Astrodigenous: an online portal for Indigenous sky-knowledge resources in Canada with Heidi White

While astronomy and the study of the sky and Universe have been explored within a variety of global and cultural contexts, we tend to only see Western/Eurocentric astronomies in the classroom. Canada is built on Indigenous lands, on the erasure of Indigenous Knowledges and the attempted genocides of Indigenous peoples (Simpson, 2014). In the era of Truth and Reconciliation, there is an increased need for Indigenous Knowledges of astronomy to be seen and understood at all levels of education. This has resulted in much interest from both settler and Indigenous educators to be inclusive of Indigenous Astronomy Knowledges (IAK) in the classroom, but many teachers do not know where, or how, to even begin. In this talk, we will be debuting “Astrodigenous”, a newly developed online portal which provides teachers and educators with search-like access to a wealth of Indigenous sky-knowledge resources. Our presentation will provide an overview of the resources we've collected, a tour of the core features of our website, and demonstrate the functionality and utility of our search engine. We will highlight how our choice of Django as a web framework has uniquely facilitated the rapid development of effective web applications and database modelling for our portal. We will also describe new materials we have developed to guide settler K-12 teachers in exploring their own positionality with respect to the resources in our database and towards mindfully holding space for Indigenous Knowledge in their classrooms.

This talk was presented at: https://2022.djangocon.us/talks/astrodigenous-an-online-portal-for-sky/