This study path guides learners through how historical events can affect the ability for libraries, archives, and museums to develop trust with wider communities, and how to begin addressing these historically biased relationships between institutions and the communities they intend to serve.
This study path will introduce learners to the concept of decolonizing museum practices by exploring the complex relationships between Indigenous people and museums.
In this study path, learners will create a budget proposal for a digital community project using Mukurtu. Learners will consider what resources are needed to ensure ethical collaboration and partnerships.
This study path explores how various description and access systems provide opportunities for the viewer to engage with the emotional and affective dimensions of digitized cultural objects.
This study path provides an introduction to the Mukurtu content management system and involves learning about and implementing models for collaborative curation. This is an extensive exercise that involves a significant up-front investment in set-up and training. Depending on other course work, it may require additional background reading/research as preparation.
This study path exposes students to how descriptive metadata in digital repositories is used to reinforce or disrupt stereotypes about marginalized cultures and communities.
The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) is one of the largest organizations for Indigenous cultural heritage practitioners and those working with indigenous materials in North America. It is an international non-profit organization that maintains a network of support for indigenous programs, provides culturally relevant programming and services, encourages collaboration among tribal and non-tribal cultural institutions, and articulates contemporary issues related to developing and sustaining the cultural sovereignty of Native Nations.
The ATALM also maintains a helpful resource list and advocates for digital inclusion and access in Indigenous communities, including the Digital Inclusion in Native Communities Initiative
Honoring the Dead: A Digital Archive of the Insane Indian Asylum provides access to digitized documents related to the Asylum for Insane Indians located in Canton, South Dakota from 1903 to 1934, bringing together for the first time government documents, letters, and reports widely dispersed throughout national, regional, and state archives.
This project is currently working to digitize materials from the State Archives of the South Dakota State Historical Society. We are excited to also have a case study written on this project by English faculty Stacey Berry (Dakota State University.)
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) conducted the Skins workshop to explore a pedagogy that integrated North American Indigenous cultural frameworks into the design of video games and virtual environments. Skins provides instruction in digital design, art, animation, audio and programming within a context of Aboriginal stories and storytelling techniques. In the pilot workshop with Mohawk youth at the Kahnawake Survival School, students developed interactive environments based on traditional stories from their community in a process that required them to reflect on how they knew those stories, who had told them, and which stories were appropriate for such remediation. In the process, AbTeC found that the discussions about these stories in the context of the technical skills development provided substantial motivation for both further inquiry into the stories and greater participation in the skills development. This paper describes the curriculum and strategies of the Skins pilot workshop.
Games offer a space for Indigenous artists to reify the connections between tradition and technology since Indigenous games can directly engage players in Indigenous ways of knowing through design and aesthetic. The social impact game Survivance, the musical choose-your-own-adventure text game We Sing for Healing, and the mobile game Invaders exemplify games as self-determined spaces for Indigenous expression. And yet, these examples still merely hint at possibilities of self-determined Indigenous games as access to technology expands and the potential to design systems with Indigenous perspectives from the code up unfolds.
