Ojibwe.net

I am Ojibwe and my culture is important to me. Because I believe that culture exists primarily through language (how we see and describe the world) and our language is endangered, I volunteer much of my free time to the creation and maintenance of Ojbwe.net, an innovative open-source learning space. I am also a founder of Asiginaak-Negamojig (The Blackbird Singers), a local women’s hand drum group that celebrates contemporary Ojibwe culture and sings traditional songs in our language. Ojibwe.net serves as a repository for all of the ways we archive and share our work.

Ojibwe.net provides interactive experiences for language learners through audio and visual experiences. Integration with YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter brings a diversity of over 6,000 users into one community with a common purpose. For the website I provide audio recording and editing, photography, coding, analytics, information architecture, WordPress maintenance and development, and occasional content creation.

In November of 2020 we launched an interactive map of the current Anishinaabe tribal diaspora in both the US and Canada as well as the Great Lakes. I leveraged Mapbox for this project and we have presented our work at both the 2020 Indigenous Mapping Conference and for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Humanities Lab in celebration of the U.N.’s World Water Day. Learn more about the map.

Through my work on Ojibwe.net I have also co-authored and published an article entitled “Waasamodibaajibiigemaazoying: Bright Lines of Story in Song” published in the Studies in American Indian Literatures Journal. Volume 29. Number 1. Spring 2017.

Additionally, I presented my work on ojibwe.net at the 2023 Stabilizing American Indian Languages & American Indian Indigenous Teacher Education Conference as well as the 17th Annual Anishinaabemowin Teg Conference (2011). These presentations covered subjects such as the history of the website, who it is meant to serve, projects highlights, analytics data on how the site is being used, and our future goals.