Portland geographer explores lessons from the Hunger Games

What can the geography of the Hunger Games book series and movie franchise tell us about the culture and economics of our own world? Dove Makes has found an online audience making highly researched videos, exploring where the different districts in the Hunger Games might be based on and what that can reveal to us.

Dove Makes is a multimedia artist and writer and PSU graduate with a Bachelor of Science and Geography. She joined OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic to discuss Hunger Games and cultural geography.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Lillian Karabaic: Your videos take an academic lens to the Hunger Game series and they kind of explore the cultural geography. Can you tell me how you stumbled into making this content?

Dove Makes: Honestly, I never meant to be a creator at all in the first place, but when all of the Hunger Games movies got put on Netflix in 2023, it sort of started this renaissance similar to how we had a Twilight renaissance in 2020.

And it really inspired me to go back and re-read the books for the first time as an adult. And when I did that, I was just completely blown away by how much depth I had missed out on.

Karabaic: Why are they still interesting to study? Why do you think you found an audience?

Dove Makes: Oh, I think they just aged like fine wine. They continued to get more relevant because when Suzanne Collins originally came up with this idea that she wanted to explore the story that she gives us is that she was sitting on her couch and she was flipping through TV channels and she was going back and forth between coverage of the Iraq War and Survivor.

For all of these things to be happening at the same time, I feel like that has only gotten more and more extreme because the coverage has gotten closer. This is the first time in human history that people have been able to document their own experience when times do get so tough. They can be in charge of their own narrative. That original idea of seeing that dichotomy and seeing how it interplays together has only grown to a bigger extreme.

Karabaic: For people that might not be familiar — how do the places in the Hunger Games reflect real-world places?

Dove Makes: So when we get our opening couple of chapters, where we’re really getting a sense of what this world kind of is, and Katniss has a very limited knowledge of history as most of the people in that area do. But she knows that she lives in a place that was once called North America. And also specifically where she is is a place that used to call Appalachia. District 12 is a mining district. That’s what their industry is and she knows that people have been mining there for generations longer than anybody can remember because the miners have to go so deep. It’s this idea of infrastructure kind of builds upon itself.

If we look at American history from our present day right now, there are a lot of regions that used to be perhaps better known for very specific specialized industry, but it creates this sort of feedback loop where because the industry is there and the infrastructure is there, it makes it less and less likely for that industry to move somewhere else because the infrastructure is already there, it’s more likely to build upon itself. So when we’re thinking about the Hunger Games as a future dystopian North America, there are echoes of our current day North America that have lived on. Part of it is industry, part of it is culture. I mean something that we learned in the prequel that came out in 2020 is that reaping day, when all of these children are chosen to see who is going to go into the Hunger Games, takes place on the 4th of July.

So there are all of these echoes of American experiences and ideas and culture that have lived on, even though the government has changed so drastically.

Karabaic: One of the places your first deep dive long video found that the Capitol and Hunger Games, and I was really surprised to learn that it’s almost definitely in Salt Lake City. Can you tell me what research led you to determining that and what clues were a factor?

Dove Makes: Yeah, so honestly what made me start to look into it is because I was so frustrated by this, I don’t know how it has just taken over the narrative that people really believe that the Capitol is in Denver. And I’m like, guys, it literally cannot be in Denver because when we are given the context told about the original war that led to the creation of Panem, as we know, it talks about the strategy that the Capitol used and why they were able to beat the rebels. Specifically, the Capitol is west of the Rocky Mountains and most of the other districts are east of them.

So them having to cross the mountains left them extremely vulnerable to counter attacks and that was a major reason that they lost the war. And if we’re thinking, okay, nestled in the mountains, but west of the Rockies, there’s only so many places and Salt Lake City is kind of the obvious contender.

And then it was funny, once I posted that video, I had so many people from Utah being like we all assumed that it was apparently most of the people there were already like, yeah, this is totally Salt Lake City.

One of the weirdest things, though, that I came across that is somehow one of the most compelling arguments is this idea Suzanne Collins has come out and said that Katniss only includes information in her inner monologue that she thinks is important. And when she’s in the Capitol over the course of the first book, she mentions the streets seven times and in three of those times she mentions just how wide they are. And something I learned as I was doing research for this video is Salt Lake City has the widest streets in the US by a long shot. It’s like, I want to say they’re 800 feet wide and for a comparison, Portland’s are like 220. That was by design.

That was a principle that Joseph Smith and other founders of the Salt Lake City area, people who were coming there to sort of create a Mormon state, that was something that they had written into their blueprint for the perfect Mormon city.

Karabaic: Which district is likely to be based on the Pacific Northwest?

Dove Makes: Oh, absolutely we are district seven, no question about it because district seven provides lumber and paper.

Karabaic: Yeah, that’s probably us.

Dove Makes: I think we’re kind of known for timber. We also are uniquely, our landscape just primes us to be that we have one character that we know really well from District seven, Joanna, but she doesn’t really give us an idea of what home might be. So we don’t have a huge window into what that economic landscape looks like. But rest assured we will soon because I will be going on a deep dive of every single district.

Karabaic: So many readers see Hunger Games as sort of a dystopian cautionary tale about economic disparity and authoritarianism in the United States in particular. Do you think that examining the series in this in-depth way provides any wisdom for the times we’re living in now?

Dove Makes: Oh, absolutely. Not even just me examining it in depth. I mean, that’s just my own passion project. I was so taken aback when I re-read for the first time as an adult, I was like, there are so many relevant messages to today.

A huge recurring theme is a reminder that your neighbors are not your enemies. You need to remember who the actual enemy is, who the people who are trying to oppress us and prevent us from accessing necessary resources and a general standard of living that all people deserve. And it’s not the people who have a little bit more money than you in a richer neighborhood in your town. Those are not your enemies. The people who are taking care of your lawn or cleaning people’s homes, those are not your enemies.

Your enemies are the people who are higher up that you don’t see every day. The other part of it, I would say, huge recurring theme: We, as a general whole, need to remember that we are not immune to propaganda either.

Karabaic: I mean, I feel like I see some form of propaganda every day and it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish it from facts.

Dove Makes: It is. And the thing too is propaganda has this very negative connotation and for the most part it is used in negative ways to push certain ideology in order for somebody to gain something. But story — art and storytelling — is a part of any successful movement. People need a story to cling onto to give them hope.

And hope is the thing that’s going to get us through difficult and weird times where we don’t always know what tomorrow is going to look like. We need to be critical and think about who is telling that story and what they might gain from you believing it.

Karabaic: Thank you so much for joining me, Dove Makes.

Dove Makes: Yeah, thank you for having me.