It was in the early 1850’s when a 70-year-old Chief Shingwauk first embarked on a solitary journey from Garden River to Toronto to petition the Anglican Church to build a school for his people.
It’s a story that Skylee-Storm Hogan felt was necessary to tell in Walking with Chief Shingwauk: A Journey for his People, a ‘story map’ project that she completed as part of a digital public history course at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., where she is currently completing her masters in public history.
“Initially when I had started working with the story maps medium, I had felt that I wanted to create something for anyone who really wanted to read about Chief Shingwauk, or to understand more about Chief Shingwauk’s vision or his journey for education and what that meant and what it was about,” Hogan said.
Telling a part of Chief Shingwauk’s story by way of story mapping was inspired by Hogan’s time at Algoma University as a student and her work at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre.
Hogan used a digital version of Chief Shingwauk’s journals to tell the story, while designing a map that she felt reflected the roadways and railways that he would have used at that time.
“It can be a little bit hard to understand, because of the way it was written,” said Hogan. “So I felt like the visual companion made it a little more easier to understand how big of a journey it was.”
Hogan, who is of Irish and Haudenosaunee descent, says that working with the original journals of Chief Shingwauk revealed to her some of the prevailing attitudes of the day, and how those attitudes could have made for a potentially isolating experience.
“The way that he describes the way that people would interact with him, or the way that they viewed him was really interesting, because a lot of people would assume that he was drinking or assume that he was up to something when he was just trying to find his way around, and he couldn’t speak English,” she said. “It was very telling of how maybe communities were at that time.”
Hogan says the story map that she’s created is intended for a decidedly younger audience - an audience that now scrolls and swipes in order to obtain information.
“Reading a typewriter version of this diary is very dry, and it’s also very hard to get students to read that themselves, so creating a map is much easier,” she said. “A lot of us like to scroll - scrolling is very easy to do, swiping is very easy to do, and story maps lends itself very well to that type of browsing.”
“A part of public history is making history accessible to the public, and the fact is that the public, the way that they receive and the way that they want to see information is changing, so adapting historical documents in a way that keeps their integrity and keeps their words is important, but in a way that people will enjoy looking through it.”
Walking with Chief Shingwauk: A Journey for his People can be accessed at this website, while a more detailed explanation of Hogan’s story can be found on WordPress.