Mapscapes: Revealing Indigenous Placenames in the American Northeast

Zooniverse Platform: Mapscapes: Revealing Indigenous Placenames in the American Northeast

Associated Project: Brightening the Covenant Chain

Mapscapes is a new digital initiative hosted on the Zooniverse platform that invites volunteers to recover the Indigenous cultural geography of the American Northeast. Using a range of historic sources, volunteers first find, then locate, and finally position the names the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations used to denote the villages, towns, and significant places within their homelands. 

Many Indigenous place names have been obscured or deliberately erased from public memory, but some still survive in old maps and reports. Through the combined efforts of researchers and members of the public, we pull together these disparate sources of information to create a unique map of the American Northeast filled only with the place names used by Indigenous communities. 

Mapscapes is the first digital map of the earliest recorded Indigenous place names of the Northeast. It is accessible to volunteers of all ages and technical backgrounds and is Open Access.  It is a free, people-powered learning tool for students and teachers of Indigenous history that will fascinate every resident of the Northeast.