msu-anthropology / indian-country-ss22

Indian Country Mapping project for Dr. Heather Howard's Spring 2022 class on Contemporary American Indian Communities at Michigan State University.

indian-country

This is Indian Country

https://msu-anthropology.github.io/indian-country-ss22/

This project began as a collaborative project in the Spring 2016 with Dr. Heather Howard's ANP 433: Contemporary American Indian Communities class at Michigan State University. Students all chose a specific issue affecting a particular community on which to write an analytical essay. They created the webpage for the atlas entry (basic HTML, CSS, and some light JS if they felt ambitious), added the pin to the map by adding their site's information (Lat/Lon, time period, brief site description) to a CSV via Google Docs. Leaflet Omnivore was used to pull the data out of the CSV and onto a simple Leaflet based map. In addition to doing focused research and writing on specific American Indian communities, students learned basic HTML/CSS and GitHub (forking, pull requests, committing, etc.) during the course of the assignment.

The project has several goals. First, it allows the students to have focused, activist-oriented engagement with a specific issue concerning a specific community (and write about it). Second, students will learn valuable digital skills such as working with HTML, digital mapping, version control, and project management. These skills are not normally part of a senior level anthropology classes, but can easily be applied to many anthropological issues and projects. Finally, students will build something public, meaning they will contribute to the collective knowledge and resources available on the open web about various American Indian communities.

This project is a direct child of the Digital Atlas of Egyptian Archaeology (DAEA), a course project developed by Ethan Watrall. Both This is Indian Country and DAEA were developed in partnership with LEADR at MSU and especially through the efforts of Brian Geyer. Starting in January of 2020 and ending in May of 2021, Zach Francis has been responsible for both teaching new anthropology students how to add new issues to the map, and maintaining the code repository for this project.

(much of this README comes from the DAEA README)

Google Form Location Data Link

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfY5nOqegY45UfnA19jWRqChkQi6IUWbwjUAmIi-syebVszXQ/viewform?usp=sf_link