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.
[8] When he was a teenager, he wanted to find a map of the United States that depicted all of the Native American tribes on it.
[8] He told Rick Smith writing for Win Awenen Nisitotung that I would attend powwows and scour through the items vendors had for sell.
[9] When he was younger, he described himself as a "radical youngster" who was involved in Native American causes and protested Columbus Day.
[2][10] He constructs maps of Native American tribal lands with their original names prior to Europeans coming to the Americas.
[9] His aim has been to construct Pre-Columbian era maps circa 1490, just before Columbus landed in the Americas.
His research and map construction began as four "pencil-marked poster boards on his bedroom wall".
[1] He found the Handbook of North American Indians to be very helpful in constructing his maps.
[11] Carapella told the Navajo Times that the biggest challenge in constructing these maps was finding all of the original names.
[5] He found research on his maps especially difficult because some tribes had only a few surviving members and even fewer speakers of their native language.
The first map of the United States was released in November, 2012,[13] and according to Two Row Times it was the first to show North American indigenous nations in their original languages.
[2] Herman also noted that some of the common names for Native American tribes are derogatory.
Carapella's maps show that before 1492, North America was filled with a large number of autonomous tribes.
[15] By late 2015, Carapella had completed a borderless map of tribes of South America.