Native Studies in the Digital Age

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel explores problems and possibilities for new directions in Native Studies in the digital age. Panelists will probe the relationship between digital technologies and Native American Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives, methods, and practices such as anthropology, literary studies, and digital humanities. Digitization is changing the possibilities for scholarly access to and engagement with Native American archives. Equally important, Native peoples are using digital media to preserve and advance tribal knowledge production in the twenty-first century - and to contest colonial practices and epistemologies.
Panelists engaged in joint tribal-scholarly digital humanities projects will map the ways in which internet sites like dawnlandvoices.org, an electronic collection of Native writing from New England, enable new relations between tribal and settler-colonial communities. Tribally-based historians and authors working with university-based scholars and students are digitizing historic tribal newsletters and in the process tribal activists are educating their own communities and the settler public about indigenous history and politics. The process of digitization of this crucial archive produces crucial spaces and opportunities for pedagogy, cooperation, and contestation. In addition to such decolonizing possibilities, digital technology also enables the importation of colonial practices into the digital sphere and age.
Gaming, where players take up indigenous personas and interact with digitally rendered indigenous worlds, represents an example of the dangers and possibilities of the present moment. On the one hand, video and multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft can become new sites of colonial appropriation, erasure, mis-education, and “playing Indian.” On the other hand, games like Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) and Assassins Creed III, where Inupiaq and Mohawk languages enable the creation of indigenous digital worlds, also has the potential to be community-driven projects that instantiate new collaborative relations and advance tribal language revitalization projects.
Native peoples in the digital age are reclaiming not only indigenous American languages but also Native literacies and literary forms. Websites like Gibagadinamaagoom (Ojibwe) link cultural, linguistic, and literary revitalization in transformative ways, explicating literary forms like pictography from within tribal epistemologies while centering the instructional authority of tribal elders. Such developments, and increased scholarly and tribal access to documents kept in archives and private collections, herald the possibility of radical new pedagogies, theories, methods, and histories in literary studies. Furthermore, it calls for a new longue duree approach to American literary history that centers Native ways of recording and transmitting knowledge while accounting for the ongoing adaption of new technologies like pictographic sticks, alphabetism, and digitization into literary repertoires, from the pre-colonial era to the present.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Marisa Duarte, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• “Earthmother Protect Us”: Playing Indian in Digital Domains - Jenny L. Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Dawnland Dissent: Digitizing Maine Tribal Newsletters as Red Pedagogy - Siobhan Senier, University of New Hampshire

• Wintercounts and Websites: Early Native American Literature in the Digital Age - Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Binghamton University (SUNY)