Process Description

1. Gain Familiarity with MMIW Stories, Knowledge, and History, and Get ready objectively and subjectively. At the beginning of the semester, to draft comments for DEIS, we watched the online public hearing of the Line 5 Re-route. We listened to the testimonies and took notes. Among them, there were a lot of life stories local communities told about their relationship to the water and environment and the advocacies made by the water protectors about how the land and water are tightly related to indigenous peoples' life and culture. From the literature reviews, we learned the long-lasting history of the MMIW issue and how it was deeply rooted in colonialism. We started to understand why the infrastructural projects, such as the Line 5 Pipeline, were laid out in this way, how they systematically disenfranchised the Indigenous peoples, and in what ways they triggered more MMIW2S issues. Through meetings with Kristin, looking into the WWHI website and their social platforms, and reading news articles and event recordings, we realized the specificity and level of details that our work is supposed to be. We also learned that this work required an enormous amount of empathy and care. And because of that, we should not just regard ourselves as outsiders to provide technical support but have to be mentally prepared, feel the pain, join the group, and be fully engaged. For

Native Americans, oral histories and storytelling play an essential role in transiting different generations' life experiences and wisdom. Therefore, closely listening to stories and narrating them are keys to understanding and channeling existing cultural values and ways of knowing and sharing information. With the projects going on, we further understood these projects' real goals: to use the multiple ways to frame people's stories and increase the MMIW2S issue's visibility rather than completing a school project that shows the workload and technical difficulties.

2. Figure out the storytelling approaches for the online story maps for the Earth Day project and MMIW.

Our first attempt to use the ArcGIS story map was for the Earth Day project, Protect Land, Water, and People. Stop Line 5. We linked each photo we got along Line 5 with a note and its geographical information. In this way, each piece of the story became evidence, data, and a claim for preserving the land. Thus we continued to use a story map for MMIW stories. Nangonhs Massey 's Storymap set a prototype for future use. By tracing the critical moments of her story with exact locations in a temporal order and combining each spot with drawings, videos, sounds, and texts, a victim of MMIW has become a vivid person to the viewers. Incorporating Nangonhs' stories before the murder and the healing and resistance processes after the murder that Nangonhs' mother, Melissa Pamp, has gone through into one story map clarifies that all the before and after are interwoven. There is power originating from the past that can exert agency for change in the future.

3. Prepare questions and conduct interviews Kristin helped us to connect to the MMIW families and water protectors. We have had an interview with Melissa Pamp, the mother of an MMIW victim, Nangohs

Massey. We will have more Zoom interviews with survivors or families who have suffered from MMIW2S and water protectors to collect stories about how they managed to speak out and increase their voice. Kristin traveled the week of April 11 to support a family at a prosecution hearing. She planned to conduct interviews with fellow WWHI members before the visit and interviews with the family & community while she was there. She also planned to record images, sounds, and locations of significance during the visit to be included in the multi-media environment of the story map.

Before the interview with Melissa, we prepared questions to help facilitate the conversation around the topic of her and her daughter's story, the ways to find supporters and platforms to resist and advocate, and the processes for her to heal.

4. Incorporate materials from the interviews and frame the overarching Story Library website

The interview with Melissa provided us with direct sources of materials like quotes, video clips, sounds, and stories with more details. This information can be incorporated into the story map and the conceptual structure of the guidebook. In addition, we created a landing page that brought all the separate projects we did together as an overarching story library to increase awareness of the MMIW2S issues and advocate for protecting land and people. This website also includes our experience and thoughts about what we, as the initial outsiders of the MMIW issues, are doing to help and join the overall resistance story.