- Monday, October 10, 2022 is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the U.S.
- The holiday recognizes the native tribes of the U.S. before Christopher Columbus and other explorers arrived and displaced them.
- An interactive tool shows you which indigenous populations once lived on the land where your home now is.
As more and more communities recognize the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you might be wondering what the best way is to celebrate. A great first step is to learn about which tribes resided in your specific part of the country before vicious settler colonialism uprooted them, or likely worse.
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Thanks to a mapping company’s clever approach to Google Maps, it’s possible to learn which native tribes once inhabited your neighborhood.
The tool is called Native-Land, and it’s run by Canadian developer Victor G. Temprano. He also runs the company Mapster, which helps create maps for a wide variety of uses.
Native-Land started in early 2015 “during a time of a lot of resource development projects in British Columbia,” Temprano writes in a blog post. “While mapping out pipeline projects and learning more about them for the sake of public awareness, I started to ask myself whose territories all these projects were happening on. Once I started finding the geographic data and mapping … well, it just kind of expanded from there.”
From the Trans Mountain pipeline to Dakota Access, oil pipelines are often flashpoints of technological controversy. With Native-Lands, Temprano was able to use cutting-edge mapping to explore the legacy of a wide variety of borders not often seen in the mainstream.
📚Read Up: The History of Indigenous Peoples
Free Press In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians
University of Toronto Press Indigenous Peoples of North America: A Concise Anthropological Overview
Arena Books Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
“I feel that Western maps of indigenous nations are very often inherently colonial,” Temprano says, “in that they delegate power according to imposed borders that don’t really exist in many nations throughout history. They were rarely created in good faith, and are often used in wrong ways.”
Native-Lands is very openly not an academic or professional project, but one that is constantly changing through input from users. But it’s not just a pet project either: In 2018, Temprano announced he had hired a research assistant to further develop the site’s maps.
David Grossman is a staff writer for PopularMechanics.com. He's previously written for The Verge, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and several other publications. He's based out of Brooklyn.
