IMW Scholarship: Willowra Community
The Willowra Community received one of three scholarships awarded at the Indigenous Mapping Workshop (IMW), held in Perth in August 2019. The funding will help create employment opportunities for community members to learn digital mapping tools and create a digital resource to bridge the cultural knowledge gap of younger generations.
Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, anthropologist, scholar, and IMW 2019 attendee, spoke with us about how Willowra’s mapping project had progressed since the IMW and what they hope to achieve down the track. Petronella was joined at the IMW workshop by Willowra community members, Keziah AhKit Kitson and Marissa Brown.
Why is this project important for your community?
We want to provide a digital resource for local Willowra people that showed Warlpiri ways of being on Country. The Willowra Mapping Project arose from elder Teddy Long Jupurrula’s aim to engage the younger generations in cultural activities such as: mapping culturally significant places and he songlines that connect different groups on Country. We wanted to be able to supplement this material with information from early land claim maps and audio and visual recordings of ancestral and personal histories, interviews and georeferenced data.
How has a lack of funding impacted your work?
We were aware we wanted to do more beyond canvas mapping, but we had no funding. People who are in a position to support us didn’t have a sense of the potential uses of digital mapping.
In remote communities, unemployment is a real challenge we’re facing. The grant money enables us to pay people nominal amounts to get involved, stay engaged with this project and recognise their hard work.
How do maps help you tell your story?
Walpiri people tend to think in terms of cardinal points using an absolute frame of reference (rather than left right directions) to orient people and objects in space and navigate Country. Therefore, maps are a logical way to teach about relationships, identities and connections. The Walpiri people have always used mapping in different forms, whether it’s sand mapping or in paintings of anesctral Dreamings. Although they might not have the same sort of exactitude, they’ve always represented the relationship between places and people.
Mapping technology can bridge the gap between different generations and how they think about the land. Our young people are very excited and see digital mapping as more in line with the way they view the world.
What mapping technologies did you use prior to the workshop?
We were previously recording sites, stories, ceremonies and songs using audio and visual technologies, as well as documenting the location of these places on canvas maps. The Central Land Council has been supporting the project by giving us the coordinates of sites and preparing satellite-based maps so we can take them into the fields and orient ourselves. Now that we have attended the IMW, we are excited to draw the dreaming tracks and relationship between sites, ceremonies and people across particular areas using tools such as Google Earth.
How would you describe your mapping skill level after attending the IMW?
We attended the Google Earth Pro, Tour Builder and MyMaps training during the workshop. Learning these mapping technologies is great because it’s easy to visualise and understand a lot of information quickly.
Since the workshop, we’ve downloaded and continued using Google Earth to help the younger generation build their knowledge of the land.
Even though their understanding may not be as extensive as their parents and the older generation, using Google Earth as a tool is an important step forward in their learning.We recently ran a two-day training workshop on Google Earth Pro at CLC. Janelle Ross, Julie Kitson, Selina Williams participated from Willowra and volunteer Marcelis Avery (anthropology student ANU) assisted with the training.
What would you say to someone who is considering attending the IMW workshop but might be letting their skill level get in the way?
The IMW helps communities work from the ground up, rather than the top down. Attending the IMW workshop doesn’t require any previous technical knowledge or knowledge of digital mapping, and even though you may not master everything in the workshop, it allows you to see how things can be done.
Marissa and Keziah said, “We got ideas from other Indigenous people from Australia and overseas from the IMW. It gave me more ideas and how we could do things at Willowra such as how we can map dreamings, places, burial sites and birthplaces for Willowra people.”
Thank you Petronella, Marissa and Keziah and the Willowra community.
The Indigenous Mapping Workshop would not have been possible without its organising committee, sponsors and partners.