2 Regenerative Mapping for Geographies of Radical Resilience

practice, especially regarding governance with people and land. In sharp contrast to sovereignty as a right to do what you want with property, Anishinabe spiritual leader Eddie Benton-Benaie profoundly expressed sovereignty as “a responsibility you carry inside yourself” (Harjo, 2019, p. 60) – an embodied sovereignty that translates into care for self, neighbors, and the earth. This in turn translates to sovereignty embedded within communities and emplaced within ecosystems. As Mvskoke geographer Laura Harjo (2019, p. 60) expresses this theory of radical sovereignty: “[I]f we look inward to our own energy, power, and knowledge, and outward to that of our relatives and community – there is where we will collectively find the map to the next world, the map to the lush promise.” This conception of embodied, embedded, and emplaced sovereignty stands in opposition to the colonial sovereign rationalities at the core of perpetual processes of dispossession, displacement, and extermination under capitalism (Hern, 2017; Moore, 2017). Yet it is fundamental to the praxis of diverse, marginalized communities that have developed systems of mutual care for people and land, even in circumstances where they have no legal rights to the land or housing (Campbell et al., 2020; Hern, 2017). Thus we draw from critical indigenous studies, black feminist thought, environmental justice methodologies, and regenerative development literature to offer a framework of critical and co-creative methodologies through which academic researchers and community members can collaboratively map the way to geographies of radical resilience. At its core, the framework supports co-inquirers in shifting their cartographic gaze from “seeing like a State” to “sensing like a sovereign body.” The framework includes four regenerative mapping methods – asset mapping, story mapping, promise mapping, and kinship mapping – that can be conducted internally through the leadership of community members, or as a participatory process led by academic researchers and city and regional planners, with community members.

To illustrate this theoretical framework in practice, we then offer reflections drawn from our experiences about the challenges and opportunities presented in the application of such approaches through the story of the Valverde Movement Project, a community-engaged, multi-sector action research initiative in a Denver neighborhood subject to decades of serial forced displacement pressures, most recently, gentrification. We write in a collective voice drawn from our varied personal, professional, civic, organizational, and institutional backgrounds. Most of us are situated in academia. Half of us share whitesettler positionality. Almost all of us share female positionality. We all hold an intention to embody antiracist, decolonial, and feminist praxis in our lives and work.

In referring to geographies of “radical” resilience, we join Muñoz et al. (2021) in employing the etymological meaning of radical, “of, or having roots,” as an emplaced, embedded, and embodied understanding of the production of space, place, community and home. In the context of displacement research, we employ “rootedness” as the opposite of displacement and “resilience” as the antidote to its traumatic effects. Research shows that the local ecological knowledge, social capital, and place attachment associated with such rootedness are sources of knowledge and power that enable community resilience in the face of natural disasters (Afifi et al., 2020). These rooted forms of knowledge and network