Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It's not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land. As Gary Nabhan has written, we can't meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without re-story-ation. Robin Wall Kimmerer · Citizen Potawatomi Nation · Braiding Sweetgrass
What this is
One folio per place. Every name that place carries, in every language that carries it, with the survey name listed as one row among the others rather than as the headline. What the people who have held it longest understand themselves to owe it. What was done. What is being done now.
Each folio ends with two columns that have to be filled in together: what is, stated as fact and not softened, and what can be, which must name a real and ongoing piece of work or stay empty. No entry is permitted to end in despair it has not earned, and none is permitted to end in hope it cannot cite.
Some folios decline to carry the story. Where the people who hold a place have publicly asked that its knowledge not be circulated, this archive records the ground, the water, the law, and the fact of the refusal, and publishes nothing further. Those pages are not incomplete. The gap is the entry. The Covenant sets out the six rules the schema enforces.
The field map
The map carries coastline, relief and water. It does not carry national borders, and its place labels are off. That is method rather than decoration: the ground in this archive predates every line drawn across it, and several of these places are cut in half by one.
Every folio in the corpus, sited where it actually is, coloured by the pattern that runs through it.
The folios, by what runs between them
The places are the ground truth. The spine is what recurs across them. Follow a motif and you are watching people who never met arrive at the same law, or suffer the same machine.