Thank you to all of the #UHA2025LA attendees to stopped by to learn about my digital project this morning at the Urban History Association conference

I'll also be sharing " #OurLandOurStories Wild Rice and Lenape Lifeways in the New Jersey Meadowlands" from 1-2pm, if you'd like to stop by! #envhist

Really pleased to be sharing this project at #UHA2025LA this week.

Shoutout & big thanks to #AnitaBakshi for inviting me to contribute to #OurLandOurStories, #DavidNelson @amphilsociety.bsky.social for getting me started with coding last year, and the #RamapoughLunaapeNation for the collaboration.

Screenshot of a digital interactive map. The map comprises of several components. In the background are two side-by-side basemaps occupying different portions of the screen. The one at the left comprises of historical black & white aerial imagery from the 1930s. It shows a patchwork landscape of urban development, rivers & meadows as seen from a considerable distance above the earth, as in a satellite image (except in this case, the historic black & white imagery was taken from a plane and later stitched together to form the complete "layer" shown on the map). The basemap that appears beside it is a more recent satellite image, from the 2020s, that appears in color. The actual landscape shown is one landscape represented partway by the black & white aerial imagery, and partway by the color aerial imagery. Viewers familiar with New York City's geography will recognize the large rectilinear Central Park in Manhattan, which appears on the map's right-hand side. At left is the part of the landscape represented by the black and white historical aerial imagery, which comprises of Newark, Secaucus, Jersey City, and other towns along the Hudson River and Passaic and Hackensack Rivers. The layers comprise a large metropolitan landscape past and present. Upon the map, 2 areas are highlighted in beige and purple opaque layers. Atop is the purple layer, a white pop-up box with black text reads: " Sëkëxkuk: 'Place of the black snakes.' Departing from Munsee Lenape tradition, colonial settlers rendered Sëkëxkuk as Sikakes. Today, the spot is known as Secaucus in a further phonetic and orthographic distortion of the phrase. The historic presence of snakes in this area, where freshwater and saltwater once met at the penultimate bend of the Hackensack River, is reflected in original Munsee place name and in the name of nearby Snake Hill." Several placemarkers also appear on the map in blue. At the bottom right is a control bar with different map layers that the user can toggle.

This image is a detail of the larger map project described in the last alt-text entry. This image is taken at a closer scale and different layers are turned on within it to show slightly different information. The layer that is turned on shows historic Munsee Lenape settlements along the Passaic River in New Jersey, and another layer, overlapped beneath it, shows historic Lenape place names (i.e. "Passayack, Atchunk, Espating, Wiehaekse, Meghegtecuck"). Atop these map layers are the same beige and purple highlighted areas. Two blue placemarkers are visible on these layers. There is also a dashed purple line stretching from the southernmost Lenape village represented on the basemap, along the Passaic River, to the southernmost tip of the two areas highlighted in beige and purple. Coming up from the blue placemarker that sits atop the purple layer is a pop-up box. The white pop-up box features a detail image of a herbarium specimen. That specimen is a dried wild rice plant. It appears with beige fronds and dense seedheads, strapped down by a piece of white paper. In the pop-up box where this herbaria specimen appears, there is a title. It reads: " pèhpastèk | Zizania aquatica. Collector: J. V. Monachino. Date: August 11, 1936. Location: "Near Union City". Hudson County. Source: New York Botanical Garden. On the upper left corner of the map is a plus/minus tool for zooming in and out. There is also a button for expanding full screen. At the bottom right are the Layer Opacity and Map Layer control bars. Along the bottom border of the image are some credits. They read: "Leaflet. Source: Kevin Wright & Bergen County Historical Society. Source: Newark Museum. © MapTiler & OpenStreetMap. A small Ukrainian flag icon appears next to the Leaflet label, inline with the small text. This text sits at the bottommost part of the map in small font. The main feature of the image is the wild rice herbarium specimen, and the map layers.

⑵ Besides posting here during #UHA2025LA @charlotte-leib.bsky.social will be sharing a digital project this #Friday in #LA Titled "Wild Rice and Munsee Lenape Lifeways in the New Jersey Meadowlands," it is part of #OurLandOurStories our-land-our-stories.libraries.rutgers.edu/exhibits/sho... #envhist

Did some #coding today

Here, I'm testing out some features for a map I'm developing for the #OurLandOurStories website, a multimedia project dedicated to sharing #Native history & advancing #envjustice

The map will show Munsee #Lenape peoples' historic wild rice harvesting grounds in #Lenapehoking