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Video games can be dynamic sovereign spaces for Indigenous representation and expression when the self-determination of Indigenous people is supported. Where ga...

"The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of 'representation' to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality"--Provided by publisher.

"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

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.

Indigenous peoples and their cultural heritages, their ways of knowing and living, are tied to land. As Mishuana Goeman states,“Land is foundational to people’s cultural practices, and if we define culture as meaning making rather than as differentiation and isolation in a multicultural neoliberal model, thanby thinking through land as a meaning-making process rather than a claimed object, the aspiration of Native people are apparent and clear,” (Goeman, 73).Goeman asserts here that land is not limited to physical space, and that land locates a group of people physically, culturally, spiritually, intellectually,etc. and provides them with both an internal and external locus of understanding for and within broader society. When digital representations of Indigenous peoples are completely removed from any meaningful connection to their land, anerasure of culture occurs. Moreover, the physical removal of Indigenous peoples from the virtual representations of their lands is another form of dispossession and the enactment of digital Manifest Destiny. This paperutilizes a decolonial Indigenous framework to analyze the dispossessions that take place within the digital realm of the video game, why they occur so frequently, and why they are so harmful.

There are clear challenges posed by rural and remote education in Australia. These challenges are caused both by physical and material factors, but more importantly epistemological divisions that have created a separation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. Video games have the potential to bridge this epistemological gap by explicating the differences between different knowledge systems and engaging students in exploring these differences. Crucially, these projects need to be co-constructed to ensure that not only the representations of Indigenous people surpass some dubious traditions, but that different epistemologies are adequately framed. There is an urgent need for research-informed game-based learning projects to begin to address the ‘epistemology gap’ and the challenges faced by all Australians.

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.

This thesis analyzes and discusses the complexities of digital representations involving Indigenous peoples through video games. Connecting both Game Theory and Native Studies, I analyze how digital games incorporate identity, culture, and relationships in diverse and intellectual ways and provide new spaces for Indigenous agency and semiotics. Beginning with an analysis of several historical and negative representations of Indigenous peoples, I then compare those tropes to projects within today’s environment and mainstream video game companies, independent companies, and educational service providers. I assert that while some digital media representations of Indigenous cultures are stereotypical and problematic, others facilitate a sense of cultural continuance and survivance. Lastly, some video games display both stereotypical and cultural continuance within them.

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.

Thunderbird Strike, a 2D side-scroller developed by Elizabeth LaPensée, allows a player fly from the Tar Sands to the Great Lakes as a thunderbird protecting Turtle Island with searing lightning against the snake that threatens to swallow the lands and waters whole. The game encouraged players to learn about the indigenous culture, reflect on water protection and alternative energy sources, and gain awareness of risks posed by oil pipeline construction for the conveyance of tar sands.Thunderbird Strike was developed through residencies including O k’inādās Residency, The Banff Musicians in Residence Program, and Territ-Aur(i)al Imprints Exchange thanks to the 2016 Artist Fellowship grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.

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.

En 2014, une collaboration entre le studio Upper One Games et des conteurs et aînés iñupiats d’Alaska a mené au lancement du jeu vidéo Kisima Inŋitchuŋa (Never Alone). Ce jeu de plateforme invite à une immersion poétique dans un univers nordique guidée par une trame narrative inspirée d’une légende traditionnelle. Dans une perspective culturelle, les fonctions ludique et documentaire du jeu permettent d’acquérir des connaissances en lien avec les pratiques traditionnelles et la vision du monde des Iñupiats. Ainsi, l’étude exploratoire présentée dans cet article contribue à comprendre les caractéristiques du jeu (design, narration, mécaniques) et les stratégies relevant de sa conception. Les résultats invitent à reconsidérer des représentations dominantes du Grand Nord et soulignent en quoi le jeu vidéo se fait vecteur d’expression du patrimoine culturel, artistique et oral d’un peuple autochtone de l’Arctique.

1. Racism and Mainstream Media / Lori Kido Lopez -- 2. Image Analysis and Televisual Latinos / Mary Beltrán -- 3. Visualizing Mixed Race and Genetics / Meshell Sturgis and Ralina L. Joseph -- 4. Listening to Racial Injustice / Dolores Inés Casillas and Jennifer Lynn Stoever -- 5. Branding Athlete Activism / Jason Kido Lopez -- 6. The Burden of Representation in Asian American Television / Peter X. Feng -- 7. Indigenous Video Games / Jacqueline Land -- 8. Applying Latina/o Critical Communication Theory to Anti-Blackness / Mari Castañeda -- 9. Asian American Independent Media / Jun Okada -- 10. Remediating Trans Visuality / Amy Villarejo -- 11. Intersectional Distribution / Aymar Jean Christian -- 12. Podcasting Blackness / Sarah Florini -- 13. Black Twitter as Semi-Enclave / Raven Maragh-Lloyd -- 14. Arab Americans and Participatory Culture / Sulafa Zidani -- 15. Diaspora and Digital Media / Lia Wolock -- 16. Disrupting News Media / Meredith D. Clark -- 17. Latinx Audiences as Mosaic / Jillian M. Báez -- 18. Media Activism in the Red Power Movement / Miranda J. Brady -- 19. Black Gamers' Resistance / Kishonna L. Gray -- 20. Cosmopolitan Fan Activism / Susan Noh.

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

It's about the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. The essays question the ways in which components of the reconciliation, such as apology and witnessing, have social and political effects for residential-schools survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics."-- Provided by publisher

Cette publication a été réalisée à l'occasion de l'exposition "L'Oeil Amérindien, Regards sur l'Animal au Musée de la civilisation à Québec.