Toward Indigenous Making and Sharing

• In Event: 14.015 - Making Spaces for Youth From Nondominant Communities: New Approaches for Supporting Equitable and Consequential Experiences

Abstract

In this paper we explore “Indigenous making and sharing” that occurred in a project called Native STEAM, an ArtScience participatory design project. The project involved Indigenous youth, families, and community artists in a summer program. The program was designed to cultivate Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and making and focused on pedagogies of walking, observing, and talking lands and waters as the foundations in making activities. There were five major artscience making themes that youth engaged in including: clay work, digital productions, visual art, theater, and plant making. Each of these were embedded within the larger camp such that the activities were part of the flow of ideas and practices and became the central place for reflective and exploratory sensemaking.

We are interested in the ways in which cultural and epistemic heterogeneity can be foundational to making (Vossoughi, Escudé, Kong, & Hooper, 2013). Thus we focused on ways to support and encourage Indigenous youth in navigating the complexities of people, resources and expertise (Sheridan et al., 2014) as well as relationships and interactions with more than human life embedded in practices of making (Cajete, 1999). More specifically, we ask how making is a site of the construction of human-nature relations (Bang & Marin, 2015) and the expansive possibilities of making with such a perspective. Often making reflects a culturally narrow view of materiality that impacts the forms and practices of making considered (Ingold, 2000) as well as the kind of sensemaking opened to youth.

This participatory design research project involved community members, artists, and scientists in the development and implementation of the making space. This paper is a case study that utilizes interaction analysis of two of the artscience making spaces, clay and visual arts during the STEAM program.

Data included pre and post interviews with youth, video and audio data, field notes, as well as the artifacts produced by youth and their public sharing of their pieces. There are 23 youth represented in this case study. The video and audio data consists of 12 hours of activity focused specifically on making and an additional 16 hours of exploration designed to scaffold making activities.

The program enabled a dynamic cultural and epistemic ecology of making for Indigenous youth, where youth cultivated relationships with a) more than humans, b) cultural transformations of the natural world, and c) forms of making in which Indigenous communities have historically and currently engage. Youths’ making practices infused both the activities from the program as well as from their home and community lives. We present examples of this and argue that developing making spaces based in youths epistemic ecologies enables expansive forms of making reflective of Indigenous forms of human-nature relations.

This work expands our understandings of issues of equity in making by considering how making necessarily is a cultural activity that reflects particular epistemic practices. This work also raises fundamental questions about the ways in which culturally narrow perspectives of materiality, reflective of specific human-nature relations, may currently be driving much of making.

Authors

• Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Filiberto Barajas-Lopez, University of Washington