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This free, intensive one-day workshop -- held in conjunction with the 2015 AAA Annual Meetings -- is designed to provide training for Native American tribes and their research partners looking to use Google Earth and other powerful Google mapping technologies to document the significant places and landscapes in their territories.

This workshop's insights will be of consequence to indigenous communities and scholars documenting indigenous land use and occupancy, undertaking land and resource management, and sharing knowledge between generations and neighbouring communities.

The methodologies and tools discussed not only respond to demands for representations that are informed by indigenous knowledge, but build on affordable, accessible technologies that leverage networked and local computing resources, and address essential needs around privacy, ownership, control and access.

The workshop will start with sharing with participants with 'best-practices' examples of indigenous mapping methodologies from collaborative projects being done by and for indigenous communities. Then, the workshop will focus on an intensive, sleeves-rolled-up focus on the 'how-to' aspects of using Google's powerful and largely free-to-use technologies (Google Earth, My Maps, Fusion Tables, Open Data Kit) to leverage effective indigenous mapping projects.

The workshop will be led by faculty from the University of Victoria’s Ethnographic Mapping Lab and the Google Earth Outreach team. As an outcome, participants can anticipate gaining enough familiarity with the Google geo-tools and sufficient consideration of indigenous mapping project design elements that people could start using these tools in their own work.

The event is being hosted in association with the 114th Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, at the AAA conference site in Denver. This is a free event and registration for the AAA meetings is not required to attend.