Očhéti Šakówiŋ Makóčhe Owápi
A Deep-mapping orature of the oyáte, and remapping based in decolonial scope
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Our stories carry great knowledge. They carry knowledge about our lives, the lives of ancestors, and about our being on this earth. As a practice of caretaking that knowledge, and the earth from which it comes, we seek to create a digital collection of storytelling—to be accessed through both a website and a phone app—about important Oceti Sakowin places in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and beyond. These stories comprise a map of our Očhéti Šakówiŋ Makóčhe, the lands of the Seven Council Fires.
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We will work with sixteen different Oceti Sakowin communities by collaborating with tribal councils and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers to record storytelling (in English or D/Lakota) about culturally and historically significant sites across Oceti Sakowin territory
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We will use multimedia to populate the map (videos of places if possible; audio/video recordings of storytelling)
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Community needs will shape map project (data sovereignty, language learning and revitalization, access to completed map, etc.)
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As part of data sovereignty, we seek to partner with tribal communities to create a permanent website (on a tribally-controlled, dedicated server)
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We will invite the formation of an elders’ council across Oceti Sakowin communities for oversight and final decision-making
This project will digitally remap Oceti Sakowin placenames in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and beyond. We seek to work with sixteen different Oceti Sakowin communities by collaborating with tribal councils and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers to record storytelling (in English or D/Lakota) about culturally and historically significant sites across Oceti Sakowin territories. By centering Oceti Sakowin storytelling as literary expressions of knowledge, we seek to create a dynamic, ever-growing, interactive StoryMaps documenting literary expressions of origins, presence, and desired futures of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate.
Our map builds upon existing digital maps of Oceti Sakowin territory such as the Minnesota Humanities Council’s and Dakota community members’ Bdote Memory Map and Dakota Goodhouse’s Makȟóčhe Wašté, in terms of mapping locations of importance to Oceti Sakowin people. But our map goes beyond these examples in the following important ways: it will highlight community storytelling as what Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu calls “orature” (oral literature); it will show connections or relationship of stories across the map; and it will be community-created, community-directed, and community-owned on tribal servers.
In fulfilling all of these aims we seek to create a living map of stories and storytellers, with the map ultimately being in the service of magnifying a living tradition of orature. Orienting through story is our long-held way of mapping and relating to the land, and so this project seeks to recognize story as map.