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This article examines Indigenous video games that critique mainstream environmental politics at the level of mechanics. An analysis of video games’ influences on ecological values requires looking beyond the representational to the mechanical relationships between player and software. As a cultural–computational medium, video games are embedded with ethics of interaction that inflect this representational dimension by requiring that players generate the text as participant. With the recent visibility of Indigenous rights movements, developers have embedded Indigenous cultural protocols in the mechanical interactions (or technical protocols) of gameplay. In the context of critique, their integration produces “critical protocols,” configurations of gamic action that encourage players to evaluate their treatment of real-world environments. Critical protocols emerge between the technical and cultural, where scripts for interaction in algorithmic spaces intervene in affirmative game design and work as an analog beyond the game. Indigenous developers call for new ways of computing and critiquing settler digitality through play. These games aim toward representational as well as computational sovereignty.

When Rivers Were Trails is a 2D adventure game wherein The Oregon Trail meets Where the Water Tastes Like Wine through an Indigenous lens. The game depicts a myriad of cultures during the player’s journey from Minnesota to California amidst the impact of land allotment in the 1890s. Initiated by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the game was developed in collaboration with the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University thanks to support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the many Indigenous creatives who contributed design, art, music, and writing. Uniquely, When Rivers Were Trails is a sovereign game, meaning that it was directed and informed by Indigenous creatives who maintained the role of final decisions during development. Merging design research and close reading methods, this study sets out to describe the game’s design, development process in regards to the game writing, and the resulting themes which emerged as a result of engaging Indigenous writers in self-determined representations.

The educational video game, When Rivers Were Trails, was launched in 2019. The purpose of the game is to teach players about Indigenous perspectives of history, US federal allotment policies affecting tribal nations, and some of the effects of these policies on Indigenous peoples. This article explores tribal college student experiences playing When Rivers Were Trails in hopes that it provides the basis for further research into how tribal college faculty may be able to teach the game within their own classrooms. Tribal colleges and universities were created by tribal nations to provide for the higher education needs of their citizens. Using phenomenological research methods, seven college students volunteered to participate in a brief study about their experiences playing the video game. Upon transcription and analysis of the interview data, three themes were developed that capture how these students define their experience with When Rivers Were Trails: feelings of representation, histories of land dispossession, and resilience of communities.

Este artículo analiza las implicaciones ontológicas y el carácter performativo del documental Shekuita o el mal trueno, lanzado en 2017 por un colectivo de producción audio- visual indígena wiwa en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta en Colombia. El documental explora las causas, dudas y consecuencias de un triste incidente ocurrido tres años antes: la caída de un rayo sobre una edificación ceremonial de los wiwas, que causó la muerte a casi una docena de líderes. A partir del contraste entre las explicaciones científicas de la tragedia y las que han investigado las autoridades espirituales de la comunidad desde sus ontologías relacionales, y basándonos en un trabajo de campo cuasietnográfico durante el proceso de filmación, buscamos dar cuenta de un caso específico de descolonización de lo real y de los esfuerzos de una comunidad indígena por la libre expresión y la representación autónoma. Encontramos que este documental abre puertas de forma artística a mundos otros, contados en clave insumisa desde una indigenidad que nos interpela. Concluimos que los wiwas performan un realidad que no necesariamente es la que vivieron, sino una que les permite estratégicamente alcanzar más fácilmente la realidad que quieren recuperar. El artículo intenta contribuir a la visibilización de otras ontologías distintas de la naturalista, a mostrar las autocríticas de esta y a manifestar cómo el audiovisual es un espacio propicio para descolonizar lo real. This paper analyzes the ontological implications and the performative nature of the documentary Shekuita o el mal trueno, released in 2017 by a Wiwa indigenous audiovisual production group in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. The do-cumentary explores the causes, doubts and consequences of a sad incident that happened three years earlier: a lightning strike on a Wiwas ceremonial building, which killed nearly a dozen leaders. Based on the contrast between the scientific explanations of the tragedy and those that the spiritual authorities of the community have investigated according to their relational ontologies and based on a quasi-eth-nographic fieldwork during the filming process, we seek to account for a specific case of decolonization of reality and of the efforts of an indigenous community for free expression and autonomous representation. We find that this documentary opens doors to other worlds in an artistic way, told in an unsubmissive way by an indigenous community that challenges us. We conclude that the Wiwa perform a reality that is not necessarily the one they lived through, but one that strategically allows them to reach the reality they want to recover more easily. The paper at-tempts to contribute to the visibility of other ontologies other than the naturalistic one, to show self-criticism of it and to show how the audiovisual is a propitious space to decolonize reality.

This thesis explores the many ways indigenous religion is articulated, performed and translated in the video game Never Alone - Kisima Inŋitchuŋa (2014). The video game was among the first of its kind – being made in a close collaboration with an indigenous group, and published by the first indigenous owned video game company in the U.S.A. At launch, Never Alone gathered attention from traditional media in both North America and in Europe, and the game reached a global audience. Never Alone tells a story based on Inupiat storytelling, and Cultural Ambassadors gives the player an insight into Inupiat culture and tradition. Never Alone balances on the edge between the conventions of the video game medium and its genres, and of indigenous tradition and religion. This thesis examines how vocabularies that can be related to ‘indigenous religion’ are used and translated in Never Alone, and how these vocabularies relate to a globalizing discourse on indigenous religion. This thesis also explores how the medium of video games facilitates new ways of reclaiming traditions and articulating indigenous religion.

Le lieu de la rupture, ici, se voit déplacé : s'il faut rompre, en cinéma autochtone, ce n'est pas avec ses propres prédécesseurs, comme l'ont fait Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et Agnes Varda. Des cinéastes tels Barnaby, Freeland et Grace peuvent ainsi s'appuyer sur le travail d'ouvreurs de sentiers tels le réalisateur māori Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, en traduction française, Nous étions guerriers, 1994), le réalisateur cheyenne et arapaho Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, 1998) , ainsi que des précurseurs incontournables tels Barclay, en Aotearoa, Nouvelle-Zélande, et la documentariste abénaquise Alanis Obomsawin, figure de proue du cinéma autochtone au Canada. Dans un récent document interne sur le cinéma autochtone en son sein, l'Office national du film (ONF), cet important producteur et diffuseur public d'œuvres audiovisuelles au Canada, explique que pour « comprendre la situation actuelle des cinéastes autochtones a l'ONF », il faut l'envisager a partir des « anciennes politiques gouvernementales visant explicitement a éliminer toute culture autochtone de la société canadienne ». Elle est également sous-tendue par le désir de proposer un storytelling, un art de raconter, issu des peuples autochtones, déterminé par ces derniers tant au niveau de la forme et du contenu cinématographique que dans le processus de production, de réalisation et de diffusion de ces œuvres.

This article examines how “colonial time” is called into question in two short films of the National Film Board of Canada’s series Souvenir, from 2015. The question of time lies at the heart of this series, for which the NFB commissioned contemporary Indigenous filmmakers to take up their archives of visual material on Indigenous peoples. The colonial temporal framework is at work in the vast archives of ethnographic and documentary film and photography on Indigenous peoples dating back to the early twentieth century, in which Indigenous people are often represented as part of “vanishing” cultures. Thus, in this article, I underscore the temporal interruptions that occur when ethnographic visual material of Indigenous peoples is put into the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists. I focus first on what it means to repurpose dehumanizing colonial archives and ask whether visual sovereignty is in fact possible within the archives. By analyzing the reappropriation of archival footage in the short films Mobilize by Caroline Monnet and Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down) by Jeff Barnaby, I elucidate how the filmmakers break with modes of colonial time through what I propose to call “reframings” that offer alternative ways of conceiving of time. By rehabilitating ethnographic images, these filmmakers refuse to project the material into the distant past and complicate the readability of Indigenous images in the archives, revealing how the reappropriation of old images can be just as powerful as the production of new ones.

Video games, which uniquely interweave design, code, art, and sound, can be an especially robust way to express Indigenous cultures. Such games should involve Indigenous people in meaningful roles throughout design and development from conceptualization to distribution with a focus on building capacity to encourage self-determination for Indigenous game developers. This call to action informs SPEAR (Sovereignty, Positionality, Equity, Advocacy, and Reciprocity), a framework for design and development informed by the Indigenous cultural game Thunderbird Strike.

Have you ever wanted to know which games to use in your classroom, library, or afterschool program, or even at home? Which games can help teach preschoolers, K-12, college students, or adults? What can you use for science, literature, or critical thinking skills? This book explores 100 different games and how educators have used the games to teach - what worked and didn't work and their tips and techniques. The list of 100 goes from A to Z Safari to Zoombinis, and includes popular games like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Minecraft, as well as PC, mobile, VR, AR, card and board games.

Game Devs & Others: Tales from the Margins tell the true stories of life in the industry by people of color, LGBTQIA and other marginalized identities. This collection of essays give people a chance to tell their stories and to let others know what life on the other side of the screen is like when you’re not part of the supposed “majority”. Key Features This book is perfect for anyone interested in getting into the games industry who feels they have a marginalized identity For those who wish to better diversify their studio or workplace who may or may not have access to individuals that could or would share their stories about the industry Includes initiatives aimed at diversifying the industry that have a positive or negative impact on the ongoing discussions Coverage of ajor news items about diversity, conferences aimed at or having diversity at its core of content and mission are discussed Included essays are written with as little game dev specific jargon as possible, makeing it accessible to people outside the industry as well as those in the scene but that may not have all the insider lingo

À la suite d’une série d’évènements historiques de grande relevance sociopolitique, les années 1990 ont connu une montée d'initiatives menées par les artistes autochtones nord-américains visant à une récupération et une divulgation de leur l’héritage culturel, et, de ce fait, à une revendication de leur visibilité dans le panorama international. De cette résurgence, l’artiste multimédial autochtone canadien, Kent Monkman, constitue l’une des voix plus actives et plus emblématiques. En créant un dialogue épistémologique entre les études postcoloniales et l’art autochtone, cet article interrogera l’œuvre de Kent Monkman au prisme d’une notion dont sera proposée une définition, à savoir le « Painting Back ».

"Although the fields of media studies and digital humanities are both well established, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving students, scholars, and media studies practitioners a cutting-edge guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersection of digital humanities, computing, and culture. Topics covered include: networks; interfaces; media and culture at scale; procedures, programming, code; memory, digitization, and new media; and hacking, queering, and bending."--Provided by publisher

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As I sit writing in my kitchen while the forces of the U.S. military state are brought to bear on thousands of Standing Rock water stewards and land protectors and their allies in Cannonball, North Dakota, I consider how this sail special issue on digital Indigenous studies not only represents a collection of essays about the critical work Indigenous women are performing in their various digital projects but also illustrates that these online “Indigenous territories” (Hearne), crafted on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, save lives. Every single day since the protectors first gathered to oppose the proposed 1,170-mile Dakota Access pipeline (a project that would potentially contaminate the Missouri watershed and the Ogallala Aquifer and desecrate Dakota sacred sites), digital independent and social media have constantly covered the story. At least 1.3 million Facebook users checked in virtually at Oceti Sakowin and other Indigenous camps and communities to ensure that support presence is recognized, while the world monitors the presence of the military and police force gathering at the construction site to curb further violence. The Standing Rock gathering offers hope to networked Indigenous youth, a demographic between three and ten times as likely to commit suicide than the national average peer rate. The Nodapl action in the Indigenous imaginary is an invitation to stand at the front lines of a global movement to protect water and land resources for all living beings on this planet and to draw attention to and support those whose lives and ways of being are in peril through overt military action and consequential environmental destruction. It is also an occasion, in the words of Jolene Rickard, “to invest in the apparatus of the imagination” (Bernardin). One need only look at the online art, handwritten signs, and logos representing #nodapl, #standingrock, [End Page 172] #waterislife, and #rezpectourwater to see the ways in which Indigenous artists are creatively and powerfully envisioning this movement, most often immersed with work that features strong images of Native women and girls, the community backbone and life force. Or we need only view digital videos like computer animator and artist Joseph Erb’s black-and-red graphic history of Standing Rock, “Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXoy5lzpjiM), and first-person game platforms like Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike, which extend the conversations at Standing Rock to the struggles over Enbridge’s Alberta tar sands pipeline and fracking practices as players work to undo and prevent further environmental degradation. Following Idle No More’s digital and geospatial (re)articulation of Indigenous territories, we are now living and loving and hoping in this historic moment as new ways of relating to one another and living in deep connection with the land and all its forms of life are being physiologically, intellectually, and spiritually forged at the geospatial confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. They are being forged as well through the confluences of digital rivers on our electronic devices and in our online conversations about the beauty and devastation of the events that are unfolding in Standing Rock. Susan Bernardin’s essay in this issue on Heid E. Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” considers the meaning of rivers to Native peoples and contends that images of waterways, particularly the Mississippi, are mobilized “to make visible the continuing claims of this and other imperiled riverine systems.” In her introduction, Joanna Hearne asks us, “How might such an intersection of digital and Indigenous specificities take place in a way that is ‘native to the device’; that is, how might Indigenous specificity be embedded in shared platforms that are therefore central to all of our digital lives?” The essays in this special issue respond to this question by theorizing digital media in fresh and innovative ways. Many of us teach digital humanities courses or classes with strong digital media content, but we lack the language for critically engaging this new field on its own terms as it intersects, extends, and radically reconceptualizes more familiar research areas such as cinema studies, Indigenous / Native American studies, communication, literature, art, and history.

Comment se fait-il que le Canada puisse être représenté par des totems indiens à Walt Disney World ou par un inukshuk aux Jeux olympiques de Vancouver ? Il y a indéniablement « quelque chose » d’indien à propos du Canada. Pour survivre moralement et politiquement à son héritage colonial, l’État a besoin de se faire lui-même partiellement indien. Il lui faut ce je-ne-sais-quoi, cette « chose indienne », nommée sans l’être complètement, signalée sans jamais être définie. Cette indianité, bien qu’elle soit interpellée par la présence d’Autochtones, n’a plus besoin d’eux pour se manifester en tant que réalité. Historiquement, le cinéma constitue l’un des lieux privilégiés où se manifeste cette « chose indienne » prise dans les rets de l’imagination libérale et coloniale qui alimente les velléités de souveraineté du Québec et du Canada. Dans la mesure où une telle capture constitue l’un des principaux exercices politiques de l’État, le présent ouvrage avance une conception de la décolonisation qui ne relève plus de la révélation d’une réalité de l’Indien, cachée derrière sa représentation et ses distorsions filmiques, prête à resurgir au profit d’une « reconnaissance » par et dans l’État souverain. Il s’agit plutôt de comprendre le rapport colonial comme une lutte multipartite entre Canadiens, Québécois et Autochtones, avec pour enjeu de s’emparer du pouvoir exclusif de désigner et de représenter ce (et ceux) que cette « chose indienne » pourra (ou non) signifier et autoriser dans le voisinage colonial du souverain.

Inuit have been participating in the development of photo-reproductive media since at least the 19th century, and indeed much earlier if we continue on Michelle Raheja’s suggestion that there is much more behind Nanook’s smile than Robert Flaherty would have us believe. This paper examines how photographer Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973) and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk have employed photography and film in relation to Raheja’s notion of “visual sovereignty” as a process of infiltrating media of representational control, altering their principles to visualize Indigenous ownership of their images. For camera-based media, this pertains as much to conceptions of time, continuity and “presence,” as to the broader dynamics of creative retellings. This paper will attempt to address such media-ontological shifts – in Pitseolak’s altered position as photographer and the effect this had on his images and the “presence” of his subjects, and in Kunuk’s staging of oral histories and, through the nature of film as an experience of “cinematic time,” composing time in a way that speaks to Inuit worldviews and life patterns – as radical renegotiations of the mediating properties of photography and film. In that they displace the Western camera’s hegemonic framing and time-based structures, repositioning Inuit “presence” and relations to land within the fundamental conditions of photo-reproduction, this paper will address these works from a position of decolonial media aesthetics, considering the effects of their works as opening up not only for more holistic, community-grounded representation models, but for expanding these relations to land and time directly into the expanded sensory field of media technologies.

Over a twenty-year period, renowned artists such as Edward Poitras, Robert Houle, Jim Logan, Kent Monkman, among others, appropriate renowned colonial landscape paintings and art historical canonical works, and then alter them to include First Nations narratives, as methods of critiquing the exclusionary nature of grand colonial narratives and their associated historical, art historical and, by extension, anthropological discourses. Using counter-appropriation as an artistic strategy, they critique: the West's disregard for First Nations histories in North America; Art History's past failures to classify their art objects as Fine Art; and contemporary cultural constructions of "Indianness" originating from colonial history and ideologies about the "Vanishing Race." With their works, the artists offer their viewers insight into First Nations histories and stories, thereby enriching the multiple narratives and pluralist discourses existent in North America.

Combines post-modern theory with the comic wisdom of the tribal trickster to explore the effects of nostalgic simulations of "Indian-ness".

Knopf samples a variety of Native American filmmaking genres, including documentary, short films, and full-length narrative films, providing a detailed synopsis and content analysis of several films. Since its genesis in the early 19005, film has been an effective colonizing tool, impacting Indigenous peoples around the globe.

In more than twenty powerful films, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has waged a brilliant battle against the ignorance and stereotypes that Native Americans have long endured in cinema and television.

Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them