Welcome to our project: Native American Monuments in the United States! Our website features an interactive map, where you can see where Native American monuments, memorials, and heritage sites are located in the U.S. These monuments are represented by markers on the map to indicate their location. You can hover over these markers to see a brief summary and image of the monument. If you press on “Click here to learn more!”, you will be redirected to a new page to see more information about the monument as well as why we think it's significant, whether or not we suggest you visit, and a Google Maps link to the monument. If you have any monuments you would like to see added to our website, you can press on the “Want to contribute?” tab and fill out the form there. Additionally, in the “Want to contribute?” tab, you will find a link to our GitHub repository, where you can contribute to our code if you would like to.
This website was created by Jabili Gadde and Adeena Ahmed, computer science majors at The College of New Jersey, as our final project for our Monuments, Heritage, & Belonging class. We wanted to create a project that would utilize our specific skills and knowledge in terms of our programming skills and combine those with the content we have been learning and researching about in class. In our project, we aim to highlight various Native American monuments, memorials, and heritage sites and explain their significance both in the context of the past and more importantly, the present.
We settled on our focus after listening to the podcast “Not A Foot of Land” by Megan Scarborough, which talks about the mural, “The Peace Council of New Jersey and the Indians, 1758” by Richard Farley that sits today inside one of the buildings at The College of New Jersey. Among other things, the podcast made us aware of the “Vanishing Indian” phenomena, which is the popular belief that indigenous people and their cultures have vanished into the past, and are now ancient and extinct. However, this clearly proves to be false when one takes a look at the presently active Native American communities and tribes in the United States. By compiling a list of locations that have both past and present significance, we hope that this map helps combat this rhetoric.
We chose monuments for our website by looking for monuments that are known on a national scale. We aimed to focus nationally rather than locally, since our project features a map of the United States. However, it is important to note that the monuments on our website are not a comprehensive list of all Native American monuments in the country that are known on a national scale. If you know any other monuments that would be a good fit for our website, we encourage you to fill out the form in the “Want to contribute?” tab.
We also wanted to provide a variety of types of Native American monuments that exist. We selected monuments that honor prominent figures in Native American history, where the Crazy Horse Memorial is meant to honor Lakota war leader Crazy Horse and the Sitting Bull Monument is meant to honor Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull. Additionally, we included monuments that are created in response to certain events and occurrences that Native American tribes and communities have faced on varying scales, like the ‘Not Afraid To Look’ statue that was created in response to the DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) protests, and the National Native American Veterans Memorial, which is meant to honor the military service of Native Americans as a group.
Furthermore, some of these monuments are structures (Not Afraid to Look, Sitting Bull Monument, and National Native American Veterans Memorial), while others are geological features or areas(Crazy Horse Memorial, El Malpais, and Devils Tower). Two of the geological features or areas are “National Monuments”, which are protected areas that are controlled or owned by the government. However, these monuments have undeniable connections and are significant to various Native American tribes and communities, both in the past and today.