Each year, the MacArthur Foundation announces its MacArthur Fellows or “Geniuses,” a class of researchers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs and more who are changing the world through their endless creativity and groundbreaking contributions. And each year, Under the Radar with Callie Crossley highlights New England recipients of the award through its ongoing series “The Genius Next Door.” This is the fourth and final installment highlighting the Class of 2025.
According to Margaret Wickens Pearce, if you ask 50 different cartographers how they approach their work, you’ll get 50 different answers.
“For me, cartography is a form of writing,” Pearce said. “Because I approach it like writing, it really kind of opens up different ways of conveying information or knowledge and bringing in different voices. And all of that can happen in a map; it’s just in two dimensions.”
Her life-long love of writing and literature, along with her interest in the histories of math and science, combined with her passion for nature and time spent outdoors growing up in Rochester, New York, all came together when she was a student at Hampshire College and decided to take a cartography class.
“People talk about the moment that they find their calling in life. Literally that first week of class, it was just like my head exploded,” Pearce said. “I understood it better than anything I had ever studied. I also just found it hilarious because on the one hand, people treated maps like they were scientific truth. And I could see clearly, just in our first couple of exercises, how subjective they were and how they were really authored narratives.”
The narratives detailed in Pearce’s maps center the knowledge, experiences and histories of Indigenous people in North America like herself, as a member of the Potawatomi tribe. Her years of commitment to this work is what earned her a spot in the 2025 Class of MacArthur Foundation Fellows.
One of her early works, “They Would Not Take Me There,” reworked and retold the story of Samuel Champlain’s mapping of what is now Canada by including Native names for locations and imagined dialogue of First Nations voices that Champlain dismissed — or even complained about — in his travels.
Her latest work, “Mississippi Dialogues,” is a public art project in collaboration with three tribal nations — the Prairie Island Indian Community, Ho-Chunk Nation and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.
“We are creating two installations on the Mississippi River that are about portraying Indigenous knowledge and experience of the Mississippi River, and elevating public awareness about Indigenous ways of living in balance with the river as a way to spark public imagination for what balance looks like,” Pearce said.
This project was entirely funded by federal grants that were terminated by President Donald Trump’s administration, so Pearce has already said she will be allotting the funds necessary from her MacArthur grant to finalize the work.
For Pearce, this kind of project is essential for both visitors to the river but also for those who have honored and cared for the Mississippi for generations.
“I’m interested in how public dialog about hard issues — in this case about flooding and dams on the river — can be shifted simply by ruminating about different perspectives on the issues in place,” Pearce said. “By standing in a public park along the river and meditating on other people’s perspectives about that river and taking the time to reflect and consider our own relationships to the river, to imagine different futures, and become braver for listening to other people’s perspectives instead of feeling talked at or spoken down to.”
Guest
- Margaret Wickens Pearce, cartographer, member of the 2025 class of MacArthur “Genius” Fellows.
