Treaties and Monuments: The Whim of Ephemeral Contracts, or A War Department Map Looks like the Fingerprint of All My Relations
ii
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This place is an impression
left by the friction-ridges
of a human battle.
The recovery of partial-places
from a crime scene
is an important method of reclaiming home
Extraction practices, i.e. natural gas,
minerals and oil, on a landscape
result in targets points on a map renamed
and colonized on surfaces such as a mountain
or burial ground. Deliberate impressions
of entire villages can be obtained by observation
or other surveys bullets
transferred from the peaks of friction ridges
on the national register to a smooth surface
such as a map.
Place records normally contain
impressions from the stories told, lives lived
on the plains and rivers, peaks and valleys
of basins and draws, though maps
also typically record portions
of wars waged on the people within.