Islands in the Salish Sea Community Mapping Project

Vanessa Sparrow writes: "This project took place between 1999 and 2004 in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia’s Strait of Georgia; an area (along with Puget Sound, USA, to the south) dubbed the Salish Sea in reference to the Coast Salish peoples who have made this area home for millennia. Emerging from a desire to reconnect people living on these islands with a deeper understanding of their home places, and an opportunity to give these places a voice amid the rising cacophony of development pressures, the project focussed on 17 islands in the Canadian part of the bioregion. By identifying organisations on each of the islands to work with local coordinators and artists, the project was eventually able to produce an astonishing range of hand-crafted community maps depicting various aspects of each place that are valued by those who live there."

The “Islands in the Salish Sea Community Mapping Project” engaged over 3000 people and involved everything from oral history with elders through reviews of scientific data to school kids with clipboards and crayons. More than 30 local artists then brought together these layers of information to life in unique and extraordinary maps. The project resulted in the publication of Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas eds. Sheila Harrington and Judi Stevenson. Vancouver: Touchwood Editions, 2005. The atlas docuemnts to project and showcases the artists' maps. Additional chapters describe the origins and strength of the emerging practice of artistic community mapping, the unfolding of this project over several years, and the history and character of the islands. This book is one of the course texts for "Envisioning Islands," a foundation course for the Islands Institute.

Seee also Artistic Community Mapping and Maps and Mapping

Local island coordinators included Katherine Dunster and Caffyn Kelley