Event Title
A Brief Narrative of Cheyenne Migration: 1650-1880
Start Date
28-2-2015 10:30 AM
Description
This proposed presentation demonstrates how a variety of off-the-shelf visualization tools may help answer questions posed during historical research into how Cheyennes — a Great Plains indigenous nation — adjusted to dynamic differences among landscapes. While partly based upon preexisting thesis research, it was assembled with a variety digital tools more familiar to anthropologists and geographers than historians including ArcGIS, SketchUp, Story Map applications, and others. Its products also point toward the importance of considering cross-disciplinary collaboration and non-academic audiences in digital heritage work.
This presentation serves as a portfolio of work which indicates the efficacy and relevancy of these tools to historians. For example, visualizations built with ArcGIS illustrate how human factors forced Cheyennes from a tallgrass ecosystem of the eastern Great Plains centered on the Mille de Lacs region of central Minnesota into the mixed-grass and shortgrass ecosystems of the High Plains. These same data visualizations clearly demonstrate that the Cheyennes followed watercourses into their new homelands, and support the argument that they only adopted horses once they reached the mixed-grass region of the Great Plains. These grasses were protein rich and gave both horses and bison the necessary nutrients that they needed. Finally, tools like SketchUp can be used to draw attention to the spatial break represented by the arrival of Euroamericans. While the new trade benefited Cheyennes, it also eventually led to the arrival of gold seekers and conflict over water. While some of these conclusions are familiar to historians of the North American West, data visualization tools demonstrate them more starkly and can be used to expand the audience for them.
Recommended Citation
Buchkoski, John (2015). "A Brief Narrative of Cheyenne Migration: 1650-1880," Digital Humanities Symposium.
A Brief Narrative of Cheyenne Migration: 1650-1880
This proposed presentation demonstrates how a variety of off-the-shelf visualization tools may help answer questions posed during historical research into how Cheyennes — a Great Plains indigenous nation — adjusted to dynamic differences among landscapes. While partly based upon preexisting thesis research, it was assembled with a variety digital tools more familiar to anthropologists and geographers than historians including ArcGIS, SketchUp, Story Map applications, and others. Its products also point toward the importance of considering cross-disciplinary collaboration and non-academic audiences in digital heritage work.
This presentation serves as a portfolio of work which indicates the efficacy and relevancy of these tools to historians. For example, visualizations built with ArcGIS illustrate how human factors forced Cheyennes from a tallgrass ecosystem of the eastern Great Plains centered on the Mille de Lacs region of central Minnesota into the mixed-grass and shortgrass ecosystems of the High Plains. These same data visualizations clearly demonstrate that the Cheyennes followed watercourses into their new homelands, and support the argument that they only adopted horses once they reached the mixed-grass region of the Great Plains. These grasses were protein rich and gave both horses and bison the necessary nutrients that they needed. Finally, tools like SketchUp can be used to draw attention to the spatial break represented by the arrival of Euroamericans. While the new trade benefited Cheyennes, it also eventually led to the arrival of gold seekers and conflict over water. While some of these conclusions are familiar to historians of the North American West, data visualization tools demonstrate them more starkly and can be used to expand the audience for them.
