Cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce 84F Recognized as 2025 MacArthur Fellow
She received an $800,000 no-strings-attached award alongside 21 other “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”
Margaret Wickens Pearce 84F has been recognized as a 2025 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Popularly known as the “genius grant,” Macarthur Fellowships are awarded to talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits. Fellows are nominated anonymously by leaders in their fields.
Pearce is a cartographer who foregrounds Indigenous understandings of land and place in maps that visualize Native Peoples’ knowledge, history, and stories. A Citizen Potawatomi Nation tribal member based in Maine, she pushes the boundaries of cartography beyond two-dimensional depictions of static and defined spaces. Pearce also draws on a wide range of archival materials and long-term collaborations with Indigenous communities to resurface their history, knowledge, and presence throughout North America.
Pearce’s work includes the co-authored 2008 map They Would Not Take Me There, which documents the Native geographies and communities Samuel de Champlain interacted with as he explored what is now known as Canada. It includes Native place names, excerpts from Champlain’s journal, and imagined dialogue from First Nations People. In 2017, she authored Coming Home to Indigenous Name Places in Canada to mark the 150th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada by the Canadian-American Center at the University of Maine. The map “honors Indigenous place names in Canada and the assertion of Indigenous authority through place names.”
More recent work includes a series of maps designed for “Land-Grab Universities,” a 2020 investigative report by High Country News into how the United States funded land-grant universities with stolen Indigenous land. She also designed maps for Chicago’s Field Museum’s permanent exhibition installed in 2022, titled Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. Pearce is currently working on Mississippi Dialogues, which she describes as “a public art project reimagining possibilities for Mississippi River flood management through situated cartographic design.” She is collaborating with tribal nations whose homelands include the Mississippi River and its floodplains.
Pearce received a B.A. in 1989 from Hampshire College; her Division III project was titled “Proposal for an Atlas of Indian Sacred Lands in the U.S.” She received a Ph.D. from Clark University in 1998. She has held faculty positions at Humboldt State University, Ohio University, and University of Kansas. Her maps have been exhibited at the Leventhal Map and Education Center at Boston Public Library, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Onsite Gallery at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, among others. Pearce’s maps and scholarly articles have appeared in several books and journals, including Cartographica, Historical Geography, and The Cartographic Journal. She is online at studio1to1.net.
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