As a community living in diaspora, it is a challenge to provide opportunities for everyone to participate in language and culture learning. Our education team has been developing a new digital platform that allows us to connect with learning resources from anywhere with Internet access. Šaapohkaayoni: A Myaamia Portal was designed to make searching our numerous web resources easier and to provide online learning opportunities. We’re excited to enter our first large phase of testing in order to better meet our community’s needs.

Šaapohkaayoni has two key sections: the public homepage and the private user homepage. The public homepage utilizes a Google enhanced search engine to return search results from our numerous web resources including Aacimotaatiiyankwi, our YouTube channels, our teaching resources, and other curated websites. This means your search results were either produced or vetted by the Miami Tribe’s education team. For example, searching “Myaamia Removal” will bring up articles written by staff for Aacimotaatiiyankwi, the A Cultural Exploration of the Myaamia Removal Route publication, and articles from Miami University about their event commemorating the 175th anniversary of Removal. Our programming team is continually refining the search engine in order to return the best results!

The section we are most excited to share is behind a user log in. Here you will find a user dashboard that will greet you by name (Myaamia or English) and show you all of the courses you can access. As we move through our testing phases, we will continue adding online courses and resources. Right now, community members automatically have access to our Community Resources page.

Community Resources is where you’ll find resources related to general topics of interest. For example, the Language topic has links to the Myaamia online dictionary, pronunciation guide, and Memrise language courses. Based on user feedback, we will continue adding topics and resources. Our goal is to include direct links to online applications for summer programs and back to school funds.

Other awesome page features are the forum and announcements. The forum allows users to post messages for all course users to see and respond to! We hope this becomes a useful way for our community to engage with one another online. Announcements allow administrators to send important information, for example application deadlines, to all course users. Users can be emailed when new forum comments and announcements are posted.

The first course we are offering on Šaapohkaayoni is Foundations of Myaamiaataweenki. If you have participated in the six week Intro to Myaamiaataweenki course, this content may look familiar. Jarrid Baldwin and the rest of our education team have worked together to modify the six week course into a self-guided, five part course. Each section focuses on a foundational element of Myaamiaataweenki to help those in the beginning stages of their learning journeys.

This course is open to any community member; however, you will not have automatic access the same way you do for Community Resources. Foundations of Myaamiaataweenki and future courses are designed so users can select which courses they would like to participate in based on their own interests. As our course catalog grows, our goal is to offer a mix of in-person, online, and hybrid options.

Our education team looks forward to developing more content for the course and sharing it with the Myaamia community. We also want to extend a mihši-neewe to our programmers Dr. Doug Troy, Bishal Baaniya, Alisha Sharma Chapai, and Pratiksha Shrestha for all of the hard work they have put into creating and developing Šaapohkaayoni!

If you have any questions about Šaapohkaayoni, please reach out to Kristina Fox at markskm@miamioh.edu.

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Updated: February 24, 2023