I had a bit of trouble deciding at first what I wanted to make a PowerPoint on until I thought back to my video game experience within Jennifer’s class. I chose to make a PowerPoint about When Rivers Were Trails because it was noticeably different from many other video games that feature Native American peoples. Whereas many video games featuring Native American peoples were created by companies with millions of dollars, When Rivers Were Trails was created by a small group of programmers and designers from an Ojibwe band. I also wanted to incorporate stuff that I found in the video game such as stories and maps. I thought of including images of the video game to give a sense of what I was discussing at certain points. I should note that I also included a slide on one version of The Oregon Trail which I also played and did a comparison between the two games in the final slide. I mentioned how in The Oregon Trail, Native American peoples remained unspecified and appeared mostly as background characters, apart from offering assistance with hunting every now and then.
When I was trying to make this slide presentation, it was noticeably difficult for me to come up with a title and so I played around with the title a few times. When looking at the Ojibwe themselves, I wanted to show not just the Ojibwe territory in Minnesota, but also other parts of the US and Canada such as Wisconsin Michigan, Ontario and even Alberta. Since this video game was set during a time when settlers started arriving in massive numbers to Minnesota, there were instances where one would be bound to run into Indian Agents. I tried looking up images of Indian Agents to add to the PowerPoint but ultimately couldn’t find one that seemed good enough. In fact, when I typed in “Indian Agents”, most of what came up were people of professions within India in South Asia rather than those who dealt with Native American peoples within the last few centuries. However, I did decide to use a picture of an Ojibwe healer. Even then, I had a bit of trouble adding it in, because it wasn’t really a PDF at first, but then I found one with a PDF attached to it and used that image.
Tony– a narrative like the one we see in When Rivers Were Trails is ideal for a story mapping project because of its strong geographic connection. When reading the slides of the story map, the viewer is guided through the breadth of Ojibwe territory. As we can see in one of the map illustrations, this is a space encompassing the entire Great Lakes region and further northwest to Lake Winnipeg. I really like how platforms like Storymap JS allow us to ask different historical questions about the construction of space. I could also see this tool being helpful for someone like a video game developer as they try to build story lines and “map out” the journey of the character(s).