Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | November 17, 2025 | Worcester Business Journal 9 the kind of property exchanges and ne- gotiations and colonial negotiations that are really at the heart of how all those towns were formed originally. What was your first reaction when you heard that you had been named a MacArthur Fellow? I felt very moved and just felt very quiet. I was honored and excited, but immediately felt the responsibility of that fellowship, which I feel very power- fully. I'm so grateful to the MacArthur Foundation for trusting me with that responsibility. It's a huge honor. I view it as an opportunity to put my dreams within reach. I view it as a responsibility I've carried all my life to use the skills and training that I've been given to make change, particularly for Indigenous people. What projects are you planning on working on with this fellowship? I have an immediate project, Missis- sippi Dialogues, that was already un- derway but was not completely funded because we had a grant through the National Endowment for the Human- ities that was terminated. So these funds in the immediate future can complete the funding for that project. It is a collaboration with Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin and Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota for a public art project on the Mississip- pi River. We're doing these two large format cartographic panels: one will be installed in a public city park right on the river in Red Wing, Minnesota, and the other is going to be in a public land trust on the Mississippi River down in Illinois. You say you use cartography as a language. How did you come to that understanding and interpretation of the work? It's actually a very traditional ap- proach to cartography: that is cartogra- phy is structured by something similar to words and phrases and grammar. We have these graphic marks, like colors and shapes and lines, operating like words because they have meaning in the map. We assemble them together to make phrases: like a symbol, if you just imagine on a map a symbol for a historic town on the river, you expect that symbol to look in a particular way. So you're getting phrasing in the map. en all of the rule systems we use to put the maps together: the map projec- tion, categories, and data classification. ose are all a kind of a grammar tying all the symbols together, so it has a structure like written language. at's not the way that people gen- erally think about it in society, at least in American society. ere's a more passive view: Whatever the phone is telling you is the route. But those digital maps are authored, and there are choic- es behind the way those symbols and those graphic phrasings have been put together. e more we think about them as writing or as language, the more we can imagine how they can be shaped to express other ways of living in the world just the same way we shape writing. In your MacArthur Fellowship video, you said that you see cartography as a way of writing about concepts that are hard to convey in linear text. What are some concepts you hope people have a better understanding of after viewing your maps? Something that's significant to Indig- enous experience: e land is the most important thing. It's more important than anything. Cartography is a two-di- mensional expressive space about the land. So the land is at the center of that narrative at all times. You can go further with that and make the land into a character or a collaborator in the telling of that narrative. Another aspect of Indigenous experience: Time is not linear. Time is something that is a sequence of events in the landscape. So if you want to show time in a different way, you can use this two-dimensional space to portray se- quential events as having also a kind of simultaneity, because we think of time as being always: everything is potential- ly present in time. Why do you think graphic represen- tation of Indigenous peoples land is so important? A visual representation, or a graphic representation, specifically, is a way of rendering visible people who are oen made invisible in colonial circumstanc- es. A graphic representation's symbols, similar to letters, allow us to imagine in spaces. I can create a space for imag- ining what is there and how my life connects to the events that are being portrayed in the map, because there is a little bit of a little bit of a gap allowed. For example, if I'm reading a story in linear text, and it's line by line, it's going to give me a very different experience than if I am, for example, reading that same text in a map where I can carve my own path through that narrative. I might be reading those sentences in a different order, or seeing how they are situated with respect to the town where I live. It allows different dimensions of experience and of empathy to come forward that may not be present in other forms. is interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ Staff Writer Mica Kanner-Mascolo. Congratulations to Dr. Larry Sasso ('90, M.S. '13), Worcester State University Board of Trustees, and Helder Machado, Worcester State Foundation, on being selected as Notable Veteran Leaders, 2025! Your dedicated service and visionary leadership help to foster an environment in which students of all ages can explore, discover, create, and achieve on our campus and in the city we call home. Thank you! Worcester State University has been awarded the Silver Military-Friendly School and Military Spouse designation for the second year in a row, 2025-2026. Leading with Purpose! Dr. Larry Sasso Helder Machado Learn more: worcester.edu/military W

• Cover