Remapping the Oyáte: Orature as Deep Mapping
1. Introduction
In a 2021 talk at the University of Minnesota, Dakota scholar and activist Wazíyatawiŋ advocated for an approach to tribal futures that is grounded in “resurgence by any means possible.” We take Waziyatawin’s ethical call to include the restoration of Očhéti Šakówiŋ (Lakota/Dakota) territories through both material and non-material means, with the recent restoration of the name Bdé Maká Ská (for a historically-significant lake in Minneapolis that had been previously renamed as “Lake Calhoun”) being one prominent example of this sort of reclamation. Our work seeks to build on this success by not only bringing to light or restoring placenames in our Dakota language but also to perform a deep remapping of these places through orature gathered in consultation with our Dakota and Lakota communities and their tribal councils and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs). This work is well supported by our team members’ knowledge and identities as Dakota and Lakota descendants, tribal citizens, and/or active community members, as well as by our close relationship with the University of Minnesota’s Department of American Indian Studies and Institute for Advanced Studies. The former is solidly grounded from its founding in 1969 in the politics, activism, histories, and cultural productions of Indigenous nations and communities, while the latter is the University’s interdisciplinary research center that seeks to build lasting relationships across the University and with communities beyond our walls to foster significant, innovative research. As part of this mission, the IAS promotes reciprocal, community-engaged research and the equitable distribution of resources through facilitating grants with multiple units, institutions, and communities.
2. Grant Summary/Abstract
This project digitally remaps Očhéti Šakówiŋ Oyáte placenames in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and beyond. Historically known by the exonym “Sioux,” the Očhéti Šakówiŋ Oyáte (People of the Seven Council Fires) includes people now more commonly known as Dakota and Lakota. By centering Dakota and Lakota oral stories and histories as literary expressions of knowledge about culturally and historically significant sites, what Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu calls “orature” (in Thiong’o 1998), our team—comprised entirely of Dakota and Lakota researchers—seeks to create a dynamic, ever-growing, interactive digital archive of ArcGIS StoryMaps documenting literary expressions of origins, presence, and desired futures of the Očhéti Šakówiŋ (O.Š.).
This work joins a body of work that maps O.Š. territory in print (Durand 1994) and digitally (“Bdote” 2023; Goodhouse 2019; “Makoce Stories” 2023). Our project will go beyond this body of work by centering orature that speaks to important O.Š. places and placenames to create a dynamic survey of the people’s histories, traditional ecological knowledge, and continued relationship with homelands. What drives this work is community-based research: we hope that each O.Š. community will highlight what is most important to their/our needs. This might beorature that assists in treaty or territorial boundary disputes; or it might be a desire for language renewal, with recordings done in Dakhódiapi (Dakota dialect) and Lakȟóliapi (Lakota dialect) serving as invaluable resources for our language learners and revitalization of these critically endangered languages. But in addition to these things, a desire for renewing relationships with home territories is another of our drives: centering orature in a digital map interface will allow us to represent O.Š. understandings of human and other-than-human relationships through engaging audio and video and promises to unsettle familiar settler-colonial parameters of the mapping form, centering instead mapping practices that are inextricably tied to Indigenous language, story, and storytelling.
3. Reason for the Work
The reason for this work must be understood in relation both to settler-colonial understandings and practices of place-making as well as Indigenous (and specifically O.Š.) efforts to restore relationships to home territories and particular locales. Indigenous remappings are a critical intervention in colonial cartographic processes that were and are instrumental in Indigenous land dispossessions. As many Native American and Indigenous scholars have observed (Brooks 2018; Diaz 2020; Goeman 2013; Hall 2009; UCLA Mapping Indigenous LA) one of the primary strategies in the process of settler-colonialism involves mapping lands and demarcating tribal national boundaries, doing so not only to facilitate trade but to amplify settler senses of tribal factionalism, to construct tribal territory and leadership in ways that were legible to non-Native modes of governance and trade, and to strategize inroads for eventual land dispossession. In this way, mapping has historically served as a critical tool for imposing non-Native authority over Indigenous spaces. The paper-bound practice of flattening dynamic ecosystems and codifying dynamic cultural, governmental, and economic relationships across lands and waters provided the foundational framework for treaty agreements, removals, and expulsions of Native nations.
Our work seeks to redress such settler-centered representational practices and does so also as an O.Š. ethical practice of truth-telling or owótaŋna wóhdakapo. It continues the intellectual labor and activism of other O.Š. community members like Syd Beane, Dr. Kate Beane and Carly Bad Heart Bull, whose efforts led to the restoration of the name Bdé Maká Ská (replacing Lake Calhoun) in 2020 and who state succinctly the main problem our remapping work addresses: “Names have been changed to assert power over Indigenous peoples, to claim the land, and disconnect us from our ancestral homelands, to sever ties” (Beane 2019). Our remapping assumes that language and place are intertwined and shape not only public histories but settler senses of belonging in lands that were gained through treaty-breaking, land grabs, and ethnic cleansing. It is only through recovering and restoring Dakota and Lakota place names and histories that historical truths about O.Š. presence, and settler erasures of that presence, can be told. And it is only through reckoning with such truths that healing for all might begin.
Beyond decolonizing settler understandings of place and place names, this work centers O.Š. relational philosophies that connect locales horizontally or geographically with one another and with human and non-human relatives, as well as connecting vertically, or temporally, to the ontological time of earth and of creation. Such philosophies are perhaps nowhere more evident than in O.Š. orature, which grows out of longstanding aesthetic practices and traditional expressive genres such as ohúŋkakaŋ and eháŋna woyákapi. These genres have often been glossed as “myths” by non-Native scholars, but they are, on the contrary, deeply historical, lived practices of narrating O.Š. senses of time, place, and relationality. Emphasizing three-dimensional space and topography through orature’s unique merging of image, sound, and story allows us to layer storytelling, voice, language, and video/traveling across O.Š. locales. In doing so, this work draws on the works of Native American and Indigenous scholars who have taken up decolonial remapping projects. From Mishuana Goeman’s work, Mark My Words (2013), which centers the re-imagined geographies in Native women’s writing, to Lisa Brook’s book and companion website, Our Beloved Kin (2018), which remaps King Philip’s war and offers an Indigenous perspective on the intersection of time and space at a critical moment in the colonial space of the Northeastern United States, to the virtual mapping project and canoe revitalization work of Vicente Diaz, which brings together Micronesian, Ojibwe, and Dakota traditional watercraft in locales around Minnesota, we draw on global Native American and Indigenous Studies frameworks for remapping and reimagining the Indigenous and settler-colonial landscape in the 21st century.
We are particularly well-positioned to do this work by virtue of our geographical embeddedness within O.Š. territory and because of the institutional resources that the University of Minnesota’s American Indian Studies Department may bring, including possible supplemental funding for community knowledge-sharing events. Relatedly, our PI and co-PI are Dakota scholars whose expertise in O.Š. literature, history, and language will facilitate partnerships with tribal nations, and at the University of Minnesota there is a strong and sizable pool of O.Š. graduate students we may call upon to work as research assistants.
4. Goals
Our work grows out of our research team’s efforts over the past year in partnership with the National Park Service to identify and narrate key O.Š. sites in the Twin Cities Mississippi River Corridor. More broadly it seeks to build on existing scholarship on “deep maps” (Bodenhamer et al., 2015; Ridge et al., 2013) and on oral traditions as works of literary imagination (Finnegan 2012; Lord 1991; Niles 2010; Thiong’o 2007; Turin et al., 2013). Much of this latter work is problematically grounded in histories of extractive research and in anthropological discourse that is dismissive of tribal realities (i.e., oral literature as myth, legend, or folklore) or that has emanated from contexts (especially African) outside of North America. In taking an approach that centers O.Š. orature and lived realities, we aim to critically supplement this body of work.
A second goal, and perhaps the most important for enacting a decolonial praxis, is to create meaningful partnerships with O.Š. tribal communities through ongoing consultation with tribal partners over the three years of this project. Tribal partners (Tribal Historic Preservation Officers; tribal councils; research fellows; storytellers) will be consulted on all research, facilitating relationships between universities and tribal communities, with PI and co-PI providing project oversight and tribal, institutional, and community outreach throughout the award’s term.
The digital map aims to be pathsetting in how it reconnects for the first time Indigenous territory across and between individual reservations and urban settings in partnership with orature gathered by Tribal Research Fellows from each of the sixteen O.Š. communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Montana, and North and South Dakota. In other words, this will be the only map of its kind to comprehensively center place-based orature and knowledge about tribal territories disconnected by settlement and colonization, and maybe most importantly, by doing so through research by and ongoing consultation with O.Š. communities. Our impetus is not just to put pins on a map, in other words, but to understand them across time in relation to O.Š. peoples’ historical presence and desired futures. The need for such a map is a matter of restoring and sharing collective memory of place, expressed in the aesthetic mode of orature, but also to aid in Dakota/Lakota language learning and revitalization, since orature in these Indigenous languages will serve as a vital instructional and archival resource for the University of Minnesota's newly-created BA in Dakhóta language and in tribal colleges where these languages are taught.
Our project’s value for the humanities and public-tribal relations more broadly consists in enlarging the possibilities of “the literary” and in resituating Native American literary expression into present-day, and future-oriented, living practices of tribal storytelling. Accordingly, one of our key goals is to intervene in scholarly debates over what constitutes Native American literature and American literature by documenting tribal aesthetic and historical archives of names and histories that tie to culturally-significant locales. Our project’s decentering of settler-colonial histories, institutions, and their spatial practices is thus redressive and aimed at bringing occluded aesthetic and historical tribal community expression into greater visibility. We especially recognize its potential to serve as a model for tribal-nontribal relations, especially ones where literary genres serve as sites of negotiating public memory.
Such work is at its core relational and in keeping with O.Š. philosophies of the thióšpaye, or extended family, in that it requires developing reciprocities--or being a good relative--between tribal and non-tribal partners. Institutions like the University of Minnesota are key interlocutors in controlling spatial narratives that privilege settler-colonial imaginings, as well as having been agents of harmful and extractive research on Indigenous people (Minnesota Indian Affairs Council (MIAC) 2020; Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1999; TRUTH Task Force 2022). Our hope is to create a map that is shareable with a variety of different community partners (tribal and non-tribal) and provide a replicable model for tribal-university-public land-based research practices that privilege tribal protocols and seek for ever-greater institutional accountability to Indigenous communities.
We will assess the contribution of our work through continual collaboration with tribal nations and through two retrospective knowledge-sharing events. In terms of tribal collaboration, we will be able to assess in real time, through input from tribal elders, THPOs, and tribal councils, which StoryMap form and content would be most desirable for each of the sixteen nations we are engaging. Our knowledge-sharing events will allow us to assess the overall successes and shortcomings of our collaborative work, as well as importantly point to further needs, desires, directions, and possibilities for the StoryMap archive and for tribal-university relationships more broadly.
5. Planned Activities
We will do all recordings through consultation with the sixteen O.Š. tribal communities in the United States, both off- and on-reservation, beginning with ones nearest to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, campus: Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, Prairie Island Indian Community, Lower Sioux, and Upper Sioux. Our first-year activities involve relationship-building between our researchers, tribal and community partners, the University of Minnesota and Marquette University. PI and Co-PI will coordinate with community partners to establish contacts with tribal councils and THPOs, asking them how a digital map of orature would benefit their/our communities, and seeking recommendations for community storytellers. At the start of the year, the tribal nations will also select Tribal Research Fellows, who will record storytellers in their respective communities over the remainder of the year. Graduate and Undergraduate Research Assistants will gather multimedia materials (photos and videos of locales) and begin conventional archival research to support the orature recordings of Tribal Research Fellows at both tribal and university library collections.
In year two the Tribal Research Fellows, Undergraduate Research Fellow, and graduate RAs will record storytellers and make translations and transcriptions into both English and Dakhóta/Lakȟóta when appropriate.
In our third year, the Postdoctoral Fellow, PI, and co-PI will work with UMN’s LATIS, or Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services, to create StoryMaps that synthesize the oratures and our researchers’ interpretive commentary. By the end of this year we will have a fullStoryMap-populated ArcGIS map to share with the sixteen O.Š. nations.
At the end of the third year we will hold two community knowledge-sharing events: first, at the Minneapolis American Indian Center, which is one of the oldest Indian centers in the United States; and second, at the Mystic Lake Center of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community near the Twin Cities. Our hope with these events is that they will be both a celebration and an occasion for making community members more aware of the ArcGIS map. In terms of the latter, we will use the knowledge-sharing events to open dialogue for how best to continue the university-tribal partnership, including discussion of a permanent digital home for the StoryMaps archive.
Grant outputs:
· StoryMap-populated ArcGIS map
· Tribal Research Fellows: 32
· Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Minnesota): 1
· Graduate Research Assistants (University of Minnesota): 3
· Undergraduate Research Assistant (Marquette University): 1
· Public knowledge-sharing events: 2
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