Skip to main content

UNIT 6

Relationships to the Land

For Tribal nations, land isn't property - it's relationship. Build a visually rich website about how Native peoples understand the land, water, and living world.

⏱️ 7 Stages
🌿 Early Intermediate
🎯 45–60 min per stage
🖼️ Images + CSS Positioning

The Big Idea

Every unit so far has been mostly text and color. This one introduces images - not just photos dropped into a page, but images used intentionally. Images that fill a space without distortion. Images that serve as the backdrop for layered text. Images that tell a story before you read a word.

You'll learn how CSS handles images: object-fit keeps photos from stretching, background-image makes a full-bleed hero that spans the entire screen, and position: absolute lets you place a title right on top of an image. These three techniques show up on almost every professional website.

The content is about land, water, and living relationships as Tribal nations understand them. You'll research and write three sections. Each one gets its own image layout.

By the end of this unit, you'll be able to say "I can..."

  • Use background-image to create a full-screen hero section
  • Place text on top of an image using CSS positioning
  • Use object-fit so photos fill their space without stretching
  • Build an image grid where multiple photos sit side by side
  • Create a website with a professional, visually driven design

What You'll Build

A visually rich website about how Tribal nations understand their relationships to land, water, and the living world.

A full-bleed hero image opens the page with your title layered on top. Three sections follow - Land and Territory, Water and Rivers, Living Relationships - each combining images with your research.

This is where your pages start to look like real websites.

Five websites. You know how the web works. Now let's make it beautiful.

Your learning path

The 7 Stages

STAGE 1 The Image Tag img + alt text basics STAGE 2 Image Containers Sizing + object-fit STAGE 3 Image Grids CSS Grid for photos STAGE 4 Background Images background-image + cover STAGE 5 Positioning and Overlays position + rgba overlay STAGE 6 The Full Land Page All sections combined STAGE 7 Make It Your Own Customize your land site
Let's Begin

← Back to All Units

Sources

This unit presents traditional ecological knowledge and land and water relationships as understood by Dakota, Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, and other Tribal Nations in the region. All content is drawn from Tribal nation sources, Native-led organizations, and academic institutions with direct partnerships with Indigenous communities. Students are encouraged to explore these sources before and after building their site.

Official Tribal & Indigenous Organizations

Government & Educational Sources

Cultural Protocols and Image Use

Educational Standards

This unit aligns with computer science, social studies, science, and arts standards across MN, ND, and SD. Click a panel to expand.

  • OSEU.SS.C.1, Living Relationships to Land and Water (All Grades): Students will understand that Tribal nations hold relationships to specific lands and waters that are grounded in cultural identity, ceremony, governance, and generational responsibility - not ownership in the Western legal sense. (The unit asks students to research and represent the land and water relationships of Tribal nations in their region: the lakes, rivers, prairies, and forests that specific nations have named, stewarded, and organized their cultural life around. These relationships are not historical artifacts. The unit presents them as current, active, and legally relevant - shaped by treaties that remain in force.)
  • OSEU.SS.H.2, Treaty Rights and Land (All Grades): Students will understand how treaty relationships defined and continue to define the land base, rights, and sovereignty of Tribal nations. (The land and water relationships students represent in this unit were shaped by treaty. Students are guided to acknowledge the treaty context of the places they are representing without reducing the cultural significance of those relationships to their legal status. A lake is not just a treaty-protected resource; it is a place with a name, a history, and a relationship to the people who have called it home for generations.)
  • CSTA 1A-DA-06: Collect and present the same data in various visual formats. (Students represent land and water knowledge using images, background visuals, and overlaid text, presenting cultural information in a visual web format that communicates meaning beyond words alone.)
  • CSTA 1A-IC-17 (Grade 2+): Work respectfully and responsibly with others online. (Students select and attribute images thoughtfully, write alt text that respects the people and places depicted, and consider what it means to publish images of sacred land and water on the public web.)
  • ISTE 3a, Knowledge Constructor: Students plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits. (Students research appropriate images for their nation's land and water, evaluate sources, and apply the tiered source policy to visual as well as written content.)
  • ISTE 6d, Global Collaborator: Students explore local and global issues and use collaborative technologies to work with others to investigate solutions. (Students use web technologies to represent Indigenous land and water relationships and connect local knowledge to global conversations about environmental stewardship and sovereignty.)
  • MN Social Studies 2.5.25.1 (Grade 2): Explain the relationship between people and the natural environment, giving examples of how people depend on and modify the environment. (The unit's three content sections, Land and Territory, Water and Rivers, and Living Relationships, each address how Tribal Nations in the region depend on, care for, and maintain relationships with specific natural environments. Students represent this knowledge visually on the web.)
  • MN Social Studies 6.4.19.1 (Grade 6): Identify ways people adapt to or modify their physical environments and describe the positive and negative results of these modifications. (Students examine how Dakota, Anishinaabe, and other Tribal Nations adapted to and managed specific environments, the lake and forest ecosystems, river systems, and plains, and contrast those relationships with colonial-era land modification.)
  • MN Science 5E.2.2.1.2 (Grade 5): Describe patterns of change in ecosystems and explain how ecosystems can reach a state of balance. (The traditional ecological knowledge in this unit, wild rice stewardship, river system relationships, bison ecosystem management, provides concrete examples of Indigenous practices that maintained ecosystem balance before and during colonial disruption.)
  • MN Media Arts 2.8.2.3.1 (Grade 8): Create media artworks using transdisciplinary or transmedia production to express emotion and meaning, including web page design with multimodal perception. (Students combine CSS background images, positioned text overlays, and inline image cards to create a visually and emotionally coherent website. The design choices, image selection, alt text, overlay language, express cultural meaning, not just aesthetics.)
  • MN Social Studies 9.4.19.7 (Grades 9-12): Identify multiple Indigenous concepts of boundary-making and relationship-building with the environment through economic, political, and kinship systems. (The Land and Territory section addresses how Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples defined territories through relationship and kinship with the land itself, not through surveyed property lines. Students represent this concept visually on their webpage.)
  • MN ELA 9.3.3.2 / 10.3.3.2 (Grades 9-12): Create and share a piece of digital work for a specific purpose and audience, demonstrating understanding of digital footprint and responsible publishing. (Students publish a visually composed website, select images intentionally, write alt text for accessibility, and consider the cultural implications of publishing land and water imagery on the public web.)
  • ND CS 6.E.2 / 7.E.2 / 8.E.2 (Grades 6-8): Evaluate information sources to identify bias and determine reliability. (Students apply source evaluation to image selection: What is the source of this photograph? Who took it? Does it accurately represent the people and land it depicts? Students apply the same tiered source policy to visual content as to written content.)
  • ND Social Studies 8.6.1 (Grade 8): Analyze the impact of environmental factors on the development of human societies. (The unit examines how specific environmental features, the Missouri River, the tallgrass prairie, the northern lake country, shaped the cultures, economies, and spiritual practices of the Tribal Nations who have lived in relationship with those places for generations.)
  • ND Indigenous Language Standard 2.1 (All Grades): Learners investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship of practices to the customs, traditions, and perspectives of the cultures studied. (Land stewardship practices, seasonal burning, wild rice management, river fishing systems, are examined as expressions of cultural worldview, not just subsistence methods. Students represent these practices visually on their site.)
  • ND Indigenous Language Standard 2.2 (All Grades): Learners investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship of products to the customs, traditions, and perspectives of the cultures studied. (The website itself is a cultural product. Students analyze and represent the land and water as Dakota, Lakota, Nakota, Ojibwe, and MHA Nation peoples understand them, producing a web artifact that reflects those worldviews.)
  • ND Science 8.E.1.1 (Grade 8): Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the uneven distributions of Earth's mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are the result of past and current geoscience processes. (The water rights and river system content in this unit connects to scientific understanding of water as a finite and unevenly distributed resource, with Indigenous water stewardship serving as a model of sustainable relationship.)
  • OSEU Standard 1.3 (All Grades): Describe traditional and contemporary Oceti Sakowin perspectives on communal stewardship of land and natural resources, including flora, fauna, geographic, and sacred features. (This standard is the direct curricular foundation of Unit 6. The Land and Territory, Water and Rivers, and Living Relationships sections each address a different dimension of Oceti Sakowin land stewardship: territorial knowledge, water as sacred relative, and the web of relationships that ties all living things together.)
  • OSEU Standard 2.1 (All Grades): Describe the history and importance of treaty rights and Tribal sovereignty in South Dakota. (Water rights and land rights are treaty rights. The Water and Rivers section connects the Missouri River to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's treaty-protected water access, grounding the cultural content in legal and historical reality.)
  • SD Social Studies 3.G.1.1 (Grade 3): Describe the relationship between the physical environment and human activities in South Dakota. (Students study how the Missouri River valley, the Black Hills, and the Great Plains shaped the lifeways and seasonal movements of Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples, and how those relationships continue today.)
  • SD CS 6-8.DA.CVT.1: Collect data using computational tools and transform the data to make it more useful and reliable. (Students transform cultural knowledge about land and water into structured visual web content: selecting images, writing alt text, organizing sections, and composing text that is accurate and respectful.)
  • SD Science HS-ESS3-1: Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity. (The unit's examination of how Tribal Nations across the plains and woodlands organized their lives around rivers, prairies, and seasonal cycles connects directly to this standard's focus on environmental influence on human societies.)