RootedWisdom

Method

How this atlas is made

Every entry in this atlas traces to published sources - books, peer-reviewed work, tribal nations' own publications, and public archives. Each citation names its author, publisher, and year. Most of the library is by Indigenous authors; non-Indigenous scholars appear when their work rests on Indigenous testimony and collaboration.

Three kinds of statement appear on these pages, and they are not blurred. Documented history carries a citation. Teaching in a nation's own words carries a citation. Where this site draws a lesson or makes a comparison, the text says it is interpreting.

Nations are described in the present tense wherever the record allows. Language revitalization, land-back litigation, food-sovereignty projects, and tribal governance are not epilogues here - they are the story continuing.

Some knowledge is not ours to publish. Sacred, ceremonial, or community-restricted material is excluded by policy, even when it is documented elsewhere. Claims we cannot source are excluded too, and so are generalizations that flatten thousands of distinct nations into one.

Errors will exist anyway. The contribution page explains how to propose a correction with a source; nothing is published from contributions until review rules exist.

Imagery

Photographs on this site come from open archives - Wikimedia Commons and public collections - and each one is checked for a license that permits reuse. Author and license appear under every image, with a link to its source page.

Images generated by artificial intelligence appear only as editorial illustration - the frontispiece portrait, the interlude bands, the library still life - and each is labeled as illustration at its point of display. No generated image depicts a real or named person, a real ceremony, or any nation's regalia or sacred motifs. The frontispiece is an imagined face, presented as imagination, never as documentary record.

Following Australian convention, any page about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples carries a warning before it shows images of people who have died.

Image credits - site-wide and museum imagery

Per-nation photographs are credited under each image on its page.

  • Wild rice harvest, Mud Lake, Minnesota (2015) - George Stringham, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Public domain
  • Winnowing wild rice, Floodwood, Minnesota - Lorie Shaull, CC BY 2.0
  • Ojibwe woman tapping sugar maple (c. 1908) - Roland Reed, Library of Congress, Public domain
  • Night sky interlude panel - Studio illustration generated for this site, Illustration, not a photograph
  • Milky Way over Satwiwa, Santa Monica Mountains (Chumash land) - Mike Shaw, National Park Service, Public domain
  • Frontispiece portrait ("An elder, imagined") - Original AI-generated illustration, Illustration, not a photograph
  • River valleys and night-sky interlude panels - Original AI-generated illustration, Illustration, not a photograph
  • Bandolier (Shoulder) Bag, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), 1880s? - The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0 1.0
  • Tapa Cloth Beater (l'e kuku), HawaiĘ»i, before 1930 - The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0 1.0
  • Ainu robe, cotton and wool with applique (kiri-fuse) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 1.0
  • Pair of earflare frontals, Maya, 200-600 CE - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 1.0