Six Nations is the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. It is the only reserve in North America that has representatives of all six Haudenosaunee nations living together. These nations are the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora. Some Lenape (formerly known as Delaware) also live in the territory. The Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) people originally inhabited a much larger area stretching across the United Stated and Canada, and were legally granted a large tract of land by the French via the 1784 Haldimand Treaty; this was later taken away, and Six Nations represents only 5% of that area. The organization Ohneganos is an Indigenous water research program led by McMaster University professor Dr. Dawn Martin Hill, and are working to co-create Indigenous water quality tools, and mixed-method tools for collecting and training in Indigenous ecological knowledge.
As part of the Indigenous ecological knowledge research program of Ohneganos, Awana Digital is providing programmatic support to Ohneganos in using Mapeo to collect Indigenous ecological knowledge across Six Nations, and recording place-based oral histories about important Haudenosaunee cultural sites across the lands. The Ohneganos team, together with a local mapping coordinator, will be using both Mapeo Mobile and Desktop to gather and organize data, and will be mapping and visualizing the geospatial data and stories using the open-source application Terrastories. This project represents the first pilot in testing out a Mapeo-to-Terrastories workflow.
