RHW GIS Program Update

By RHW GIS Team

In our first edition of The Robinson Huron Treaty Times, we introduced you to Geographic Information System (GIS): what it is and how we are using it.

We also featured our developing projects, highlighting the GIS Portal, which if you have not had a chance to check out, you can find it on our website at www.waawiindamaagewin.com. Try it out following the steps of our Quick Guide listed on page 41 or reach out to our team if you would like to schedule personal or community training, and allow us to demonstrate using the application. Let us know what you feel is missing or provide feedback of your experience—we are continuously working to add to the list of available data sets.

Ndoo-Dbaajmowninaan (Our Story)— Anishinaabe within the Huron 1850 Treaty

We are using our GIS Portal to map our ways, tell our stories, and share our knowledge of our connections and relations to the land and water with our treaty partners and all our relations: our systems, our governance and council fires.

We also are working on Virtual Tours that can be taken using the GIS Portal. Baawating—the place where the Robinson Huron Treaty was signed—is the first community featured on our Virtual Tour in the GIS Portal. Ogimaa Sayers shares a journey with us along the St. Mary’s River, through Baawaating, also known as Sault Ste. Marie.

We are excited to share with you ‘Our Story’, from the Anishinaabe lens, of the time and place as it was before and at the onset of colonization. Our governance, our relations and our obligations to the land, as we inherited rights to live in peace in harmony with all our relations.

Ndoo-Dbaajmowninaan is now accessible on our website or by following the link below. Please take time to listen to the voice of Ogimaa Sayers as he shares key origins of our journey and our connections. This is a small piece of the stories to share and the ones we know exist and wish to include.

Coming Soon—Virtual Tour Development 2021

Youth Stories

Youth Stories feature the voices of our youth as they talk Treaty, share knowledge, visit and explore the Robinson Huron 1850 Treaty. We look forward to continuing Ndoo-Dbaajmowninaan and sharing their journeys, which capture and share with us the origins through the lens of our youth.

Nation to Nation

We are working hard to develop a similar application to share with you the historical timeline of our Treaty from the onset of European Exploration. Starting with the 1455 Papal Bull and the Doctrine of discovery, 1497, 1670, 1671, 1754, 1763, 1746, 1776, 1794, 1812, 1836, 1850 to the Signing of the Huron Treaty.

DNAKIIWINAN (Places)

In our last article, we shared that we were beginning to build a spatial survey to collect, capture and showcase places within the Huron 1850 Treaty area in our Anishinaabemowin.

Since then, we have started using the survey to collect information, from our team, community, historians, and available resources. We are in search of your knowledge of places within our Treaty and in our language. We are compiling as many place names as possible, capturing the waters, land and many landmarks throughout our territory.

We hope you have a chance to use our survey and add to our database. We are looking forward to having you share more Dnakiiwinan, places you remember, pasted from our ancestors, our communities. The survey should be easy to use—see the following for a few tips.