As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Inuit in the Arctic and island inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean both experience interrelated changes in their maritime environments. Global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, which leads to rising sea levels. As a result, local inhabitants in both regions experience the disappearance of their space (land and ice), paired with the arrival of new stakeholders with a diverse range of interests in the areas. As the inhabitants of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, Inuit and Pacific Islanders have engaged in counter-mapping and counter-narrating their space that colonial powers have previously conceptualized as isolated, remote, and peripheral. In contrast, the maps of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific illustrate and tell the stories of transnational spaces that have been collectively shared and used since time immemorial. These counter-mapping and counter-narrative approaches shape a new perception of the regions. This chapter contributes to conceptual development of environmental violence by discussing case studies of counter-mapping and counter-narration in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean – as locals’ responses to experiences of structural and cultural violence to overcome their vulnerability, challenge power differentials, and satisfy their human needs.

This essay examines the vexed history of Trelawney Town, Jamaica, from its grant by treaty in 1738 to Jamaica’s self-emancipated Maroons until its expropriation by the colonial state after the so-called Second Maroon War (1795–6).Maps provide evidence of the different ways Maroons and their colonial enemies understood territory and their relationship to it.As an imperial practice, cartography both determines state-sanctioned boundaries and distributes the ideological beliefs that enforce them.But it sometimes also records evidence of the way Maroons inhabited their territory. Close examination of pencil notations on maps produced to establish the boundaries of Trelawney Town and its environs reveal the refusal of Maroons to acknowledge their territory as a bounded space. With the inevitable encroachment of patented estates, they rebelled to assert their right to inhabit their territory as they saw fit. Through guile and terror, the colonial state prevailed against them, expropriating their territory and transporting the Trelawney Town Maroons to Nova Scotia. Later maps show the parcelling of their territory into 300-acre plots secured by a central military barracks. So prevails the proprietary space of capital: by force.