Shift – Indian Country’s Changing Landscape

Settler colonialism, genocide, and imperialism are often normalized in U.S. ideologies. Shift, Indian Country’s Changing Landscape offers a reversal of those ideologies into decolonial data-visualizations. Data of and from the Indigenous peoples of the area now known as the U.S. constitute Shift. Vine Deloria Jr., a Native scholar defines true liberation as “chang[ing] the way that Western peoples think, the way they collect data, which data they gather, and how they arrange that information.” Shift visualizes Indigenous data-sets (population, land area, wars, and treaties from 1400-2016) into an immersive and colossal, yet intuitive display to re-teach American history.

My Lakota friend, Sinte Numpa, and I then began to geocode every treaty’s location. During the geolocating, I also began to georeference (convert to digital) historical maps produced by Dan Cole for the Handbook of North American Indians and geolocate every war, battle, and massacre. The decolonial map is the culmination of this research.

Download the .csv file of the geocoded treaties and wars – Treaties and Wars

Download the shape-files of Native Land throughout the centuries – Native Land Shapefiles by contacting me directly.