These artists embrace new technology, challenging stereotypes of what counts as Indigenous art
Unreserved talked to artists who are using digital media to share culture and stories
Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island are embracing new forms of technology to support their art and reimagine traditional cultural practices.
For some, non fungible tokens (NFTs) are providing a much needed source of funding.
For others, technology has provided a whole new medium to tell Indigenous stories.
Unreserved spoke with three artists who are using digital technology to forge new paths and challenge traditional notions of what constitutes Indigenous art.
Meagan Byrne: Hill Agency: Purity Decay
Meagan Byrne founded her own game development studio, Achimostawinan Games, in 2016 after noticing a lack of Indigenous video game creators.
Her newest video game will be released at the end of August.
It is a narrative game rooted in Indigenous futurism with a heavy film noir influence. It is set in 2762, in one of the last major cities in North America, on the brink of colonial collapse.
"There's a dame, there's a murderer, you have to solve it," said Byrne, but that is just the beginning. She uses the story as an entry point to explore a post-colonial world. Byrne said that when designing the game she and her team asked, "what is it like to be in a space that has acknowledged and worked through generational trauma?"
A lot of thought was put into what would happen to cities. She asked, "[would] we all just move back to our traditional territories?" Instead Byrne repurposed urban spaces through an Indigenous cultural lens and turned apartment buildings into vertical longhouses. Longhouses are a type of pre-contact Indigenous housing, where multiple families related through maternal lines lived. Your neighbour wouldn't just be your neighbour, she said, "it would be your cousin, or it'd be your uncle."
Video games are still considered an unconventional medium for artists. This is especially true Indigenous artists.
Byrne told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild that despite being Metis herself, some people questioned the Indigeneity of her art. She said, "it didn't look Indigenous. It was like, it didn't read as the common consciousness in Canada of what something that is Indigenous should look like."
The game might take place in a fictionalised postcolonial world but Byrne thinks it is a possible one.
"I don't know what it is about talking about Indigenous land back and sovereignty and health and community that make people think that 'oh, that's unrealistic,'" she said. "I don't see why we couldn't have apartments that are made up of [a family's] multiple generations, [who] take care of the space [and] live there for 1000 years? Why is that ridiculous?"
400 Drums
400 Drums is an organization based out of Burnaby, B.C,. that's using a new form of digital art to invest in a better future — the well-being of youth in their community.
The organization is using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to monetize Indigenous art and fund programs that connect youth to their culture and traditional languages.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital-assets, usually visual art or music. They are bought and sold with cryptocurrency.
Non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies have received a lot of criticism lately for their instability and impact on the environment. Still, 400 Drums has found a way to make these decentralized digital technologies work for them.
- Crypto is Crashing. Why?
- As museums begin to embrace NFTs, they face new opportunities — and risks
- What's an NFT? And why are people suddenly spending millions on them?
Prior to the pandemic, David Fierro, a drum maker and culture keeper from Okanagan First Nation would go into schools and teach drum making. When the pandemic halted in-person activities, Fierro was forced to pivot to online workshops.
"I was really feeling it in my heart that I wasn't able to get out there [and] have the kids working with proper drums to learn their language and their culture," he said.
And that wasn't the only challenge Fierro and 400 Drums faced. Just getting the funding to pay for the materials required to make the drums became much harder without grant money
Tamara Goddard, one of the founders of 400 Drums, from Saulteau First Nation in North Eastern British Columbia said, "we had run out of grant writers and grants are harder to get right now."
Goddard came up with the idea to make digital representations of Fierro's drums and sell them as NFTs.
She said, "[with] this NFT project, we're getting money faster than we're receiving the money from the grants."
NFTs have allowed 400 Drums to expand beyond Ferrio's drum making workshop. Goddard said that through the sale of NFTs they were able to buy computers and pay for the professional training for youth.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin creates virtual reality experiences that connect users to the past and push them to think about the future in new ways.
She's also an associate professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Florida, from Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.
"I like to think of [virtual reality] like a dream technology because when you're in virtual reality, you are walking without walking, you're talking without talking, you're talking to people who aren't there," she said.
Winger-Bearskin says dreams play an important role in her Indigenous culture.
"Dreaming is also a way in which we express hope," she said "And hope is such an important thing to contain when we're looking at so many different problems in the world that have such complex solutions."
When users play virtual reality, or even certain video games, they are actually participating in storytelling, said Winger-Bearskin, adding that her mother was a storyteller from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation
"The way [my mom] told stories reminds me a lot of the way my son tells stories in Minecraft or Roblox."
Roblox and Minecraft are immersive digital social platforms. Users create their own 3D worlds, where they connect and share experiences.
"My son built a lot of these worlds that now have been going on for maybe 10 years [and] he's kind of stewarding a lot of intergenerational conversations," she said.
Winger-Bearskin says that humans will always use technology to connect, talk and share with one another.
"That's just kind of the way we hack. That's how we do it. That's the thing we care about the most in the world. Thank goodness for that."
Produced by Shyloe Fagan and Rhiannon Johnson.
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