Telling an Old Story in a New Way: Raid on Deerfield
On February 29, 2004, the 300th anniversary of the raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA)/Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield launched a Web site, Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 to tell an old story in a new way.
Our intention was to both commemorate and reinterpret the raid from the perspectives of the five different groups who were present at the event, as well as their descendants: Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), Wôbanakiak (Abenaki), Wendats (Huron), the French, and the English. We did not want to simply present information; we wanted to help learners come to a deeper understanding of the raid, the forces that led up to it, and its profound legacy. We wanted to increase viewers' awareness of the multiple perspectives surrounding the event and encourage them to reach their own interpretations.
For three centuries, this assault in contested lands has been interpreted from the dominant European viewpoint: as an unprovoked, brutal attack on an innocent village of English settlers. However, the same event can be seen from another perspective: as a justified military action taken by Native Americans and the French against a highly-fortified English settlement in lands belonging to the natives. Our challenge was to tell this story in a fair and unbiased way to a general audience through the use of e-learning.
 © Francis Back In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 1704, a force of about 300 French and Native American allies launched a daring, surprise, three-hour raid on the English settlement of Deerfield, situated in the Pocumtuck homeland. By the end of the attack, 112 Deerfield men, women, and children were taken captive on a 300-mile forced march to Canada in harsh winter conditions. Some of the captives were later "redeemed" (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, but one-third chose to remain living among their former French and American Indian captors. |
Challenge 1: Collaboration
Our first challenge was to create a collaboration that would include
the diverse perspectives of five different cultural groups. We began
by assembling a planning team that included a core team of Native
American and non-Native American scholars; a historian-in-residence;
an award-winning interactive media designer specializing in history
and humanities Web sites; a well-known French Canadian illustrator;
a programmer responsible for site architecture, programming, and
database structure; and a project manager with extensive experience in
interactive multi-media training and project administration. The core
team worked closely on collaborating with Native American and French
Canadian cultural organizations, including the tribal council of the
Huron-Wendat Nation in Quebec; the Kanien'kehaka Onkwawén:na Raotitiohkwa
Cultural Center in Kahnawake, south of Montreal; the Musée des Abénakis
located in Odanak, west of Quebec City; and Pointe-à-Callière, the Montreal
Museum of Archaeology and History.
To encourage communication and collaboration with staff that were geographically dispersed, we developed a team Web site. The site contains links to contact information, writing and review guidelines, an advisor review section, an art gallery with successive iterations of illustrations, policy statements, Web statistics, user testing results, and content trackers. The People tracker, built by our programmer and illustrated below as an example, posts pages that list each character's narrative, the name of the author, the stage of development, the person responsible for the next task, the due date for the next task, and the grant that is paying for the narrative. To enter information about an item, the user simply clicks the Track field; to review the actual text of the narrative, the user clicks the Title/Preview field. Using the trackers, everyone on the team is able to access up-to-date information about the Web site's components.
Challenge 2: A Design to Support Learning
Our second challenge was to use technology to support learning—by
capturing the casual user's attention with engaging and compelling content
and design, and by facilitating the comparison of perspectives—and
do all of that with a wealth of material. To illuminate broad and competing
perspectives on this dramatic event, the Web site brings together 13 historical
scenes; 18 narratives of people's lives; 165 biographies; over 70 artifacts and
historic documents from PVMA and more than 30 institutions in the U.S., Canada,
France, England, and Italy; 13 interactive maps; over 300 glossary definitions;
over 200 bibliography and Webography citations; voices and songs; a dozen essays;
more than 100 illustrations/paintings, many commissioned expressly for this project;
and an interactive timeline covering 120 years of Deerfield, North American, and world
history. Despite all this, the work is not yet finished; by October, we will have added
several additional scenes, including a Legacies section that brings the story up to
the present day, as well as "How to" and Teacher Guide sections.
To meet this challenge, we enlisted the help of our designer, Juliet Jacobson, who designed several key learning components:
- a tab approach to multiple perspectives
- a pyramidal content structure to accommodate different learning styles
- "special features" to allow for learner exploration
