Featured in articles, webinars, and presentations, Native Land Digital is an indigenous-led nonprofit that focuses on multi-tiered interactive digital mapping of indigenous lands around the world as well as providing links to online visitors to information on corresponding languages, treaties and websites. This NLD website, largely funded through grants and donations, provides layers of maps, Teachers’ guides, and land and water acknowledgement guides. While there are several sources acknowledged, NLD emphasizes that the information is based on indigenous nations and communities’ definitions, histories, and perspectives, and is guided by their truth, and they are always seeking to update and evolve.
With a stated goal to support education, awareness, and research, NLD is not intended for commercial use nor to be utilized as a legal document. The Teacher’s Guide allows for activities to encourage students to build their own stories and to gain a deeper understanding of their own relationship with land and waters.
The website is continually evolving as the land stories are added and/or revised from the indigenous communities around the world. It allows for their own voice to be heard and represented. These mapping perspectives are not always what has come across in the western culture and therefore, adds a new element to be explored on a scholarly basis.
For more information on Native Land Digital, please visit https://native-land.ca/
Jamie– thanks for this review of Native Land Digital! I always use this project in my classes, and especially when I teach Native history classes. I like how none of the boundaries are “definitive” but rather reflective and flexible to the realities of ancestral homelands. Whereas hard boundary lines evoke notions of ownership and control, this mapping project represents space that is overlapping and connected while simultaneously asserting Indigenous representation across the space. I also appreciate how there are no colonial boundaries on the map– not just states/counties, but also road systems. This is a very useful project and resource!