A quick PSA about an exciting new feature of the OpenStreetMap Americana style: the map now renders Native reservations and other indigenous lands (boundary=aboriginal_lands)!
One of the biggest changes to our low zoom map in years, this addition surfaces an essential component of the American system of land boundaries, and thus a key aspect of traditional American cartography. It’s no wonder it resolves one of the project’s longest-standing issues. In line with our style goals, we have opted for a tan fill color, typical of American paper maps.
Adding this rendering also paves the way toward other area renderings in the works by contributors, including cemeteries, theme parks, and military areas.
The default English rendering adds parenthetical glosses if the reservation contains non-English in the name tag:
This is a good opportunity to showcase that, due to its vector tilestack, Americana supports switching labels to a multitude of languages, even many that are not available in our language picker feature (yet). Simply append &language= plus the language’s ISO code to the URL and reload the page. Here’s Cherokee Nation in Cherokee (&language=chr).
We hope that these features and renderings will promote more complete tagging across the breadth of indigenous American languages as well as further community dialog and consensus on tagging schemas to depict nuanced situations, like for example Oklahoma’s tribal nations or various tribal sub-districts.
As always, the community is welcome to raise issues and contribute to the project! As a reminder, OpenStreetMap Americana is a community project supported by OSM US, who provide our vector tile rendering (on a cycle of every few hours!) and other computing infrastructure. Enjoy the map!