Category Indigenous Futures
Recoding Relationality: Indigenous New Media and the Possibility of a Critical Digital Humanities
The below is a transcript of a talk given at the University of Melbourne in December 2018. Melbourne Talk (Slides in PDF) Watch a recording of the talk here I want to begin by acknowledging the Kulin territory that these events are taking place on. It’s my first time on this land and I am […]
Theatre of Regret Now Available in Paperback
The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada is now available in paperback via UBC Press. Some of the chapters were developed out of writing that I first shared on this blog. For instance the post “Reconciliation: ‘Like an Echo Turned Inside Out’” is the basis of the book’s conclusion, […]
Lack as Resistance in Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
Strategic Plans for the Apocalypse: The Marrow Thieves in the Classroom
Groups of 4-5 Assignment Framework Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves ends with a new beginning. While capitalist-driven climate change is leading to the decimation of settler nation states (and the rapid decline of the settler population), the protagonist, French, is full of hope for the future of Indigenous peoples—particularly now that Isaac, who holds the […]
Reconciliation: “Like an Echo Turned Inside Out”
On the penultimate page of her 2017 dystopian speculative fiction novel, The Marrow Thieves, Métis author and editor Cherie Dimaline evokes the sound of an echo as a means elucidate the reunification of two residential school surviours: The scene is significant for a number of reasons, not least of all because it contains the only […]
FNIS 454: Indigenous New Media and Digital Storytelling
FNIS 454: Indigenous New Media and Digital Storytelling Instructor: Dr. David Gaertner Email: david.gaertner@ubc.ca Overview Following the 1997 launch of Skawennati’s (Mohawk) CyberPowWow, digital space has become a vital new territory for the resurgence of Indigenous storytelling and cultural practice: “We have signed a new treaty,” Cree artist Archer Pechawis wrote of this period, “and […]
Bibliography for FNIS 401F: Indigenous New Media
Below is the reading list for FNIS 401F a special topics course I teach in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. Dowell, Kristen. “Vancouver’s Aboriginal Media World.” Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 1-20. Fish, Adam. “Indigenous Digital Media and the […]
“Poor Impulse Control”: Remediation as a Decolonial Reading Practice
In my Indigenous new media and digital storytelling class, my students and I use remediation as a means to interrogate text and to consider what sovereignty might mean in terms of art. Remediation—refashioning one media in another—provides the opportunity to question modernist binaries between old and new, tradition and innovation, and to make art in […]
How Should I Play These?: Media and Remediation in Never Alone
“Games 10,000 years in the Making.” -Slogan for Upper One Video Games, the first Indigenous Owned Video Game Company in the United States and creators of, Never Alone. When it comes to Indigenous-made video games what is the “new” of New Media. The 2014 video game Never Alone has been lauded as cutting-edge gaming (Peckham) and […]