MAPPING HISTORY: Symposium speaker explains details of historically significant sites for Indigenous peoples

Lee Guthrie Tdp Special Writer, The Norman Transcript, Okla.
Updated ·3 min read

Apr. 11—The mapping of historically significant sites for Indigenous peoples in the Washington, D.C., area, was the focus of Dr. Elizabeth Rule's talk at Northeastern State University April 10.

Rule's book, "Indigenous D.C.," was just published by Georgetown University Press. She is in Tahlequah this week as part of the Symposium on the American Indian.

Rule is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. As an assistant professor of critical race, gender, and cultures studies at American University, Rule analyzes historical and contemporary sites of Indigenous importance. A mobile application that Rule designed, Guide to Indigenous DC, complements the work.

"I launched the [application] in 2019. It was the first iteration of the larger guide to Indigenous lands projects, which builds mobile applications and digital maps highlighting sites of indigenous significance," said Rule.

Mapping Tahlequah History is funded by a National Endowment for Humanities grant. Dr. David Corcoran, assistant professor in the history department, introduced Rule at the workshop by explaining the purpose behind the mapping project. Empowering people at the citizen level allows the narratives and stories to be expanded.

"We are hearing more indigenous land acknowledgment. But these lands have always been native homelands, and of importance to many different peoples," said Dr. Farina King, associate professor of Native American Studies and Horizon chair of Native American Ecology and Culture at The University of Oklahoma.

King formerly was on the NSU staff.

"I wanted to create a project that really tackled, first and foremost, this idea that Native peoples only belong in history," said Rule.

Oftentimes, Native peoples are exclusively talked about in historical terms and not given the spotlight as contemporary, political, artistic, and self-governing peoples. Often the stories and narratives are told from a non-Native or settlers' perspective. Rule wanted a project that centered Indigenous voice and perspective.

"I'm using mapping as a way to decolonize our future. Decolonizing really has a very specific and loaded political meaning here," said Rule.

Decolonization goes back to the very origin of this project. In D.C., Rule administered the Native American Political Leadership Program. A cohort of American Indian, Native Alaskan and Hawaiian students were brought to D.C. for a semester-long learning experience — specifically, to learn how to navigate the federal tribal trust relationship and the nation-to-nation relationship between the federal United States and their sovereign and self-governing tribal nations.

Students experienced extreme discomfort coming from their home communities to D.C. Frequently, these students were the only Native person in the room. This was during a time when the Washington football mascot had not yet changed.

Rule began to hear about sites in D.C. dedicated to Native history. In an effort to share the history of Native peoples of the area to these students, Rule took that information and curated it down into a digital resource — a walking map of historical Native sites.

"[The sites] move temporally from historical times all the way up to the present," said Rule. "I included alongside those disciplines [history, anthropology and archeology], things like Indigenous arts, and indigenous politics, and even indigenous activism on a grassroots level."

It eventually developed into the "Guide to Indigenous D.C.," a free and public facing application for IOS and Android platforms. The digital walking tour takes the user to 17 sites, ranging from the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial with Ira Hayes, to the site of the Jan. 18, 2019, Indigenous Peoples March, to the murals created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, to artifacts found on the White House south lawn during the installation of a swimming pool.

"If I mapped successfully all of the sites of Indigenous significance, this map would be stacked upon stacked, because all of this land is Native land and it all has deeply significant meaning to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples have left their mark across the entirety of this space," said Rule.