Bringing Indigenous Kamchatka to Google Earth: Collaborative Digital Mapping with the Itelmen Peoples

Abstract

Indigenous peoples in the Russian Far East are engaged in vibrant cultural and linguistic resurgence and revitalization through their community and regional organizations. Through the activities of one of these organizations, a computer-aided cultural mapping project was initiated in collaboration with indigenous villages along the Kamchatka Peninsula, working with youth and elders to map out the histories of special cultural places. The project utilized innovative participatory methodologies using Google Earth and related Google mapping tools, which are freely accessible and desired for use in the communities, providing an accessible, low-cost, easyto-use computer application for detailed digital cultural mapping. This article elaborates on the use of these technologies to empower a community-based collaborative research project and reflects on critical issues in aligning community, corporate, and scholarly objectives in successful projects.of Culture in Kovran, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography, we set about a project to train community members to use freely available, easy-to-use software (Google Earth) to create a digital atlas of indigenous language place names and accounts by the community of culturally significant places. While representatives of several indigenous communities in Kamchatka have participated in the training, the fieldwork has so far been mainly centered in Kovran, an Itelmen fishing community on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula where the subsistence economy is vital for the community, and where many families are significantly involved (Koester 2012;Murashko 1997).Like many indigenous peoples worldwide (Bryan and Wood 2015;Chapin et al. 2005;Eades 2015), Itelmen peoples have several goals in setting about to collaborate on a digital atlas with Indigenous-language place names and cultural sites detailed in text, video, and photos. One objective is to engage school-aged youth in conversations with elders about indigenous language, tradition, and cultural heritage. In turn, goals of documenting and celebrating indigenous cultural heritage knowledge for use in village schools and throughout the broader public benefits all Kamchatka residents, and most especially Kamchatka youth who are engaged in the contemporary resurgence of indigenous cultures.Through documenting and making accessible indigenous peoples language, history, and places of significant cultural identity, the project seeks to benefit youth, elders, and local educators/specialists in Kamchatka. The atlas materials highlight and celebrate indigenous language materials and history, they also have contextual information in Russian and English of interest to researchers and others more broadly. The digital atlas also has potential as an instrument for public policy that uniquely positions communities to communicate key values associated with particular locales in the spirit of cross-cultural collaboration.

Big Archaeology: Horizons and Blindspots

“…The Reciprocal Research Network in British Columbia, Canada, has employed a collaborative model to develop a database on over half a million items related to the cultural heritage of Northwest Coast First Nations (Rowley 2013). Thom, Colombi, and Degai (2016) have worked with indigenous people in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula using Google Earth and other mapping tools to record and preserve traditional knowledge, on terms established by elders and other community members. Dozens of projects employing the Mukurtu platform have similarly based their work in local collaborations and employed the nested structures of access in the Mukurtu CMS to shield culturally sensitive information from outsiders (Christen 2012;Christen, Merrill, and Wynne 2017).…”

To what extent can online mapping be decolonial? A journey throughout Indigenous cartography in Canada

“…In the contemporary context of online cartography, Western technologies have also been appropriated by Indigenous groups and individuals and infused with Indigenous knowledge (Caquard et al 2009; Pyne and Taylor 2012; Corbett et al 2015; Thom et al 2016; Pyne 2020). For instance, DeRoy (2016) and Olson et al (2016) argue that the method called direct‐to‐digital mapping, which consists of collecting and sharing data and stories using mainstream digital technologies such as GPS and Google Earth, has become quite popular in Indigenous communities since it enables members of these communities to control the process as well as the content.…”

Participatory Mapping in a Developing Country Context: Lessons from South Africa

“…The 'Direct-to-Digital' (D2D) mapping technique uses Google Earth to directly map information from community workshops or interviews onto a digital platform, negating the need to digitise and transcribe data collected in the field [7]. This method (and slight variations of it) has been used effectively, and extensively to represent indigenous knowledge and rights in traditional land-use studies in Canada [7], the United States [6], Russia [32], and Australia [33].…”

“…Although all digital participatory mapping processes are community-integrated, D2D stands out as it allows for variability and diversity in representation of spaces when the mapping is done directly onto the map, thus capturing subtle particularities of a space and presenting a real 'depth of place' [7,34]. In some cases, the output maps from digital participatory mapping methods can be richer in content, more accurate, and easier to update than those produced on hard-copy maps [32].…”

“…Digital platforms offer the potential of much broader dissemination of spatial information [31], and, importantly for cases where maps are used for legal and planning purposes, can also improve the spatial accuracy of information collected [7]. Whilst this may offer elements of empowerment, it also carries an increased risk for communities and individuals, [32,36,43]. Whilst intellectual property rights should always be considered in participatory mapping projects, the legal aspects around who owns what parts of the map in digital mapping approaches is undoubtedly more complex [7].…”