About the Project
The site and project are currently being developed by Jack Kredell, Christopher Lamb, and Devin Becker @ the CDIL, with the full site expected to be released sometime in Fall 2021.
Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho’s Mountain Caribou is a multidisciplinary digital humanities project aimed at representing community response to the recent extirpation (2019) of mountain caribou from the South Selkirk mountains of North Idaho—the last caribou to inhabit the coterminous United States.
The local extinction served as the exigence for a GIS-based deep map, or spatial narrative, which documents the interaction of human and more-than-human communities in North Idaho through geolocated oral histories
Debbie Ackley Encounter at Two Mouth Lakes
1 of 29 oral histories of caribou encounters, game camera footage of species currently inhabiting former caribou habitat, and various historical documents about caribou existence in the South Selkirks.
What is a deep map?
A deep map is a multidimensional, interactive map that offers an alternative to traditional two and three-dimensional representations of space. Beyond portraying the physical geography of a region, a deep map broadens our understanding of geography itself—imagining space as a complex, open-ended web of storied interactions determined as much by geological and biological history as by imagination, memory, and desire.
Storying Extinction attempts to represent Idaho’s former mountain caribou habitat as a space constituted by human and more-than-human relationships, each of which are somehow linked to caribou extirpation. Together, the map’s oral histories, historical materials, nonfiction narratives, and trail camera footage document an environment no longer hospitable to mountain caribou, but which remains haunted by their presence.
Future Development
Storying Extinction is an ongoing and open-ended project. In our attempt to recognize the process of extinction as a continuous event extending into both the past and the future, the project will be kept open for contributions indefinitely. If you would like to share a story or other media related to Idaho mountain caribou, please email jkredell@uidaho.edu or chrstopherlmb@gmail.com.