Category Indigenous Studies
Using DH in Indigenous Studies Classrooms: Six Sample Assignments
In an interview with Liza Yeager, Anishinaabe comedian, writer, and media maker, Ryan McMahon talks about why he thinks podcasting is specifically useful medium for Indigenous storytellers: “I just think the medium is so exciting. It’s relatively inexpensive to produce; it’s a flexible creative medium that allows us to be publishers, you know? At the […]
“A soul-deep desolation:” Reconciliation and the Vacuum of Unstoried Existence
Excerpted from The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation While it is intimately, and, perhaps, impossibly, entwined with Christian ideology and Western politics, the idea of reconciliation does not belong to the Western theory alone. Indigenous scholars such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Daniel Heath Justice, Hadley Friedland, Val Napoleon, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, […]
Recoding Relations: Episode 1, People Over Tools
Listen to part one of Recoding Relations, a four part podcast series on Indigenous Studies and the Digital Humanities.
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, […]
“How do I play these?” (with your thumbs, asshole)
For me, the process of writing about Indigenous games begins with thinking about the relationship between gaming, code, and settler colonialism, as well as the ways in which I am complicit in what I call digitālis nullius, the erasure of Indigenous presence from technological spaces. As I hope to make evident as I progress through this blog post, code, narratology, and game mechanics are not abstract from larger conversations about settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty.
Writing in (Good) Relation: How Writing Can Build and Create Community
Composition courses can be some of the most challenging for students, particularly when they are embedded within a specific discipline. In this post, I share an open letter that I wrote for students in “Writing for Indigenous Studies” (FNIS 300), which I teach at the University of British Columbia. The year in question was particularly […]
Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media
David Gaertner and Melissa Haberl In June 2018, scholars, developers, artists, and community members from over twenty institutions and three continents gathered on the ancestral and unceded territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Wyomilth peoples to participate in the inaugural Symposium for Indigenous New Media (SINM). As part of the University of Victoria’s annual Digital […]
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 […]
Decolonial DH?: The Maker Movement in Indigenous Studies
Text from my keynote for DHSI@Congress. June 5, 2019. Good morning! It is so wonderful to be here with here with you during Congress 2019. This community has meant so much to me in my career, first as a grad student and now as a teacher and researcher, so it’s an honour to be with […]
Best Practices for Approaching Indigenous Studies through the Digital Humanities
The following summary of best practices was compiled out of the Symposium for Indigenous New Media as a primer for digital humanists that want to engage with Indigenous peoples and data. It is by no means comprehensive. We hope that it can be used as springboard for deeper engagement with the literature and the community […]