The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum (https://www.ahtahthiki.com/), on the Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades, serves as the public face of the Seminole Tribe of Florida (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/16). But the museum collaborates with the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office (http://www.stofthpo.com/) (THPO) next door to preserve the tribe's culture, working for and with the community through various shared projects.
One of the projects is called Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps (https://www.ahtahthiki.com/mosaic/), which is now on display in the museum. Quenton Cypress, Community Engagement Coordinator at THPO, and Lacee Cofer, Geo Spatial Analyst at THPO, started the project with Juan Cancel, Chief Data Analyst at THPO. The team taught 11th grade students at the Ahfachkee School (the school on the Big Cypress Reservation) GIS mapping software and helped the students create their own maps about a Seminole or Native American topic (https://afstof.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=cd4597ad79cb4ca8ab920cbe7b548442).
In this episode, the THPO team talks about the process of teaching the students how to use geospatial software, the Story Maps that the students created, and how the students reacted to seeing their work in the museum gallery.
Image: Lacee Cofer, Juan Cancel & Quenton Cypress presenting thier project at the Esri User Conference in San Diego in 2018.

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00:00: Intro
00:15: The Big Cypress Reservation & Quenton Cypress
01:05: Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki on Episode 16 of Museum Archipelago
01:48: The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office
03:00: Lacee Cofer
03:30: Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps
03:58: Juan Cancel
04:50: “But how does that serve the tribal community?”
07:09: The Topics Students Choose
08:58: Students Seeing Their Work at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki
10:32: Why Mapping?
11:46: Outro / Watch Making-Of For Free on Patreon

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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 53. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.



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To get to the Big Cypress Reservation in South Florida and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum inside it, you drive an hour into the Florida Everglades. By the time you arrive, you’re isolated from almost everything else.


Quenton Cypress: Here in Big Cypress, it's just us. There's a convenience store that's open till 11 o'clock at night. There's no Walmart, no Publix, no Walgreens. Anytime we need just some toilet paper, we have to drive an hour. And we have to make sure we get everything.


This is Quenton Cypress, Community Engagement Coordinator at the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office.


Quenton Cypress: My name is Quenton Cypress, and I'm the Community Engagement Coordinator. And I'm actually a tribe member. I'm from this reservation that we work on. My job is to make sure the community works with us.


The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, or THPO, where Quentin works, is separate form the The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum.

We’ve talked about the museum before: on episode 16 of Museum Archipelago, I interviewed Carrie Dilley, Visitor Services and Development Manager at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki, about the high percentage of museum visitors from outside the U.S. Through these visitation trends, the museum serves as the public face of the tribe to the outside world.

But the museum, more importantly,