Interactivity, Indigeneity, and the Digital Imaginary

Hradil, Cassandra

intro

<a id="doc18"></a>When I played through Highway of Tears at ImagineNATIVE a second time, to experience it as it was intended, the glitch came again. It was not until the third play through that the voice of the mother returned. Her name, she was able to tell me that time, is Matilda Wilson. To see what I saw the first two times, you can scroll back up and watch the last four minutes of the video above with the audio off. Much later, I remembered that Riding the Trail of Tears incorporates glitching - in fact, it forms an integral part of the plot. In Riding the Trail of Tears, Grandpa Art’s “Surround Vision” is sold after his death and turned into a tourist venture — a completely immersive experience in which tourists actually feel like they are experiencing the Trail of Tears. Tallulah works on the ride adapted from her grandfather’s technology, lending ‘authenticity’ to the venture and leading her own tours through the virtual reality. The major conflict of the story arises when one of her tourists, Irma Rosenberg, disappears from inside the ride, accidentally finding herself among the digitally generated non-player characters (gamers call them NPCs) of the virtual reality. Hausman reveals to us that there is an unexpected liveliness within the machine: <blockquote>“We cannot leave while we still think we’re the people we were programmed to be.” “We’re not supposed to be here… but here is where we always come back”… “We are targets. We were programmed to be killed, then brought back to life.” “We always begin again after we die… just to be killed again.”[38]</blockquote> In Hausman’s story, the NPCs (which come to be called the “Misfits,” but are suggested to be the “Little People” of Cherokee intellectual traditions) unmask the virtual reality tour as an act of violence perpetrated over and over not only at the expense of the Cherokee people outside of the virtual reality, like Tallulah, but against the Little People created within it. The structural violence is built into the machine itself, with its never-ending loops killing the Little People again and again, enacting and re-enacting human structures of violence. It is only a “glitch” - the arrival of Irma Rosenberg among the Little People - that breaks the technological cycle and alters the course of re-enacted history. To the denizens of the virtual reality, the “glitch” is actually a much-anticipated prophecy that allows them to find liberation: <blockquote>They walked. All one thousand of them… They did not have any wagons. Historically, a typical detachment on the Trail of Tears contained about fifty wagons for each one thousand people. But clearly, these Misfits were no typical detachment. They needed no wagons— they were now more alive than they had ever been before… Their feet, after years of storing energy, moved from potential to kinetic as they tread north-northeast over the soft and soggy slopes, a massive digital human millipede… No one wore the turtle shell rattles on their legs, but Irma was positive she heard echoes of rattling shakers as the thousand Misfits marched forward, marching northeast and toward the sky, marching away from the past and the future as they moved together into the present.[39]</blockquote> Like Grandpa Art’s original Surround Vision, the march of the Misfits breaks down boundaries in time and space. In later chapters, I will explore the ways that indigenous speculative fictions rework space-time, and what that means for indigenous technologies and futurisms. For now, it is most important to acknowledge that this echoes the effect of Grandpa Art’s original technology. The story of the “Misfit” Cherokee Little People that rebelled within the machine is a powerful piece of fiction — a bold re-writing of the past from within the virtual present. But it also points toward a technological reality: the encoding of human power structures into digital technology. In Hausman’s text, the virtual reality tourist ride is an appropriated technology, taken from Grandpa Art and turned into a site of Western control. That Westernization is written into the programming of the ride itself; but when the Little People begin their march, we can see traces of Grandpa Art’s original influence in their renewed liveliness and in how they break apart barriers of time and space. The march is a re-appropriation of the technology, a reclamation. And it all happens because of the glitch — because of the moment of unexpected outcome that breaks the colonial hierarchy just long enough to open the door for a different way. </div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [38] Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears, 119-129 [39] Ibid., 243-245 [[Continue|Indigenized Chun]]

<div align="center">Now</div> I first experienced an indigenous creator’s virtual reality documentary on the same day that I learned about Yuxweluptun’s work. In 2016, I traveled from Massachusetts to Toronto to attend ImagineNATIVE, a four-day indigenous film and media festival. Archer Pechawis, a Cree digital media artist, had seen the installation in 1992 and was also there to witness ImagineNATIVE in 2016. He mentioned Yuxweluptun - at the time, speaking to an entire panel dedicated to virtual reality. He observed that now, as in 1992, the conversation seemed to center indigenous digital technology as a site of emergence.[32] <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [32] Jason Edward Lewis et al., “Indigenous VR Spotlight” (ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, October 20, 2016). [[Continue|Returning the Gift]]

<div align="center">Organization of Chapters</div> Chapter One centers on adaptation. “Close playings” of the Inuit game Never Alone (2014) coupled with tribally specific research and literary contexts aim to show how an indigenous story can adapt to different media and contexts. The emphasis here is on narrative and storytelling aspects of the game, rather than structural characteristics of deeply obscured levels of software. Additionally, this chapter explores how indigenous storytellers worked within generic video game conventions, yet reshaped them by the very act of their storytelling — altering our collective understanding of what games look like. This chapter also touches on the challenges and limitations of cross-cultural collaboration in building indigenous stories into digital forms. Chapter Two is about resistance. This is a deeper exploration of how indigenous game designers engage with the structural and code-level workings of creating games, with an emphasis on how this is a decolonial process. The chapter will highlight the ways that indigenous games work against the grain of technology’s structures, whether by exposing troubling features of mainstream computing systems or by building their own structures to embody alternate pathways for digital technology. The works of Elizabeth LaPensée are central to this chapter, while games, writings, and conversations from Renee Nejo, Allen Turner, Jason Edward Lewis, and other digital creators are also explored. Additionally, indigenous speculative fictions will be used to contextualize the content of the games, forms of resistance, and the role of technology within broader indigenous intellectual traditions. The conclusion to this thesis is about healing. Renee Nejo says that indigenous games are all about healing - that they are her medicine.[48] I hope that at the end of this thesis, the power of indigenous technologies to bring healing to indigenous communities will emerge as strongly as their power to challenge settler colonialism. [48] “Fun and Indigi-Games!” <div align="center"><a href="https://chradil.github.io/essay/one.html" > Continue to Chapter One</a></div>

Typecasting through higher level coding languages<a id="doc22"></a>Automation can be likened to the casting of letters into type in printing. It is the point at which language is made material, and “relational models are crystallized into technological objects.”[43] Through automation, many of the more repetitive tasks that the machine must perform are written into standardized mechanisms, code commands that can be reused to save time and work for programmers who now can work in higher levels of abstraction, divorced from the menial labor of the machine’s needs. Unfortunately, automation also has a tendency to make the subjective seem objective, as well as to force users and creators into interacting with the machine in particular, limited ways[44] — much the way that, for example, type that is cast in the Roman alphabet forces users of the press to interact with the machine of the press in a particular way, which in turns reflects a structure of power. Through automation, the inequalities of military power dynamics are preserved within the mechanism of giving direct commands to the computer. The decision-making processes of the first women “computers” have been codified into mechanisms of command that are no longer modified or questioned, thereby hiding both their subjectivity and their labor. The technical term for this phenomenon is transparency, which means “users can efficiently accomplish their tasks with the help of a glossy surface that shields them from the depths of the computer.”</a> As the subjective process by which these pieces of code were created is rendered invisible, the automated commands themselves take on a default authority. Chun identifies automation as reification - “source code become ‘thing.’”[45] Automation and the transparency that it facilitates work in a similar way to early settler narratives about print in America. Like Thomas Harriot’s misrepresentation of a language barrier as a “civilized”/“savage” binary, automation selects one way of communication as the way, and transparency hides the process by which it got there in order to give the appearance that it is the only way. Harriot was able to use his Bible as an object in order to elide the role of language from his account altogether, therefore telling a story that revolves around the “civilized” object. The narrative that he tells elides indigenous literacy and denies the possibility of indigenous print. In the same way, automation alters the narrative of computing in order to elide possibilities of interacting with the hardware in ways that do not conform to the power relationships and command structure from the original military context that became codified. These structures come to seem inevitable; as literacy is “civilized” (European), computers are to be commanded (embodying military power relations). For example, indigenous game designer Renee Nejo has spoken about the way that binarism within computing systems affects her game Blood Quantum. I shall elaborate on this point in Chapter Two, but for now, it is worth noting that Blood Quantum involves interacting with “droplets” of various colors. Nejo designed the game to be an exploration of mixed identities, but she realized that the system was actually encouraging players toward racial purity, because within the context of the software it is the most efficient way to “win” the game.[46] Nejo’s game, which comes from a vastly different perspective than the rigid hierarchies of the military, exposes the subjective nature of the system; she now has to make a choice about where to break the technology in order to best comment upon or alter its workings. </div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [43] Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, 7 [44] Emerson, Lori, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) argues that this problem extends to interface as well: “the emptiness of interactive features in most pieces, which may be touted as offering the reader a liberatory freedom but that in fact simply allow the reader to choose between several predetermined directions” (43) [45] Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces, 78; 41 [46] Elizabeth LaPensée, Allen Turner, Renee Néjo, Ishmael Hope, and Edgar Serrano. “Fun and Indigi-Games!” (presented at the Indigenous Comic Con, Albuquerque, November 19, 2016). This kind of structural racism within computing is what makes Hausman’s literary depiction of the Little People being killed over and over by the virtual reality machine so unsettlingly astute. [[Continue|Imagining Otherwise in Technology]]

<div align="center">Introduction - Histories of Indigenous Technologies</div> <blockquote>Tallulah pushes the button. Nothing happens at first, but a few seconds later, all the television screens click on, one by one, starting with the front windshield. The windows hum, the colors brighten. Tallulah feels the screens turning her on like a bulb. She was inside something larger than herself, something that dwarfed even this big red Jeep Cherokee with television windows. Her suspicions had proven true — Grandpa Art was completely nuts. “I call it Surround Vision,” he says. “I know you’ve heard about the Trail of Tears.” He points to an image on the horizon that coalesces upon the windshield. “Well, there it is.”</blockquote> <div align="right">--Riding the Trail of Tears (2011), 32-33</div> Tallulah, her grandpa Art, and his “Surround Vision” are the creations of Cherokee speculative fiction author Blake Hausman. Tallulah’s story, like her first experience with virtual reality, is a narrative about the unexpected. When she turns on the screens, her first feeling is one of awakening, but her first thought is that Grandpa Art is crazy. Hausman’s humorous juxtaposition expresses Tallulah’s disbelief as a gap between what Tallulah knows and what she feels. And as the reader experiences her internal disconnect, we also witness a temporal disconnect in the scene’s narrative, as the scene switches from present to past tense, and then back to present. Grandpa Art, too, changes tense: “you’ve heard about the Trail of Tears… there it is.” The multiple tense changes foreground the significance of what Grandpa Art has programmed the Surround Vision to do: he has brought the Trail of Tears out of its comfortably distant position in the past and placed it into the present. From its position on the literal (digital) horizon, it looms into the future. Tallulah’s first experience with her grandpa’s Surround Vision tells us something about the surprising capability of digital technology to break down barriers — barriers of time, space, and understanding. In a literal sense, the power of this technology is beyond surprising - it is paradoxical; putting television “screens,” as they are called at the beginning of the passage, into the windows of a car creates a boundary from the outside world. The original meaning of “screen” — a barrier — emphasizes this sense. However, by the end of the passage, the screens are no longer called “screens” - they are “television windows.” And while screens are boundaries, windows are portals. They open passages through barriers that would otherwise seem to be closed. In this case, the most significant barrier is time. What happens when the separation of past and present tense suddenly becomes permeable, Hausman asks? What assumptions are we forced to question, what new truths must we reckon with? This thesis is a story about how digital technology forces us to reckon with indigenous modernity and colonial violence. It is about the discomfort of being confronted by the Trail of Tears in present time. Still, it is more about indigenous technology as adaptation, resistance, and healing. It is about learning to see how digital technology is being continuously incorporated into indigenous networks of knowledge. And perhaps most of all, it is about people like Grandpa Art, who risk being called “completely nuts” in order to see if putting screens up can break barriers down. [[Continue|The History of Indigenous Literary Technologies]]

<a id="doc21"></a>Digital technology, at its simplest, is composed of hardware, software, and interface. Hardware is the machine itself - to stick with the printing analogy, the press. The interface is what the user sees and interacts with, often a screen. Software is the murky space of communication in between the two, and it is this space that can be most closely likened to the printing press’ type. Like the type that Sequoyah re-worked, software is the space in which subjective language hardens into something seen as tangible or objective. In her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Chun describes how software is built up out of a complex system of interrelated code. Code refers to the languages that have been created to mediate between the commands of human programmers and tasks for the machine to perform at hardware level. Like Sequoyah’s syllabary, coding languages have been deliberately constructed from particular linguistic contexts. They are thus highly cultural in nature. While Sequoyah’s syllabary brings out aspects of Cherokee linguistic forms and comes to signify broadly for Cherokee culture and sovereignty, programming languages find their roots in military contexts in the United States, and they carry with them aspects of that rigid, hierarchical culture. Chun tells us that “software languages draw from a series of imperatives that stem from World War II command and control structures.” The technical term for an automated section of code is a “command”; we can even see some of this terminology trickle down to our modern day keyboards, with their “control” and “command” keys. These linguistic properties find their roots in the highly gendered military origins of computing.[40] Coding languages incorporate not only hierarchies of command, but of inequality. For example, the mechanism of telling a machine to do something, of giving an order to be obeyed, derives from a gendered power relationship in which a man commands a woman, as the first “computers” were actually women who operated the hardware of the machines. The inequalities that emerged in these relationships were significant; Alan Turing called the women working under him on the cryptanalysis machines at Bletchley Park “slaves.” Along similar lines, Chun claims that the mechanism of commanding the machine “resuscitates dreams of sovereign power,” identifying the pleasure of command with an imperial-colonial desire to control. The military context renders the imperial-colonial lens apt here.[41] It is important to note these first women “computers” made substantial innovations in the development of coding:

The women who worked on the ENIAC machine during WWII did not simply operate the machine, they helped shape it and make it functional… Programming the ENIAC—that is, wiring the components together in order to solve a problem—was difficult, especially since there were no manuals or exact precedents. To solve a problem, such as how to determine ballistics trajectories for new weapons, ENIAC “programmers” had first to break down the problem logically into a series of small yes/no decisions.[42]

Essentially, these women were doing the hard work of building linguistic structures to translate between their (male) commanding officers and the machine. Although their work was highly subjective, as all translation processes are, their decision-making processes have since become automated, and their labor erased. </div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [40] Chun, Wendy, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011), 29 [41] Ibid., 30; 29 [42] Ibid., 32 [[Continue|The hardening of code/typecasting thru higher level coding languages]]

1992 and 2016 are both critical junctures at which indigenous creators participate(d) in and contribute(d) to great surges in creative digital development. In 1992, the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’ landing also marked the first annual gathering of Returning The Gift, a watershed conference that brought nearly 400 indigenous writers together in community and self-determination. The conference marked a surge in generative discussions around indigenous literary traditions — affirmations of the continuing importance of awikhiganawôgan (the process of writing, drawing, marking — “an activity that can transform, an activity that has power”).[32] Joseph Bruchac writes in his introduction to Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival : <blockquote>Although what has been happening in the last few decades in North American Native writing has been termed a ‘renaissance,’ that word may be both inadequate and inaccurate… A renaissance is a sort of reawakening, but contemporary Native writing is both something old emerging in new forms and something that has never been asleep.[33]</blockquote> Among the indigenous writers who participated in these formative discussions are speculative fiction authors who, like Hausman and Stephen Graham Jones, have contributed to an indigenous literary tradition that anticipates and imagines the importance of digital technology in the context of indigenous life ways and intellectual thought.[34] <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [32] Brooks, Common Pot, 219 [33] Bruchac, Joseph, Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival (Sun Tracks, Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 1994), xvii [34] It is worth noting that Returning The Gift is now in its 25th year, and representatives from the organization were present at the first Indigenous Comic Con in 2016. </div> [[Continue|Imagine Otherwise]]

By the time Sequoyah was working on his syllabary in 1821, he was drawing upon traditions of adaptive resistance both from Cherokee red/white political structures and from a broader history of indigenous image-making. Sequoyah had to carefully negotiate tensions between his own belief in separatist resistance (red) and hegemonic narratives framing “literacy” as a symbol of “civilization.”[13] In particular, the years of the 1820s leading up to the Trail of Tears were politically characterized by “acculturated Cherokees, who often believed that Christianity and ‘advancement’ on White terms were the only way to survive as a people.”[14] Thus, Sequoyah was grappling both with Euro-American narratives that sought to impose a “civilized”/“savage” binary onto his people and with the internal tension of the red/white political consciousness shared by the Cherokee people. Sequoyah’s response was neither to reject literate technologies altogether nor to accept the colonial hegemonies of power that seemed inherent within print technology. Rather, he found a path that played upon the interdependence and commonality of the red/white dualism: “the enduring Cherokee spirit of defiance.” He created a system of symbols that were uniquely fitted to syllables of the Cherokee language — a system well-tailored enough that “a majority of the Cherokee people were literate in it within months.” Particularly in its print form, the syllabary became a symbol of Cherokee nationalism that could protect knowledge from outsiders and keep the Cherokee nation connected in a time of intense displacement and removal; at the same time, it was used as a symbol of Cherokee “civilization” along white standards by more assimilationist factions.[15] The syllabary thus occupies a “pivotal position—between the reinforcement of a hierarchy and its dismantling” and reflects the red/white dualistic forces that contributed to its creation.[16] Sequoyah broke print technology. He saw a way to physically separate the act of printing from the colonial contexts in which “literacy… became a vehicle for social control.”[17] Printer and many other indigenous people had already shown the utility of printing in indigenous communities while making their own mark on the development of print technology by printing in indigenous languages. Sequoyah went even further by developing a uniquely Cherokee print form that required the physical form of the press to be altered. In order to do so, he needed to identify the point at which European power structures physically shaped the press most drastically - the point at which language became hardened into physical form: type. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [13] Bender, Margaret, Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003) describes Sequoyah as a “progress-oriented, separatist pagan” (36) and claims that he “disliked the changes whites and some Cherokees were trying to bring about in Cherokee society” (35). [14] Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm, 65 [15] Ibid., 30; Round, Removeable Type, 130; Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture, 25, 3, 29 [16] Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture, 25 [17] Ibid., 38 </div> [[Continue|The Indigenous/Technological Binary]]

<div align="center">Points of Entry into Digital Technologies</div> As with literature, indigenous digital technologies have a long history. In the 1980s, renowned Cherokee/Yaqui game developer John Romero, infamous for his work on games such as Doom and Quake, shook up contemporary understandings of what was possible in digital games by expanding the way that dimensional space could operate in a game. His work shaped the path of first person shooters (FPS), now considered a staple of the genre. In Chapter Two, I will explore the impact of his work, which Elizabeth LaPensée credits to indigenous understandings of dimensionality. For now, I want to turn to another real-life Grandpa Art. In 1992, the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’ first colonial encounter, when virtual reality was just beginning to gain conceptual traction in the mainstream and the development of the Oculus Rift[27] was still twenty years away, indigenous (Coast Salish) artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun developed an installation at the Banff Virtual Reality Laboratory called Inherent Rights, Vision Rights. Yuxweluptun’s installation is a virtual environment that allows the viewer to enter his rendering of a Coast Salish longhouse during a ceremony. The virtual longhouse, like Yuxweluptun’s paintings, is almost surrealistic with its bright colors and busy patterning; rather than mimicking reality, Yuxweluptun’s style deliberately resists it. His virtual environment doesn’t look real, even as the immersive quality of the virtual medium makes it feel real, an effect that Kanienkehaka multimedia artist Jackson 2Bears calls “an artificially produced trance” in his analysis of Yuxweluptun’s exhibit.[28]

[The entrance to the longhouse from outside. Photo from Jackson 2Bears.]

Both 2Bears and digital artist Loretta Todd identify Inherent Rights, Vision Rights as both a landmark in VR art history and an outlier in virtual experiences. Todd comments: “Yuxweluptun does not want you to forget your body… You are yourself, and must own your feelings and your experience."[29] 2Bears argues that this virtual “return to the flesh” disrupts the human/machine binary that is accepted in Western digital and virtual ontologies.[30] Yuxweluptun, therefore, contributed to the development of modern VR by creating one of the first art pieces ever to utilize the technology, but he also resisted the Western conventions of the medium. Yuxweluptun’s work resonates with creators like Sequoyah, and with so many other indigenous authors who have affected and resisted popular understandings of what literature could be. As with Sequoyah, whose syllabary continues to be used by Cherokee people today, the groundwork that Yuxweluptun laid in 1992 gives roots to indigenous explorations and conversations in virtual reality that are going on right now. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [27] Generally accepted as the first viable virtual reality (VR) technology that has been developed. [28] 2Bears, Jackson, “A Conversation with Spirits Inside the Simulation of a Coast Salish Longhouse” (CTheory, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/a-conversation-with-spirits-inside-the-simulation-of-a-coast-salish-longhouse/) 153-154 [29] Townsend, Melanie A., Dana Claxton, and Steve Loft, Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual & Digital Culture (Banff, Alta. : Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 2005), 18-19; 160-1 [30] 2Bears, “A Conversation with Spirits,” 158-160 </div> [[Continue|Bioapparatus]]

Similarly, Sequoyah’s engagement with print technology reflects indigenous histories of technological adaptation that were well established before his time. Indigenous technological resistance has long involved the adaptation of colonial technologies into existing networks of technology, communication, and knowledge. In New England, Lisa Brooks has written extensively on the way that “the network of relations” moves, and has long moved, information along waterways. The form of this information varied from wampum to birchbark writings. Thus, when colonial print and writing technologies arrived, in a physical sense “communities adapted an old technology within an extant system of communication to pass new knowledge through Native space.”[10] In 1659, a Nipmuc man who came to be known as James Printer began working on the first printing press in North America, where he set type for the first Bible printed in North America in an Algonquian language. As Brooks articulates, “Printer adapted to a changing, challenging environment, using his linguistic skills to survive colonial war, serving as a scribe and negotiator for Native leaders, and leveraging his invaluable talent to negotiate his way back to the press after the [King Philip’s] war."[11] Brooks’ account of Printer illuminates that he, in the spirit of red/white consciousness, was carefully navigating tensions between continuous adaptation and fierce resistance as he engaged with the printing press. Part of this negotiation was bringing his skill as a multilingual scribe back to his community during the war, turning the skills that he learned in colonial contexts into instruments of radical indigenous resistance. As people like Printer adapted colonial writing technologies to their own contexts, writing technologies shaped by colonial and indigenous users and makers passed through native spatial networks. Colonial print technologies came to be brought into indigenous ideological and grammatical conceptions of “image making,” becoming awikhiganak - the Abenaki word that pertains to written or drawn material.[12] Indigenous awikhigan technologies predated the arrival of colonial printing, and these technologies came to contextualize the print technologies that indigenous nations adapted. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [10] Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (U of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8; 9 [11] Brooks, “Turning the Looking Glass on King Philip’s War: Locating American Literature in Native Space” (American Literary History, no. 4 (2013): 718-750), 727 [12] Brooks, Common Pot, xxi Unlike colonial conceptions of “literacy,” which is an exclusive term that has been used as a means of “social control” (Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture, 37), awikhigan is an inclusive term that adapts, rather than polices, its boundaries. </div> [[Continue|Return to Sequoyah]]

The digital media and virtual reality works at ImagineNATIVE build upon and shape that relationship. It is perhaps fitting that the first indigenous virtual reality documentary that I experienced at ImagineNATIVE was Lisa Jackson’s Highway of Tears, reminiscent in some ways of the virtual reality that Hausman constructs in Riding the Trail of Tears. Jackson’s short documentary tells a story about the epidemic of racialized and sexual violence against indigenous women in Canada. Between 1980 and 2012, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported 1,181 missing or murdered indigenous women and girls; an estimate from the Native Women’s Association of Canada put the number closer to 4,000. In 2016, the numbers continue to climb. Until very recently, the Canadian government refused to acknowledge the issue despite consistent grassroots organizing (including over seven hundred individual recommendations to address increasing rates of violence) and a 2004 report from Amnesty International. As a recent book dedicated to missing and murdered indigenous women asserts, ongoing violence against these women in present times is structurally driven by five hundred years of violence under settler colonialism:[36] <blockquote>Our women are born “at-risk” in First Nation communities, with no housing, no clean water, no healthcare, no education or employment living in Third World conditions in the middle of one of the richest countries in the world. They disappear while hitchhiking or walking home along remote highways because there was no other alternative, no other transportation.[37]</blockquote> One of these remote roads, Highway 16, has proven so dangerous for indigenous women that it is called the Highway of Tears — its name a reminder that the colonial violence that led to the Trail of Tears is an ongoing structure unconfined by time or national borders. It is this highway that Lisa Jackson set out to document in virtual reality. <div align="center">Scan the QR code to view Highway of Tears in VR:</div>

<div align="center">Or watch as a regular video here: </div> <div align="center"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q-gRYS3LXvA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div> Like Tallulah, I found the unexpected in my first encounter with Highway of Tears. I was perceiving information that I had been intellectually aware of, but I felt pure shock. In fact, I was struck silent. If I had to write an account of the experience, I would take it from the notes I wrote that day: <blockquote>Non-interactivity - lack of agency as part of the point. The scene in the mother’s home - a literal silencing of the indigenous woman’s voice. She looks straight at you and talks, right in her home, on her couch, and you can’t hear her. There is a difference when she stops speaking, too. She is silent, holds up her daughter’s image, and makes eye contact and I couldn’t look away.</blockquote> Like Inherent Rights, Vision Rights, Highway of Tears forced me back into my own body. Here, as with Tallulah’s experience, there is a transition at the very end: past tense and first person. I couldn’t look away. So strong was her gaze that it pushed me out of the realm of analysis and generalizations and back into the unsettling territory of my embodied response. My shock. My paralysis. Those were the new truths I had to reckon with. </div> There’s something else important about this encounter — I wasn’t seeing the same virtual experience that you most likely saw when you followed the link to the Youtube video above. When I experienced Highway of Tears for the first time, the technology glitched, and the audio cut out for the majority of the piece — an effect that I thought was a dramatic choice, to see this woman, a woman that I could see by the picture she was holding up was a mother whose daughter had gone missing, speaking and not be able to hear her. I thought it was a deliberate commentary on the silencing of indigenous women’s voices. It was not until the panel discussion later in the day that I realized the device that had moved me so deeply was in fact a glitch, a “mistake.” </div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [36] Levin, Dan, “Dozens of Women Vanish on Canada’s Highway of Tears, and Most Cases Are Unsolved” (The New York Times, May 24, 2016, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/world/americas/canada-indigenous-women-highway-16.html" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/world/americas/canada-indigenous-women-highway-16.html</a>); Lavell-Harvard, Memee and Jennifer Brant, Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016),2 [37] Lavell-Harvard and Brant, Forever Loved, 5 </div> [[Continue|Hausman]] or [[Echo|slug]]

<div align="center">Technological Frameworks</div> The glitch that I experienced at ImagineNATIVE was not quite that kind of opening. But it was a reminder that with digital technology, which is deeply scored by relationships of power and control, sometimes it is the breaking or the subversion of technology that reveals the most powerful insight. Sequoyah proves once again to be a critical precedent. As explored above, Sequoyah identified language as the crux at which technology meets ideology in the printing press. He realized that the type, the point at which language becomes materially embodied, was the fault line along which he could most successfully break the printing process and indigenize it. Indigenous game makers are following his example today by identifying points at which digital technology intersects with ideology, and by seeking to break, expose, or indigenize those places. In order to understand how indigenous game creators approach digital technology, it is critical to look at exactly where and how the workings of the machine become encoded with ideology and culture. As with print, the most outstanding example proves again to be a kind of language -- in this case, code. [[Continue|Code as Language/Crux]]

<div align="center">Indigenous Comic Con</div> The notion that indigeneity and technology are mutually exclusive - and the accompanying effort to deny modernity to indigenous people - continues to affect indigenous creators and users of literary and digital technologies. At the first Indigenous Comic Con (November, 2016), Blackfeet science fiction author Stephen Graham Jones and Anishinaabe game designer/creator Elizabeth LaPensée led a panel on indigenous futurisms, a term that LaPensée’s mother, Grace Dillon, coined.[22] In the course of this panel, Jones discussed his experience with writing in a genre whose creators and readers had difficulty conceiving of indigenous-ness and science fiction in the same breath. He noted that it can feel like checking off boxes to satisfy the genre audience, and then using the space in between the tropes to explore and do his own storytelling. LaPensée added that “you walk into the science fiction world and the perception is that Native people don’t have science.”[23] Jones’ and Lapensée’s comments affirm the way that science, like technology, is erased from outsider conceptions of indigenous identity because it is so closely linked to notions of modernity. The deep irony is that Jones and LaPensée defy this false framework by engaging with technologies in the media that they choose to work with, and by evoking themes related to science, technology, and futurisms in their work, as I shall discuss in Chapter Two. The fact that, in 2016, an indigenous author and game designer were able to sit at the same table and speak on ideas about indigeneity and technology that find their roots five hundred years ago is powerful. Their encounter confirms a continuity of resistance across time and across technologies, echoing the syllables of Sequoyah and affirming the validity of awikhigan: literature and games are connected as technologies, ways of storytelling, just as drawing and writing have long been.

[LaPensée and Jones at Indigenous Comic Con 2016. Photo taken by the author.] <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [22] Dillon, Grace L, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012). [23] “Back to the (Indigenous) Future(isms).” </div> [[Continue|Intellectual Networks]]

Sequoyah’s ability to perceive language as a crux between technology and ideology is significant, given how hard colonial narratives worked to obscure this fact in favor of binaries that situate technologies as inherently “civilized” and therefore Western and decidedly not indigenous. Colonial narratives reflect this misrepresentation from nearly the onset of colonization. In 1590, English writer Thomas Harriot claimed that when he first encountered people of the Powhatan nation, his Bible seemed to “farre exceed [the Native peoples’] capacities to comprehend.”[18] Historian Phillip Round points out that Harriot must have experienced some cognitive dissonance about this claim, as he also wrote about the Powhatan peoples’ “elaborate semiotic system that included verbal and materials signs.” Of course, in actuality Harriot’s Bible was incomprehensible to the Powhatan people he encountered because it was not in their language - the same reason that Harriot could not understand their “elaborate semiotic system.” Harriot’s account deliberately misrepresented a simple language barrier as evidence of how the Powhatan people were naturally too “simple” and “rude” to understand written technology.[19] Thus, colonial narratives generated a false binary between indigeneity and literary technologies. As Harriot’s account illustrates, this indigenous/technology mythos has also been used to signify for a “primitive”/“civilized” binary since its origin, and it persists to this day. Perhaps this explains why the false indigenous/technology binary has persisted with such disturbing tenacity: at the end of the day, the indigenous/technology binary exists within a broader framework that projects “primitiveness” onto indigenous peoples to justify the ongoing colonization of their territories. As Jean O’Brien reveals in her book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, this framework, too, has its roots in an ongoing history of colonial narratives. While O’Brien’s work focuses specifically on local historical texts, her work speaks to “a larger national narrative of the ‘vanishing Indian,’” and it is relevant here, too, because “the collective story these texts told insisted that non-Indians held exclusive sway over modernity, denied modernity to Indians, and in the process created a narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”[20] The myth that modernity is something “non-Indian,” has been “disseminated not just in the form of the written word but also in a rich ceremonial cycle of pageants, commemorations, monument building, and lecture hall performance."[21] “Modernity” as a concept is particularly important to tease out here, as it carries with it connotations about time and particularly about the myth of future time as inherently progressive. Technology is — and as colonial attitudes toward indigenous literacy show, has long been — attached to the construction of history as progress. This holds true from printing presses to computers. Because of the strong ties of technology to modernity, and because modernity is “denied” to indigenous people, denying that indigenous people are technological has remained an important feature of the popular imagination. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [18] Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, qtd. in Round, Phillip, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2010), 12 [19] Ibid. [20] O’Brien, Jean M, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (U of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiii [21] Ibid., xii </div> [[Continue|Indigenous Literary and Digital Technology]]

Although Grandpa Art is a fictional character, he could easily have existed in our own world. In 1821, nearly two hundred years before Blake Hausman wrote Grandpa Art into existence, another Cherokee man named Sequoyah risked being called nuts in order to create a new technology. Like Grandpa Art, Sequoyah adapted colonial technologies into something uniquely indigenous in an act of intellectual and practical resistance. He invented a syllabic writing system independent from the Roman alphabet for the Cherokee language, a writing system that, in 1828, the Cherokee Nation opted to have cast into special type.[1] Sequoyah’s syllabary co-opted the most practically useful elements of colonial literate technologies while centering Cherokee language structures and symbologies. He effectively indigenized a form of writing, painstakingly working for months to find a structure and set of symbols that he, as a native speaker, determined to be a fitting extension for the Cherokee language. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [1] Round, Phillip, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2010), 130 [[Continue|Terminology and Survivance]]

<div align="center">A Note on Terminology and Theory</div> When I say “indigenize,” I follow the work of scholars who situate decolonization and indigenization as cooperative ideas. Gerald Vizenor’s open-ended concept of survivance comes to mind. Vizenor articulates survivance as “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response."[5] He writes: <blockquote> The postindian warriors of postmodern simulations would undermine and surmount, with imagination and the performance of new stories, the manifest manners of scriptural simulations and “authentic” representations of the tribes in the literature of dominance.[6]</blockquote> Vizenor’s description of “the postindian warriors of postmodern simulations” invokes the power of imaginative storytelling to disrupt colonial hegemonies in literature. The colonial “literature of dominance,” Vizenor suggests, is a “simulation” - a representation that articulates a subjective, culturally specific relationship to reality, and in this case, a subjective relation of what it means to be indigenous. Yet simulation can be fought by simulation; the “scriptural simulations” of colonialism can be countered by “postmodern simulations” - counternarratives that assert indigenous modernity (“postindian”-ness that extends beyond the colonial conception of what it means to be “indian”) and expand, rather than shrink (as colonial “manifest manners” do) the possibilities of indigenous futures. As Vizenor articulates, “the simulations of survivance are heard and read stories that mediate and undermine the literature of dominance” (12). Vizenor’s language articulates a collaborative relationship between simulation, with its connotations of subjectivity and cultural specificity, and survivance. Indigenous literatures, here, become rooted both in resistances to colonialism and in affirmations of indigenous worldviews - decolonization and indigenization. Also helpful is Daniel Heath Justice’s analysis of the relationship between kinship and decolonization, continuity and resistance. In “Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative,” Justice writes: <blockquote>This is the heart of the decolonization imperative of indigenous literatures: the storied expression of continuity that encompasses resistance while moving beyond it to an active expression of the living relationship between the People and the world…The decolonization imperative in our literature both reflects indigenous continuity of the past and present and projects that continuity into the future. Stories—like kinship, like fire—are what we do, what we create, as much as what we are.[7]</blockquote> Justice’s framing of decolonization as an act of continuity that moves “beyond” resistance speaks to the “more than response” aspect of Vizenor’s survivance. Following their work on survivance and decolonization, I attempt to articulate resistance within indigenous literature and games as not merely reactionary, but rooted in the expression of indigenous ways of knowing. My use of the term “indigenize” is part of my effort to push beyond reactionary language. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [5] Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (U of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii [6] Ibid., 17 [7] Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Go Away, Water!’: Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, edited by Craig Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, 147–68 (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 2008), 150 [[Continue|Red/White Cultural Precedent to Sequoyah]]

<div align="center">1992</div> Yuxweluptun built Inherent Rights, Vision Rights at Bioapparatus, a 1991 residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Ottawa. The goals of the residency were to create access to virtual reality technology for artists and to generate discussion around virtual reality as “a symptom as well as an instrument of a re-ordering of perception and, one can anticipate, of power relations.” The Bioapparatus residency also coincided with the efforts of Loretta Todd to turn the Banff Centre into “a site that welcomed Aboriginal people within the framework of self-government in the arts.” Her efforts brought forth the Aboriginal Film and Media Arts Alliance, and ultimately the Aboriginal Arts Program at the Banff Centre. Yuxweluptun’s piece thus emerged in the context of a burst of creative energy around indigenous art and digital media, energy that continues to burn and grow even now.[31] <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [31] Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991), 10; Transference, Tradition, Technology, 19 </div> [[Continue|ImagineNATIVE]]

<div align="center">Sequoyah</div> Sequoyah’s invention drew upon Cherokee intellectual traditions, as well as long-standing indigenous histories with print technology. Renowned Cherokee author Daniel Heath Justice explores some of those intellectual traditions in his literary history Our Fire Survives the Storm. He situates Cherokee literatures within the contexts of complementary dualism, particularly “traditional Cherokee sociopolitical divisions of red/war and white/peace spheres of influence, where one group of community leaders guided the people during times of peace (‘white’) and another group led during times of conflict (‘red’).” These spheres, with their varying focuses on change and continuity, articulate different approaches toward nationhood but are “linked by the enduring Cherokee spirit of defiance.”[8] In Sequoyah’s time, the red/white framework of resistance continued to appear in Cherokee political and intellectual acts of resistance, as Justice articulates: <blockquote>The first response is what I call the red “Chickamauga consciousness,” so named for the nationalist resistance movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was devoted to armed response to U.S. Violence and expansion… Chickamauga consciousness, an extension of the red/war governmental division, is centered in Cherokee intellectual and artistic separatism, in a rhetorical rejection of literary, historical, or philosophical accommodation. Coupled with the Chickamauga consciousness is a white “Beloved Path” reading that places peace and cultural continuity above potentially self-destructive rebellion.”[9]</blockquote> Justice’s Chickamauga and Beloved Path readings manifest in political, military, and intellectual actions during the time that Sequoyah was building his syllabary, but they draw upon the much older red/white political structure. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [8] Justice, Daniel Heath. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (U of Minnesota Press, 2006), 29; 30 [9] Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm, 30 [[Continue|Printer, Awikhigan, and Indgenous Technological Resistance before Sequoyah]]

Daniel Heath Justice captures the spirit of this literary exploration with one of his signature phrases: “Imagine Otherwise.”[35] Justice calls for speculative literary explorations into alternate realities, futurisms, and technologies — all rooted in indigenous ways of knowing. His work, and the works of other speculative fiction authors, work to decolonize and recontextualize our reality by taking steps into other realms of possibility. However, it is critical to remember that these explorations do not take place in a vacuum; acts of “imagining otherwise” are rooted both in deep indigenous intellectual traditions and in the technological involvement and contributions of indigenous people. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears, which came out in 2011, is informed and contextualized by Yuxweluptun’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights as well as by Cherokee histories. Accordingly, indigenous speculative fictions serve as important means of framing the significance of digital technologies in the context of indigenous intellectual traditions, but also as means of commenting upon the current and evolving relationship between indigenous peoples and digital/virtual realities. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [35]http://imagineotherwise.ca. </div> [[Continue|Highway of Tears]]

<div align="center">"Imagining Otherwise" in Technology</div> In the face of machines that hide their subjectivity through transparency, the ability that Sequoyah possessed to see the place where technology becomes ideology remains critical. The artists at the Bioapparatus residency in 1991</a> understood, and in fact discussed, the phenomenon of culturally-specific computing technology. In the introduction to the Banff Centre’s publication that documents the proceedings of the seminar, seminar leaders Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaff write: <blockquote>Technology often specifically refers to an instrument or a tool which might be articulated in hardware or software. Here, it is considered to be a product of cultural, social and political practices that are already firmly in place. As such, technology develops within existing frameworks that specify what counts as valid knowledge and how it can be obtained. The framework is in place long before the will or the resources are directed towards making a specific instrument: relational models are crystallized into technological objects. Therefore, technology is not neutral but embedded in social and cultural contexts.[47]</blockquote> Indigenous game designers like Nejo are actively engaged in the processes of exposing and destabilizing these hierarchies that we now take for granted in computing. Simultaneously, they are “Imagining Otherwise” and exploring alternate frameworks in which translation between user and machine might take place. There are so many different ways to do this — Elizabeth LaPensée turns to pen and paper to work out her games, ensuring that her ideas — not the constraints of software — are what drive her mechanics; Allen Turner has made a paper RPG whose mechanics are driven by Lakota winter counts and players’ own stories and relationships - not by random number generators. Since it is not currently possible to go back in time and reinvent computing in a different cultural or social context, indigenous game design again takes the Sequoyah route, and fits the technology to indigenous contexts in various acts of resistance, adaptation, and healing. These powerful acts are what I wish to explore. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [47] Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, 7 </div> [[Continue|Organization of Chapters]]

<div align="center">Intellectual Networks</div> In his key literary theory text The People and the Word, Robert Warrior writes on the “intellectual trade routes” that have traversed Native space since a time beyond memory. He posits that “the tradition of Native nonfiction has developed along the modern version of such trade routes and is written on palimpsests of earlier forms of intellectualism.”[24] Today, Native game developers and digital media artists are traversing their own intellectual trade routes rooted in geographical and digital territories, using the language of geographies to denote their digital presence (e.g. Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, Jason Edward Lewis’ use of “terra incognito”).[25] When I propose the idea of indigenous game developers as an intellectual network, I follow Daniel Heath Justice’s theory in “Kinship and the Decolonization Imperative” that community relationships and decolonial writing are cooperative processes, that <blockquote>Kinship—in all its messy complexity and diversity—gives us the best measure of interpretive possibility, as it speaks to the fact that our literatures, like our various peoples, are alive. The decolonization imperative gives us hopeful purpose for our “going on.” Our council fires burn still.[26]</blockquote> Justice’s assertion is all the more powerful for its appearance in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, a book collectively authored by a group of Native literary critics who read, edited, and engage with each others’ essays all within the same collection. Their interactions create an almost hyperlinked text, a network of complex mutual referencing that forms a web of interlinked, collectively-built ideas. Through rigorous collaboration, organizing, creating, and scholarship, indigenous game developers are creating actual and virtual spaces within which the same kind of mutual referencing can build into a strong and growing network of voices. <div> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> [24] Warrior, Robert, The People And the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (U of Minnesota Press, 2005), 182-3 [25] Lewis, “Terra Nullius, Terra Incognito : Aboriginal Reservations About Cyberspace.” Blackflash, 22.1: Spring 2004. Saskatoon, SK. [26] Justice “Go Away, Water! Kinship and the Decolonization Imperative” 166 </div> [[Continue|Yuxweluptun]]

<a id="doc7" style="color: #993300;"></a>In his foundational text Keeping Slug Woman Alive, literary scholar Greg Sarris explores how in traditional stories “there is so much more than just the story and what was said that is the story.” He describes how a story can draw meaning from and engage its listener, relaying the “life and significance” of what happened when one listener “kept thinking about the story and her relationship to it.” Similar insights can be found in ethnographer-linguist Keith Basso’s important concept, recorded from Western Apache storyteller Nick Thompson, that a story is “like an arrow… when it’s strong it goes in deep and starts working on your mind.”<a id="fnlink1" style="color: #993300;"></a><a style="color: #993300;" href="#fn1">[1]</a> <hr /> <a id="fn1" style="color: #993300;"></a><a style="color: #993300;" [1] Sarris, Greg, Keeping Slug Woman Alive : A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993) 45; 38-9; Basso, Keith H, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (UNM Press, 1996)   [[Continue|Hausman]]