With video, audio, and other multimedia forms, the map provides the voices of Native speakers to tell their personal and ancestral stories of the region at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, known by the Dakota people as Bdote, meaning "where the two waters come together".
[1][2][3] Mona Smith, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota videographer, helped create the Bdote Memory Map in partnership with the Minnesota Humanities Center.
These can take the form of videos, audio recordings, writings and more from Indigenous writers, artists, elders, students, and experts.
The website additionally includes teachers' guides for instruction on Indigenous peoples in the classroom, informational resources about the Dakota, American Indian legal histories, as well as a variety of historical maps of both the Bdote and the larger Americas as well.
[4] Smith is hoping to eventually expand the map's area of coverage to include Indigenous stories from throughout the entire Mississippi region down to Louisiana.