I think this is what we’re struggling with. In the real world, reservations and their subdivisions are all administrative boundaries. They would meet any test we can come up with when assessing other kinds of boundaries, such as New England townships, to pick a current example. (Maine’s reservations are considered township equivalents for demographic purposes.)
Reservation boundaries are marked by signs just like state and county boundaries. During the pandemic, many reservations set up checkpoints at these signs. Depending on the context, someone might describe their location relative to a reservation or a county, but this is not at all like a single-purpose fire-rescue district or water board. In fact, on any of the larger reservations, I suspect the counties matter about as much as a New England county.
Reservation boundaries can cross state and county lines unimpeded. I bet this causes renderer and geocoder developers a lot of grief. But this can happen with other administrative
boundaries anyways. Probably this issue isn’t as relevant as the fact that there’s a parallel system of administration.
If we continue to represent the reservation boundaries as boundary=aboriginal_lands
rather than administrative boundaries, then there are still several outstanding issues:
- Mappers have periodically stressed a need for a tag to distinguish reservations from other kinds of indigenous lands, namely off-reservation trust lands and Oklahoma’s tribal jurisdictional areas (the ones affected by McGirt). Can
border_type=*
serve this purpose? - It seems logical that the reservations’ subdivision boundaries would be tagged more like the reservation boundaries than the non-native county boundaries, given the reporting structure. Can
boundary=aboriginal_lands
nest within otherboundary=aboriginal_lands
? - If
admin_level=*
is reserved forboundary=administrative
, should there be a parallelaboriginal_lands:admin_level=*
key? Should the numbering restart or correspond to the non-native boundaries’admin_level=*
values? Or should we rely on the status quo of adding each agency boundary relation as asubarea
member of a reservation boundary relation? - Should reservation capitals and agency seats be tagged with
capital=*
, and if so, what should the numeric values correspond to? Similarly, should tribal national parks be tagged asboundary=national_park
? - Since the CDPs within the Navajo Nation double as chapter boundaries, should they be retagged from
boundary=census
toboundary=aboriginal_lands
aboriginal_lands:admin_level=8
? Or should we map redundant boundaries for the chapters?