Aaron Carapella

Aaron Carapella is an American self-taught cartographer who makes maps of the locations and names of Pre-Columbian Indigenous tribes of North America circa 1490. At age 19, he began his map-making research and as of 2014, he has made maps of Indigenous tribes with their original names for the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Biography Carapella is from Warner, Oklahoma. He told NPR that he is "mixed-blood Cherokee" on his mother's side and has a bachelor's degree in marketing from Indiana Institute of Technology. His grandparents on his mother's side, instilled in him a deep interest in Native Americans: My Grandparents would tell me, you're part Native American and that's part of your history. They would give me books to read about different tribes' histories, so, I grew up with a curiosity of always wanting to learn more about Native American history.

Map making He constructs maps of Native American tribal lands with their original names prior to Europeans coming to the Americas. His motivation for making maps stems from his childhood, but he began research and construction of maps at the age of 19 and, as of 2014, he has worked on them for more than 14 years. Other small tribes had disappeared and the only information left was in the tribes that had absorbed them. and according to Two Row Times it was the first to show North American indigenous nations in their original languages. According to senior geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Doug Herman, his maps are unique because they include both the original name of Native American tribes and the names they are commonly known by. Because most of the tribes were nomadic, he placed the names of the tribes in locations where the tribes were before they were pushed out by European expansion.

Today's borders between Canada and the United States and Mexico and the United States are arbitrary with respect to where tribal areas used to be. For example, he estimates that there are about 24 tribes that have populations split by the Mexico-United States border. In constructing his map of Mexico, he noticed that the language and culture of tribes in Mexico are better preserved than the same tribes on the United States side of the border. He speculates that the reason may be that there was a greater effort by the American government to relocate children into American Indian boarding schools. By late 2015, Carapella had completed a borderless map of tribes of South America. In the future, he also would like to make an "old-fashioned driving atlas" in which he can focus on different areas in much more detail.