Conclusions and Next Steps

This project is incredibly meaningful and is not, and never will be,

“complete. ” We hope we have initiated a platform for storytelling which will grow to include many more calls for justice, journeys of healing, and pathways for awareness. Lulu and Sophia are continuing to work on developing and adapting the library to try to fit the goals of the community and families, and incorporating more of the many testimonies and materials that belong in the library. However, in addition to our [MIT Team’s] continuing development work, it is imperative to all of us that the MMIWG2S Story Map Library be communally owned and operated by WWHI and the broader community of MMIWG2S activists. The goal is to share knowledge of and familiarity with the platform with interested individuals who could act as moderators, spokespeople, and points of contact to anyone who wishes to contribute. We would like to take a moment to highlight some of the many takeaways and lessons we feel lucky enough to have learned over the last few months, with Maec Waewaenen to Kristin. Firstly, investing in building the relationship with our project partner and extending that relationship beyond to other members of her community was an essential first step that cannot be bypassed to make authentic progress on the project. We do wish we had better taken initiative for establishing broader connections; we should have asked for contact information and reached out directly to our other resources and interviewees much earlier. At the same time, the process of immersing ourselves, empathizing and absorbing the stories, concerns, values, and hopes of the people involved is one that takes time. We found it incredibly meaningful to take the journey slowly of sitting with these stories, the pain and anger and frustration, but also the healing and the fighting and the solidarity. We still feel deeply unprepared for the daunting goal of authentically engaging in our conversations with the family members of the missing and murdered, when we are aware we cannot ever empathize deeply enough to understand the pain they carry with them. But we are so grateful we’ ve gained the start of an understanding of the importance of approaching these conversations first and foremost as the forming of connections. Though our anxious instinct may be to establish connection

within the framework of the work we're doing, we believe it is worth the patience to push the "project" to the back burner and rather invest time in speaking person to person and fostering those ties first, then build from that authentic basis. In line with what we’ ve learned over the last few months and our goals for our continuing collaboration, we also wish to offer some feedback and possible considerations for the future iterations of the Indigenous Environmental Planning class. Since gaining an appreciation for the process of building connection and understanding over time, we are confident that even with the best intentions, without having spent this time we could not have anything close to our existing appreciation for the honored values, goals, and traditions which are at the core of this work. Similarly, instructors of the class who have not had the opportunity to work so closely with the individual project will inevitably approach the goals of the project from their perspective as an outside educator. During this project, we noticed that the professors sometimes firmly projected opinions on our project that went directly against the wishes of the client. In our case, this meant instructions to center our story as MIT students working on the project, and focus our messaging towards an audience of non-indigenous allies. We think it’s very important that the instructors recognize their positionality as someone in a position of power over their students with a limited view of the specific needs and goals of the client community. While feedback, ideas, and possible suggestions are essential to the design process, instructors should be careful not to project their perspectives and desires onto the core message of the project, or its central strategies. We felt confident enough to resist these directions in our case, and were supported by our client partner. However, future students will have varying levels of confidence in weighing the instructions of a professor and deciding to go against them in alignment with the core values of a project. Looking forward, we are excited to continue this work for the intended communities, help share these stories that are so important, and enable a space for building connections for healing. In addition, the future of this work may include further engagement with and incorporation of data. We would like to end by saying maec waewaenen (thank you so much) to Kristin Welch, Melissa Pamp, Joe Bates, and the many other activists and elders that work with WWHI and contributed to our project, as well as the teaching staff Dení Lopez, Gabriella Carolini and Lawrence Susskind.