In collaboration with the Indian Land Trust Foundation, I co-created and co-taught an immersive GIS short course for Indigenous High School students throughout South Dakota. The reasons for doing so included empowering students to be spatial and critical thinkers, to raise awareness of GIS, GNSS, and remote sensing technologies as they consider their future career pathways, and to integrate holistic Indigenous perspectives and knowledge about spaces and places.
I have been working with the ILTF for several years, beginning with conducting a GIS workshop at their annual conference, and keeping in touch ever since about the benefits of spatial thinking in research, instruction, and in the noble work that ILTF is doing. One of the students told me at the end of the course, “I was so into the course that I didn’t check my text messages for 2 days!” … which I considered a great and unexpected affirmation from a teenager and very much appreciated the student’s honesty!
It was a great honor to teach with the very supportive ILTF staff and to see the students thrive in their work in collecting data in the field, mapping a wide variety of data from local to global scale, perform spatial analysis, and integrate holistic Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in this 2-day course. The course was entirely hands-on, working through tools in the ArcGIS platform in class using 2D maps, 3D scenes, and custom apps including the Tribal Carbon & Co-Benefit Atlas, and also collecting data in the field.
The interaction with students and their investigations re-affirmed for me the value of GIS as an instructional tool and the systems perspective it offers: There is nothing that these students cannot tackle once exposed to the tools and data sets that covered Indigenous languages and homelands, biomes, climate, population change, demographics, wildfires and tornadoes, river systems, soils and landforms, energy production, and human health and behavior, as well as satellite, aerial, and UAV imagery. The students not only kept up with the many tasks that we as instructors put in front of them, but by the end of the course, they were oftentimes ahead of their instructors and also working on data and projects of interest to them.
As the course was conducted at the same site in Rapid City, South Dakota as the Lakota Nations Invitational, the students were also able to participate in the sports, culture, and educational events that the Invitational featured. We are planning to conduct a similar event this coming December 2026 at the same venue which I am very much looking forward.
The story map collection that I created to support this course is, here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/128881e43aad4bd9971f1d15b6fcc901
I look forward to your comments.
–Joseph Kerski
