Joslyn Salamanca views a tour stop on the Mapping Teejop digital tool. Photo by Andy Manis.
Scattered across campus are markers that tell the story of Indigenous history at UW–Madison, a region long known as Teejop. But those who pass these plaques, sculptures and landmarks regularly may not give them much thought.
The digital mapping tool Mapping Teejop puts this history, and the ongoing presence of the Ho-Chunk Nation and other Native peoples, front and center. Multiple self-guided, self-paced tours highlight histories of the Ho-Chunk people who, like other tribal nations across the U.S., were forced to cede their lands in the 19th century during the creation of land-grant universities.
The growing series of tours, each approximately 50 minutes, features histories collected from UW–Madison and Teejop community members that encourage learning and self-reflection. They include some of the most iconic locations on campus, such as Bascom Hill, Observatory Hill, Tee Wąąkšik Homįk (Lake Mendota), Camp Randall and Picnic Point.
Kasey Keeler, an assistant professor of Civil Society & Community Studies and American Indian & Indigenous Studies, has led the creation of Mapping Teejop. The project is a cross-campus collaboration between the School of Human Ecology, the American Indian & Indigenous Studies program, and the Department of Geography’s Cartography Lab.
“I saw a need for an accessible learning tool that offers students an opportunity to get out of the classroom and learn about the Indigenous past and presence at UW–Madison,” says Keeler, who teaches the Introduction to American Indian Studies course that enrolls around 300 students each semester. “I began working with my colleague Sasha Maria Suarez, who also has a deep interest in place-based and urban histories, and together we began imagining what an Indigenous-centered digital tour of campus could look like.
“As Native women who are not Ho-Chunk — I am Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Potawatomi, and Sasha is White Earth Ojibwe — we see learning this history and teaching it to our students as part of our responsibility to being on this land,” Keeler continues. “Early on we were joined by Gareth Baldrica-Franklin, a graduate student in geography, who brought our vision to life. More than that, though, he’s engaged in a deep learning process and strives to center Indigenous voices.”
The footprint of Mapping Teejop continues to expand, with six tours currently available to all users. Two of the newest tours explore the UW Arboretum and went live this fall. A seventh tour will be added in 2025, and the project team is exploring options to expand to the far west side of campus and into the Shorewood Hills neighborhood. There is also an “Explore” option, which allows users to discover Ho-Chunk and Native sites on campus in any order they wish.
Instructors are already using “Mapping Teejop” in more than a dozen courses across campus. Carolina Sarmiento, an associate professor of Civil Society & Community Studies, uses the digital tool in her Community Based Research and Evaluation course, which is cross listed with Advanced Topics in Chican@ & Latin@ Studies.
“The class is creating alternative walking tours of campus, so it was important for them to understand the territory we’re on,” Sarmiento says.
Several of Sarmiento’s students said Mapping Teejop deepened their once-surface level awareness of the Indigenous presence on campus.
“I didn’t really know much about the history of the Ho-Chunk people here until I took the tour,” says sophomore Joslyn Salamanca, a sociology major earning a certificate in Chican@ and Latin@ studies. “The UW reads a land acknowledgement statement before events, but I didn’t know much else. I learned a lot from the tour.”
What really stayed with Salamanca, who took the “Mąįirakere (Grounding)” tour, was learning about the Ho-Chunk burial mounds on Observatory Hill. The two that remain — although partially destroyed by campus sidewalks — form the shape of a bird and a two-tailed water spirit.
This tour describes a recent example of threat to the mounds that came in 2021, when a UW–Madison soil sciences student damaged the two-tail water spirit mound by removing “about five gallons of soil.”
“That stuck out to me because it shows that, even though we now know about the burial mounds, they’re still not recognized or respected enough,” Salamanca says.
Mapping Teejop also shares the history of American Indian military service and student activism, and the ways dispossession and non-Native settlement across Teejop altered the landscape.
Students also commented on how simple the Mapping Teejop website was to navigate.
“It was very accessible and easy to get to,” says Lilith Wehrs, a junior double majoring in Community & Organizational Development and environmental studies. “It took you step by step. The tour itself was very manageable, and I thought that it was really well done and well thought out.”
While the tool has so far been largely used by students, Keeler says anyone can benefit from taking the tours.
“The hope of the project team is that Mapping Teejop is accessible to all students, faculty, staff and visitors to UW–Madison, and that even seasoned history buffs can walk away having learned something or having paused and engaged in some critical reflection,” Keeler says. “We hope the project opens avenues for ongoing dialogue on and off campus.”
Project members note that the tool is intended to be an entry point into this knowledge, and visitors wanting a more in-depth experience with in-person tour guides should consider the First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour.
Mapping Teejop continues to add tours and is seeing wide use across campus from diverse units, as well as the general public, but its efforts to expand are limited by funding. Although it is a teaching tool, Mapping Teejop is not considered a traditional research project, limiting its funding sources.
Despite this, Keeler continues to seek out funding to support the project’s research, community engagement and cartography, as well as the long term success and maintenance of each digital tour, which are living things themselves. As the team looks toward the future, they welcome opportunities for collaboration and partnership, both on and off campus.
The Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment awarded a seed project grant to Mapping Teejop in 2022. The project has also received funding from the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program and the School of Human Ecology’s Indigenous EcoWell Initiative.
Take a Mapping Teejop online tour