassing on our lands" and eventually, invasion.

In addition to the incursion onto Indian lands, the "maps" of the suyepmsh would soon come to mean land confiscation and removal from the land itself. Beginning in 1867, the U.S. treaty commissioners began "negotiating" a series of treaties and executive orders, creating the "boundaries" of a Coeur d'Alene Indian "reservation" (land reserved for the Indian). During the drafting of the first treaty in 1867, the boundaries of the reservation were, in fact, never discussed with tribal members. When the final executive order creating a Coeur d'Alene reservation was ratified by Congress in 1891, the once 5 million plus acres of Schitsu'umsh aboriginal territory, a region without defining and limiting boundaries, had been reduced to some 400,000 acres within a defined boundary.

The treaty maps were soon followed by another series of maps that would bring even greater serious consequences. Completed by 1909, individual allotments were surveyed throughout the reservation. Parcels of 160 acres were assigned to some 638 individual Schitsu'umsh as part of the General Allotment Act of 1887. See discussion on the Allotment Act. Maps came to represent individual ownership of lands, concepts very alien to the Schitsu'umsh. With regard to subsistence activities, the family as a whole, not the "individuals" that comprised the family, had always been the unit of decision making. In addition, land could never be "owned" as property, but only used in a partnership and respectful manner with the animals and plants that co-existed on that land. See discussion on the land use. Allotted lands were now understood as "natural resources," valued for the crops they could produce by the individuals who owned them. The allotment also brought with it something more immediate - economic ruin and social collapse. Once successful farmers, using the most modern of farming techniques on farms up to a thousand acres in size, the Schitsu'umsh now found themselves limited to 160 acres, in poverty, and dependent on the federal government.

For Schitsu'umsh the maps of the suyepmsh have another meaning that fundamentally clashes with their own view of the landscape and how one should interact with it. As an artifact and construct of a culture, Euro-American "maps" typically attempt to descriptively record and represent, in some formalized symbolic code, the natural and/or human-derived physical terrain of a specific geographic region. The premise of such a cultural artifact is the assertion of an objectified, Cartesian-based world view. That is, as a "map" attempts to describe physical objects that are necessarily separate, both in time and space, and thus independent from its own being, it assumes an objectified world. The "places" of the landscape, a particular mountain or river, for example, are rendered as objects in space - fixed, static and immutable. "Place" can be made divisible into "acres" and "reservations," and quantifiable into scientific significances and "market values."

But as we considered in our discussion of Schitsu'umsh "heart knowledge," an objectified world view is not only alien to the Schitsu'umsh, but it undermines the Indian way of knowing and relating to the landscape and its "places." The oral tradition "maps" of the Schitsu'umsh are a means of participating with the other "kinsmen," human, animal and spirit, as an integral member of the world, and not removed and estranged from it. These are maps that render the "places" of the landscape as an event and construction. Place is the transitory confluence of the actions of the First Peoples intersecting with the human acts of singing and storytelling. The contrast between the spoken and printed "mapping" of a landscape is directly related to the differing implications exhibited in literacy and the written word, versus orality and the spoken word (see Frey 1995:141-147). The very premise upon which suyepmsh maps are based is thus but another form of challenge to the traditional way of the Schitsu'umsh.

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