Find Out More about Native Land Closest to You Through Code for Anchorage
A map of indigenous territory. (Picture provided by Native Land Digital)
Code for Anchorage, a volunteer group of coders located in Anchorage, Alaska, “leveraged data” from Native Land Digital: a not for profit organization in Canada to provide tools that make land acknowledgment of Indigenous communities more accessible.
“The goal is to make government services work better,” Co-Captain of Code for Anchorage Brendan Babb said. “It was kind of slow implementation. We rewrote (the code) and made some enhancements. I’m also the Chief Innovation Officer of the City of Anchorage and we have an innovation team, so we kind of combined the two.”
Native Land Digital created a website and app that was founded in 2015—and became a not for profit in 2018— that provides a map of the locations of Native communities on several different continents, including but not limited to the U.S., Canada, South and Central America, New Zealand and Australia.
“We are supported by an Indigenous Board of Directors and an Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Advisory Council. And we have this wonderful collection of individuals who are willing to share their expertise and knowledge to work to bring Native Land to be the best resource that we can be,” said Christine McRae, Executive Director of Native Land. She is a woman of the Madawaska River Algonquin people of the Crane Clan, land now known as Ontario Canada.
“With my ancestors living here for 11,000 years, that’s a story that hasn’t had the opportunity to be told yet,” McRae said. “So, really what Native Land is doing is creating a much greater awareness of who those traditional people are on the territories and what that really deep long history is.”
With Anchorage’s technology, anyone within the U.S. can text a city and state or zip code to +1(907)-312-5085 to receive information about what tribes have, or are, occupying that land. They’ve also created a Facebook Messenger bot that is free to use for anyone with an account. The 2.0 launch was August 4, 2020.
A screenshot of the Facebook Messenger bot works. (Picture by Olivia Harden)
“A bunch of people started using it. In a month we sent about 1.3 million texts,” Babb said.
Native-land.ca is always a work in progress and is consistently being updated for accuracy and expansion. According to the Native Land Digital website, the site is intentionally not dated for a few reasons. The map is not meant to be an academic resource, rather an interactive tool. It’s made up of nations that still exist, nations that they only have records of for “first contact”, nations that have moved over time and more. Some of the territories are waiting to be confirmed by some tribes and blank spaces are meant to be updated.
Native Land Digital’s goals go far beyond land acknowledgment. The organization’s resources are meant to be a starting point for users to become more aware of the history of the land and the opportunity to do their research by seeking out more resources.
“Native land looks to rewrite those myths about who has been on land, those myths that have their source in colonizers and the colonized history,” McRae said. “By doing land acknowledgment, you can bring into consciousness, hopefully on a daily basis, that the history of the land is deeper than we might realize at least at the surface level.”