Terra Nullus (Empty Land)

English maps of the New World exercised power through the categories of their omissions. These silences applied especially to Indian civilizations. We ask ourselves, where are the traces of Indian occupation on the land? At best they are only randomly preserved on the maps but, more often than not, as the frontier moved west, the traces of an Indian past were dropped altogether from the image. . . . With the exception of the survival of the Indian names for natural features, such as rivers, lakes, and mountains, the maps seldom represented an Indian geography mapped in its own right and they were never a means of preserving ethnic integrity. Many eighteenth-century map makers preferred blank spaces to a relict Indian geography. This was defended on the grounds that it was good scientific practice to avoid mapping what could not be verified. Yet the ideological implications of the silence about Indian geography cannot be overlooked. It lent unwitting support to the legal doctrines of terra nullus and vacuum domicilium, which, since the earliest days of the colonies, had featured among the grounds for acquiring land title and assuming political jurisdiction. The English in particular believed that Indian land awaited their immediate settlement because it was vacant. There is a moral neutrality about a blank space which is easily divided and ruled.

^{Source: Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 144.}