Integrating Indigenous Lifeways with XR

According to Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart (Brave Heart 1998, as cited in Brave Heart, 2011), historical trauma “is defined as cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations, including the lifespan, which emanates from massive group trauma” (p. 283). It is considered collective “in that many members of a community view the events as acute losses and experience corresponding trauma reactions' ' (Evans-Campbell, 2008, p. 320). The events that have led to both historical and intergenerational trauma have resulted in a loss of culture and tribal languages within all Indigenous communities across the nation. Therefore, this solution will have immediate impacts on Cherokee communities, but once fine tuned and streamlined can be shared with other Indigenous communities, resulting in a greater impact on all Native people from the United States and Canada. 

Historically, Indigenous lifeways were transmitted orally and visually. Stories were told that were of significance to the seasons, to the earth, the animals and the spirit world. These were repeated on a consistent basis during a person's lifetime to instill values and meaning to the circle of life. Indigenous people learned visually also. Life skills were taught visually. Children and youth watched their parents as they built their homes, cooked food, gathered and hunted for food. They also used games as a way to teach their children life skills. As an outcome of  Indigenous lifeways; physical, mental, social and spirituality is transmitted generationally. Colonization has contributed to the loss of these lifeways that were a part of Indigenous culture since time immemorial. In the last two decades, there has been major efforts to teach the Indigenous languages, so that they will not be lost; however, our fluent speakers are the elders of our tribe, and when they pass along to another world, these Indigenous lifeways, that include our language, will be lost. There has been an effort to revive the lifeways and to use oral and visual methods of transmitting the culture. There is a bigger need to develop a process of preserving the Indigenous lifeways using technology, so that it will be preserved and utilized by the next generations. 

Our plan is to be the first Indigenous organization to successfully implement an online repository of information available in XR platforms and then offer it to other Indigenous groups, ensuring that all tribal cultures can be preserved, not just the Cherokee culture. All of our Indigenous communities are affected by modernization and generations are passing on without transmitting the culture. Since 2020, the Cherokee Nation has lost a total of 346 fluent Cherokee speakers. This number is huge considering that in 2019 there were only an estimated 2,100-2,200 Cherokee first language speakers. The Cherokee Nation has a population of over 380,000 tribal citizens. Statistically, with the losses since 2019, this means that less than 0.5% of Cherokee Nation tribal members are first language speakers. As we lose more speakers, we lose more of our culture.

An online repository will be created to house traditional lifeways. This repository will be supported by uploading videos/interviews/scanned documents and objects into a cloud based service. All data gathered will be categorized by Artist/Elder name and key words (baskets, onions, etc.) Any data gathered will be done so by permission only from the artist or elder. Waivers will be signed by each participant.

Cherokee elders will be interviewed and recorded sharing their traditional stories that are passed down orally instead of written. Traditional objects will be scanned in with a 3D scanner and made available for use in VR environments. Videos will also be available of traditional activities that are not easily described verbally, yet available for use as a part of a curriculum. As the program grows, we will provide training to local schools with high proportions of Indigenous students, on how to implement the cultural pieces into curriculum that meets the State of Oklahoma curriculum standards. 

Technology used will include: 3D Scanner, audio recording devices or software, computers, high speed internet, VR platforms such as Engage, additional software such as Adobe Creative Suite and Zoom, and VR technology (Quests, Vives, etc.).

The target population is the Cherokee families and elders of these families that reside in Indigenous communities that our organization serves. AIRC provides educational opportunities for children and youth, in the schools where they attend. In addition, the families participate in cultural activities, to enhance the lifeways as a foundation to regain an understanding of the circle of life practiced before colonization. This solution will address their needs by providing them with an opportunity to document their stories and their lives to become relevant and meaningful as part of their Indigenous community.

The mission of American Indian Resource Center is to provide cultural and educational opportunities to nurture growth of American Indian/Indigenous children, families, and communities. 

AIRC provides professional expertise to and on behalf of American Indian tribes, organizations, and schools, and other interested agencies in the following areas:

• Training and technical assistance in the areas of education, health, and social services

• Program development and evaluation

• Management analysis and assistance

• Experimental, historical, and survey research

• Video production

• Curriculum development

One expertise of our organization lies in the development of educational opportunities as described in our mission listed above. Like many other tribes, the Cherokee community is underserved in many areas, one of these areas being education. As a minority group, American Indians carry the lowest rates of educational success, particularly within the post-secondary educational setting. Levaldo (2012) reported that only 1% of the 17% of American Indian (AI) high school graduates who attempt to earn a higher education graduate with a bachelor’s degree. As of 2016, American Indian/Alaskan Native (AI/AN) students make up less than 1% of college students enrolled at post-secondary institutions within the United States (Ginder and Kelly-Reid, 2013). American Indian students are frequently considered the least likely to enroll in college, and the likelihood of graduating on time is next to last when compared to other minority groups (Field, 2016).

The education setting can be a barrier for students to navigate, particularly for those students who are already presented with historically and systemically significant barriers to success such as Indigenous students. Therefore, our solution will serve to impact the lives of youth within our Indigenous community. Allowing our traditions to be preserved for our future generations in hopes of reconnecting our Native youth with these traditions so they are not lost within the Westernized society that we live in today.

Within the Cherokee reservation boundaries, approximately 200 Indigenous communities exist. These communities are rural and isolated, with the school often being the center of the community. During the COVID pandemic, the Cherokee Nation lost approximately 346 fluent speakers and treasures who kept traditional knowledge. This solution assists in not only keeping traditional lifeways for future generations, but also assists in teaching those Indigenous students who live outside the reservation in urban areas about their culture and traditions.

The American Indian Resource Center is an Indigenous led non-profit organization with an all Indigenous board of directors. As previously stated, AIRC is already embedded within the Indigenous community in this area. In the past 5 years, we have partnered with over fifty schools within the Cherokee Nation reservation. During this time, we have established connections that have allowed us to fully understand the needs of Indigenous youth within our community. Through our organization, we have been able to observe and interact with students, documenting their unmet learning needs. Our past experience has been fundamental in helping to develop programming to improve life skills, engaging in pathways that have fostered a healthy social emotional development.

Recent studies on the effects of culture-based education strategies indicate that Indigenous students in culturally responsive classrooms tend to have “increased socio-emotional well-being, a deeper sense of belonging, and enhanced student motivation” leading to “increased achievement as students begin to feel comfortable in their school environment” (“The Value of Culture-Based Education for Native American Students, 2019, n.p.). Our solution will meet these mental, social, and emotional development needs of Indigenous students by providing a way to incorporate more traditional knowledge into the classroom, leading to Indigenous youth having healthy, happy lives.

AIRC has worked in schools throughout the Cherokee Nation reservation since its incorporation in 1983, providing teacher training programs, Title VII programs, and other educational programming.  In 2016, AIRC began using VR in their education programming, becoming one of the first organizations in Indian Country to use VR.

The Team Lead and the team are representative of these communities because they are Indigenous and live in the area.  Most of the team are active in their communities through volunteerism.  AIRC, and specifically the SET team, work closely with schools to understand their needs and engage them for their input to create cultural content that is not otherwise available in the rural, remote communities.  The teachers, elders, and other community members are closely involved as they are vital to the creation of the curriculum and content.  AIRC has also partnered with the Cherokee Nation and other organizations on other cultural projects, so engagement, input, ideas, and agendas are not an issue.

The SET Team’s solution’s goal is to preserve the Cherokee culture by 3D scanning real artifacts, collecting stories from elders by recording audio or video, and compose traditions to put into an archive. There is equipment we need to make the Cherokee culture digital and preserve it for education purposes by taking Cherokee artifacts and 3D scanning them to put in a virtual classroom. Within this virtual classroom students can interact with this object and not have to worry about breaking it. Also, having audio or video recordings of elders would be ideal to archive. For example, an elder could talk about when they were a child their family would go out into the woods and gather food or look for plants to harvest to make baskets. Seeing or hearing an elder could help students understand that an actual person recounted these traditions in their life. Also, composing traditional stories will help preserve the culture, because Native American tribes are natural oral historians. Having written stories, histories and life events will provide more outreach to younger generations that do not have the opportunity to be told stories from their elders. With this archive anyone can access this content to use in virtual classrooms to learn about the Cherokee culture.This will be a stepping stone to build more for Cherokee learning, and an opportunity to build another archive with other tribes. 

This is a great opportunity to preserve the language and culture but a few challenges arise with a bit of pushback from some traditionalists that don’t want to use technology. As Indigenous tribes are primarily familistic and are taught from previous generations about traditional values and culture, using technology is not ideal. There was never a need to record any history as elders and mentors would teach the younger generations about the way of life and language, also for children and babies, stories would be told as lessons and warnings. As time progressed these lessons have decreased because of boarding schools and other measures of conforming Indigenous people. In recent years there has been an increase of remembering the language and traditional lifeways. After the pandemic, a lot of elders and traditional keepers have passed away. There are online classes, museums, and Indigenous people demonstrating or teaching small groups traditionals crafts, games, and meals. This is helpful in spreading awareness of Indigenous culture, but having these resources in a broad scale would be to collect artifacts, recordings, and the language and archive them digitally. Having this archive will be beneficial for dispersing them correctly into education curriculum and informative research. 

In order to collect we will need technology such as 3D scanners, etc. We will need software licenses from Solve supporters and need support on monitoring and evaluation. Also, having access and exposure within the technology community.

Pamela Iron, Team Lead, is a Cherokee citizen who resides in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation and the heart of the Cherokee reservation.  

She has worked in communities across the Cherokee reservation as a health advocate and educator, participating in the lifeways meaningful to herself, her family, and her fellow Cherokee citizens. Pamela is one of the three founders of the National Indian Youth Leadership Project, known for its outdoor experiential education methods to teach life skills to Native youth.

As Executive Director of AIRC, Pamela has continued her connection to the Cherokee community by fostering community relations and partnerships with the Cherokee Nation, area schools, and other community organizations to provide services to youth through programming funded mostly by the U.S. Department of Education.

AIRC’s solution approaches the problem of preserving Cherokee culture by creating a digital, online repository.  Language, culturally significant items, stories, and knowledge of plants that are normally passed down orally are preserved and made available to future generations.  With a significant number of elders passing on due to COVID as well as generational trauma from the forced removal to boarding schools, many traditions and life ways have not been passed down.  This solution allows teachers to access information that can be used to teach students in the classroom using different media, enhancing student learning and exposing a generation to their culture before it is completely lost.

Positive impacts from this solution are infinite.  Upon creation of this repository, other tribes and cultures could easily replicate this repository for their own traditions and lifeways.  Other tribes could also make contributions so that Indigenous culture as a whole is preserved and not lost.  Educators would be able to access historically correct information for use in their classrooms to continue to educate students.  Students would be able to access information about their culture and heritage in a way they understand: through the use of technology.  Videos and audio recordings would make an impact, but it is the 3D virtualization of important artifacts that would allow students to hold and examine a cultural object without fear of damage.  Students would also be impacted by learning how to become archivists themselves with training on using a 3D scanner, software, and other technology to preserve cultural knowledge and lifeways.

This solution could change the market because it involves the rapidly improving technology of VR.  AIRC began exploring the possibility of integrating VR into education platforms in 2016.  Since that time, the SET team has trained teachers and students in the use of VR by integrating cultural activities, such as building a stickball pole and foraging for wild onions and mushrooms.  Currently, there are not any real Indigenous cultural items available in virtual reality, and other cultural items and information are not readily available.  This solution also allows for the creation of a place where Indigenous information can be made available and shared with anyone no matter where they are located since the closest thing to an Indigenous repository is the Smithsonian Museum of the Native American.

The Sevenstar Emerging Technology vision is to establish a foundation of leadership to empower indigenous communities to bridge the technological divide.  In our vision brainstorming, we identified the need to empower Indigenous people to participate in the digital world.  In doing so, they would be able to remain in their rural communities and have a source of income while being an active community member in Cherokee lifeways. One of our major impact goals is to establish the infrastructure of an Indigenous network that connects schools on the Cherokee reservation with the “outside world”, allowing them to share information about their culture and lifeways while learning from other cultures in other areas of the world.  

These impact goals lead toward our solution to create culturally relevant materials, preserving them for future generations by utilizing immersive technology.   Our vision and goals are to establish a foundation of leadership to empower Indigenous communities to bridge the technological divide and preserve their culture for future generations.

AIRC utilizes multiple data collection methods to measure progress, including: surveys, external evaluation, test scores, grades, and collaboration and discussion with educators, administrators, tribal representatives, students, and staff. For this solution, a data collection plan would be developed to include both quantitative and qualitative processes. Quantitative data would be gathered in the form of surveys. Qualitative data would be gathered in the form of unstructured interviews/discussions with elders and other community members involved.

Currently, VR technology is the main technology used.  Meta Quest 2 and Vive Focus Plus headsets are being used to access the Engage platform to teach up to 10 students at a time.  (Bandwidth at the rural, isolated schools often do not allow more than 10 headsets at a time to operate without a major lag time.)  Creative Commons licensed images and YouTube videos are also used in creating activities for students in a virtual environment.  Unity software, Adobe software, and Unreal Engine software will also be used to create content.  3D scanners will be used to scan in cultural items for use in a virtual environment and stored online with cloud based services used to house the cultural repository.  Online training will be available using the Canvas learning management system.  Cherokee Nation is also working to increase broadband availability in the rural Cherokee communities.

Our team is composed of four females and one male; ages range from early twenties to late seventies. The majority of team members are Native, with one team member being Caucasian. Tribes represented include: Cherokee, Choctaw, Laguna Pueblo, Seminole, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Muscogee Creek. As a group, we offer a breadth of knowledge and represent a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, especially with the differences in generational knowledge. The SET Team encompasses the goals of the SET strategic plan and AIRC, which includes providing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.

AIRC has policies and practices which encourage the employment of traditionally underrepresented groups. AIRC currently has twenty full time employees, nineteen of which are American Indian. AIRC has nondiscriminatory policies which prohibit any form of employment discrimination. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better results.

Key customers and beneficiaries of this project are the Indigenous community, specifically the Cherokee Nation.  The preservation of culture has a profound impact on the tribe as a whole, with the ability of other tribes to contribute or learn how to replicate this project for their own use.  The revenue that is generated with this project will be re-invested into AIRC programming, allowing for an expansion of current services and creating more culturally relevant materials for technological use.  An additional impact is that this project will lead to the creation of additional jobs for Cherokee citizens.

The repository will be accessed with only an internet connection to a secure website that provides cultural information and lifeways to a generation who normally does not have much access to this information due to location, income, or a lack of cultural knowledge and awareness.  Step by step guides will be available to assist in the downloading and usage of all materials.  Training materials and other items will be available to those tribes who wish to replicate the project for themselves.

Currently, there is a major focus by the Cherokee Nation to preserve the Cherokee language.  By creating this repository, critical cultural information that is normally passed down to the next generation orally can now be available and preserved using modern technology, a format most people of the current generation are familiar with, and prevent further loss of knowledge.

Currently, the financial sustainability plan involves a combination of donations and grants, selling services, and contracts with tribes.

Donations and grants will be used to purchase the necessary equipment to begin preservation, including voice recorders, video cameras, a 3D scanner, and software.  Volunteers will be able to gather video and recordings of elders speaking of traditions, life ways, and stories.  

Online learning will be created and made available for a small fee.  This online learning will include different modules on the culture that will be made available for teachers to adapt into lesson plans for classroom use.  For those tribes who wish to replicate this repository, a contract with a fee and a defined timeline for training will be negotiated.  Contracts with tribes to manage their contributions to the repository as well as training for use in VR will also be negotiated.

Partnerships with the Cherokee Nation, Cherokee Nation Career Services, and other Indigenous organizations will be a source of revenue.  Partnerships with software companies, technology groups, and other interested entities will also be a source of revenue that will allow for an expansion of services and items to be made available.

Currently, AIRC has 5 out of 7 programs that use VR.  A majority of funding for program development and activities are from demonstration grants from the Office of Indian Education, US Department of Education.  (One program is funded through the Tribal Personal Responsibility Program, Aid to Children and Families department of the US Department of Health & Human Services.)  This funding allowed for headsets and charging carts to be provided for six rural elementary schools as well as licenses for the Engage VR platform software.  A scholarship from XR Terra allowed two staff to receive basic training on creating content as well as advanced training on the Engage platform.  A grant from Meta and Unity allowed AIRC to obtain 10 more Meta Quest 2 headsets, and currently staff are actively seeking and applying potential grant funding from angel investors, foundations, and US government agencies.  Program activities are being included in every AIRC grant application submitted for funding so that this program may continue.  There are also plans for creating a digital repository of 3D cultural objects and creating online training to be made available at an affordable cost to create an income stream that supports program activities. Partnerships with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, VR/AR Association, and Engage also contribute to potential funding sources.