Native Land 2019 Roadmap Update

Hello everyone. We had a very busy Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the site, with over 250 000 views! Thank you so much for all your support, fixes, suggestions, and comments. The site keeps growing and we keep growing as an organization.

I wanted to update the roadmap – I realized I have not done so in over a year now. There have been many changes, and I want to sum up a few for you.

• Board officially formed (see About page)
• Advisory council formed
• Added more complex details to Aotearoa and Australia
• Social media and research assistant have been continuing work
• We’ve attended numerous academic conferences to share our work and collaborate further (Michigan State, UBC)
• We’ve received our first official grant from Vancity
• We incorporated as a Canadian nonprofit in December last year
• We are expanding into more languages (Spanish, French)
• Our apps have been updated (still in the works!)
• A new Teacher’s Guide has been released
• Improved editing for research assistant on the site

And what’s up over this next year? Well, we have a lot of ideas. In some order, these include:

• Working out more expansive funding (through donations, but also through larger grantors in the United States)
  • Hiring a full time or two major part-time contractors to work on the site continually, as directors and researchers
• Expanding the site to more directly reflect the needs and concerns of visitors and Indigenous people being represented; give more control to Indigenous people over how they are being represented on the site
• Adding more South American territories
• Improving more names and territories that already exist on the site
• Expanding into a multi-lingual site
• Adding pronunciations for nation names
• Improving the Territory Acknowledgement generator
• Collaborating further with other nonprofits in Canada and the USA on language resources and other common projects and goals
• Coordinating with universities or institutions on having students join in
• Holding “hackathon” days where we make mass updates to the website with the help of many volunteers

We’re not stopping by any means — in fact, the speed is picking up! We are excited to grow and we have so many ideas. Right now we are sticking to working out all the logistical issues associated with funding and making sure that organizationally, we are ready to take on more responsibility and our bigger goals. And then we will hit the ground running once the funds start to come in!

We just want to thank everyone again. For your support, thoughts, and donations. Sometimes we are so busy it can be hard to respond, but know that it means the world to us!

If you have ideas for more ways we can improve the site, connect with communities more directly, and represent Indigenous nations more respectfully, please comment or send us an email, we are always open to having a phone call or discussing more.