Indigenous Learning Forum: "Remembering from the Heart and Mind: Oceti Sakowin Approaches to Digital Archiving and Website Design" with Kaylen James and Dr. Samantha Majhor
The first 2024-2025 Indigenous Learning Forum will take place September 12, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. This talk will be given in English with Spanish translation.
This event is open to all but registration is required.
Kaylen James (Itazipco Lakota/Mdewakantunwan Dakota) is a doctoral candidate in the department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a Charles Eastman Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. Broadly, her research utilizes Lakota and Dakota ways of knowing and not knowing to critically interrogate the way in which digital technologies, new media, status, and fame work together to reproduce settler/capitalist structures of affect and thought, particularly through social networking algorithms and user interface (UI) designs. Drawing upon this research, Kaylen assists Drs. Chris Pexa (Spirit Lake Dakota) and Samantha Majhor (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Descendant) with implementing and designing their digital, story-mapping project, Remapping the Oceti Sakowin Oyate.
Samantha Majhor (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Descendant) is an Assistant Professor of English and Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Along with co-project investigator Chris Pexa (Spirit Lake Dakota), her current project develops a digital map connecting story to place in Očeti Šakowin homelands through grant funding from the Mellon Foundation. She co-directs Marquette’s Indigeneity Lab, which supports undergraduate research in Native Studies topics including wild rice restoration along the Menomonee River Valley, archival research and outreach from the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions records, and Indigenous Milwaukee digital map via the Jorres Family Fund. Also see her most recent publication, “The Blue Beaded Dress at the Field Museum in the Works of Susan Power” in SAIL, Fall-Winter 2023.
Remembering from the Heart and Mind: Oceti Sakowin Approaches to Digital Archiving and Website Design
Our discussion will consider both the opportunities and challenges in ethically incorporating Oceti Sakowin ways of knowing, teaching, and learning in the digital, story-mapping project, Remapping the Očeti Šakowin Oyáte. With the support and participation of both elders and community members across Oceti Sakowin homelands, this collaborative and community-based project will develop a digital mapping website and story-sharing archive that connects story to place in Oceti Sakowin homelands. However, while the website will contain an archive of stories with indexing and searching functions, we don’t take for granted the epistemological and ideological assumptions inherent within any such digital designs and features. Understanding that many digital tools and features are designed towards optimizing efficiency, productivity, and information consumption, our project looks to instead incorporate features and functionalities that promote Oceti Sakowin ways of knowing, teaching, and learning. For example, we look to such values as ephemerality, slowness, decay, deliberateness, and perceptiveness, and we consider how best to incorporate these values within the user design and experience. So, while we consider questions of accessibility and ownership, we are also meaningfully engaged with how best to foster meaningful learning and remembering at every level of the remapping website’s design. This discussion will also consider the lifespan and afterlives of Oceti Sakowin data, the considerations necessary in the caretaking of such data, and Oceti Sakowin data sovereignty.