MHA Nation creates COVID-19 dashboard with help from Bartlett & West

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) has worldwide impact, with states in America working to track and minimize spread. As a sovereign tribal nation, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) Nation, also known as Three Affiliated Tribes, quickly needed to create their own task force and tracking tools to respond to the pandemic.

In late March 2020, MHA Nation’s geographic information systems (GIS) director Tanya Sand-Driver connected with Tim Penfield of Bartlett & West. Tanya was looking to set up a solution to map and track tests, confirmed cases and various other information around the COVID-19 virus within the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, which is in central North Dakota.

Thanks to a COVID-19 template created by ESRI, Tanya and Tim were able to pull a variety of information into the ArcGIS database and create a community impact dashboard for the tribe. As a further layer for the MHA Nation COVID-19 Task Force’s internal use, they added tribal members’ publicly available demographic information to the mapping platform to compare the locations of confirmed cases against the homes of tribal members 60 years of age and older.

The ability to create these response tools quickly for the tribe was possible thanks to the resource from ESRI, the work of MHA Nation’s staff and the help of Bartlett & West.