This book was written by Dave in extended collaboration with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The creative, editorial, and structural work was genuinely shared across many sessions over the course of its development. Decisions about what to include, what to cut, how to handle cultural material, and what the book ultimately argues are the author's. Responsibility for any errors is the author's.
A more detailed account of what this collaboration means — and why the book names it openly rather than hiding it — appears in the Prologue, The Cartographer's Legend, and in the Afterword.
The book's thesis requires that kind of disclosure. A collection arguing that every map has a legend, and that the honest thing to do is name the legend, would betray its own argument by obscuring how it was made.
A word on sources and cultural material. The Chumash, Rumsen, Ohlone, Yokuts, Salinan, Min-Yue, Hakka, and Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) peoples and cultures referenced in these stories are living communities whose knowledge systems are their own. Where specific practices, place names, or ceremonial material are described, sources are cited. Where names remain unverified, they are flagged as working placeholders pending verification against primary sources, scholarly consultation, and community authorization. Corrections are welcomed. The work of cultural reconstruction and revitalization continues in these communities; this book is a guest in those landscapes, not an authority over them.
A word on Chumash place names. The Chumash place names used in this book — the names of islands, villages, rocks, coves, and creeks — come from a specific chain of transmission. In 1884, Juan Estevan Pico, a Ventureño Chumash man, worked with the anthropologist H. W. Henshaw to produce a systematic written record of Chumash village names and locations. Pico drew on living community memory. The list he compiled — the Pico–Henshaw list — remains the foundational reference for Island Chumash place names more than 140 years later. In the early twentieth century, John Peabody Harrington added field recordings with elder consultants, most importantly Fernando Librado. Over the past several decades, ethnohistorians including John R. Johnson and Travis Hudson, and more recently Kristin Hoppa working with Matthew Vestuto (Ventureño/Barbareño Band of Mission Indians) and other Chumash community members, have cross-checked, refined, and mapped these names against mission baptismal records and archaeological sites. The Channel Islands National Park has published some of this work openly. The names in this book are the product of that chain. They did not survive because scholars preserved them. They survived because Chumash people — Pico, Librado, Vestuto, and many whose names are not on any citation — carried them through a period designed to make them disappear. The scholarship is real and honored here. But the carrying is older than the scholarship.
A word on language and identity. This book uses contemporary respectful language for gender and sexuality: singular they where appropriate, stated pronouns honored throughout, and indigenous gender categories — such as the Chumash 'aqi — described on their own terms rather than by comparison to the male/female binary. This is a deliberate choice, consistent with the book's larger argument that how we name things shapes what we can see. Like every map in this book, this one is the best version available at the time it was drawn; revision is assumed.
An open project. Two Maps, One Landscape is free to read, share, and teach with. It is also, deliberately, not finished. The book's thesis is that every map has a legend and that the honest thing is to name it and keep drawing; a project arguing that cannot credibly present itself as a closed artifact. This is an open, ever-evolving map. Corrections, additions, and constructive criticism — on theory, method, historical claim, cultural material, translation, attribution, or anything else — are welcome. If you see something that should be different, please say so. The next version of this book will be better than this one because a reader took the time. Any errors are the author's. The next cartography is yours.
Dedication. For the frogs who did not leave when the dispatch ordered them to, and for the people still singing into the water.
Monterey, California