Fourth VR: Indigenous virtual reality practice

Abstract

Indigenous creators are currently using virtual reality (VR) tools, techniques and workflows in wide-ranging geographical locations and across multiple VR formats. Their radical adaptation of this new technology folds together cultural traditions and VR’s unique audiovisual configurations to resist dominant, particularly colonial, frameworks. Within this context, we ask how VR is being used to create space and capacity for Indigenous creatives to tell their stories and how do Indigenous creatives negotiate Eurocentric modes of production and distribution? To answer these questions, our Fourth VR database provides a snapshot of Indigenous VR works. By drawing on three case studies drawn from the database – The Hunt (2018), Future Dreaming (2019) and Crow: The Legend (2018) – as well as the wider patterns emerging across the database, it is possible to see an Indigenous-centred VR production framework. This framework is diverse but also contains repeated trends such as the ability to use VR to express and realize Indigenous Futurism; foreground native languages in virtual worlds; provide new articulations of Indigenous activism; embody connections between the past, present and future and demonstrate the interconnectivity of all living things. In turn, this growing body of work, engaging with the full spectrum of VR formats and tools, provides a rich contribution to the wider arena of VR practice.

Keywords

Decolonization embodiment fourth cinema indigenous activism Indigenous Futurism indigenous languages interactivity virtual reality

Introduction

During the 2016 public debut of new head-mounted-displays (HMDs), the face of virtual reality’s (VR) new wave appeared to be White, male and of the millennial generation as epitomized by Palmer Luckey, the founder of major VR company Oculus Rift (Harley, 2019). Drawing upon existing media technologies and production contexts, such as cinema and gaming, public-facing VR was doing little to dismantle the lack of gender and ethnic diversity found in these media (Chess and Shaw, 2015; Molina-Guzmán, 2019; Ramanan, 2017; Verhoeven et al., 2019). Oglala Lakota producer, Sarah Eagle Heart, of the Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP) organization noted this lack of diversity was particularly pressing for Indigenous media practitioners. Speaking of her creative partnership with Baobab Studio’s Crow: The Legend (2018), Eagle Heart noted that ‘during this process, Baobab and I discovered a scarcity of Native creators within the VR industry’ (Oculus VR, 2018). Acknowledging Eagle Heart’s experience working in this space, as well as the diversity problem faced by this emerging industry, we have found, nonetheless, that a deep dive into the wide gamut of VR media provides numerous examples of Indigenous VR practitioners from widespread cultural and geographical backgrounds. Even when they do not receive the same press and industry attention as other VR practitioners, Indigenous practitioners have often been quick to capitalize on this new technology as part of a broader drive to reimagine traditional storytelling in new media forms such as gaming, augmented reality, and audiovisual installation work (LaPensée, 2017; Te Ao Māori News, 2016). We do not believe that VR is any more important than these other media forms but the recent public attention to the possibilities afforded by VR suggests this is a timely moment to examine how such affordances are relevant to Indigenous practitioners. Examples of Indigenous VR range from Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s seminal work, Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1991–1993) (2Bears, 2010; Lewis, 2016; Todd, 1996), to Lisa Jackson’s 360 documentary Highway of Tears (2016) to the language revitalization game Ksiistsikom (2019) commissioned by the Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth to Wiremu Grace’s Māori language cinematic VR work Whakakitenga (2020).

Although VR is sometimes defined as an HMD-enabled interactive digital environment through which a user can fully navigate space and objects, the sale of smartphone-powered HMDs – and even basic viewing technologies such as Google Cardboard – means that consumers, as well as marketing and press information, frequently describe any media viewed in an HMD as VR, whether it is fully navigable or not (Loomis, 2016). Within this context, we thus include any Indigenous media content that is made for viewing in an HMD – be it 360° video, interactive storytelling or gaming – as Indigenous VR.

This is not to say that a technological definition of Indigenous VR erases the problematic nature of delineating what should and should not count as Indigenous media. Since Māori film-maker Barry Barclay’s 2002 public lecture, in which he advocated moving the camera from the coloniser’s boat – looking onto the shore of Indigenous land – to placing the camera in the hands of the person on the shore, there has been increased emphasis on recognizing Indigenous media as made by Indigenous creatives (Barclay, 2003). However, as Keziah Wallis (2011) has noted, understanding who ‘makes’ the media is not always as simple as looking at a role such as the director, a practice typically used to assign authorship in Western media practice. In this article, we understand those who ‘make’ Indigenous media to encompass a wide range of production roles such as writer, designer, producer, cast and even commissioning bodies. We define their Indigeneity as ‘people who are minorities in their own homeland, who have suffered oppression in the context of colonial conquest, and who view their political situation in the context of neo-colonialism’ (Leuthold, 1998: 3). While the difficulties inherent in qualifying membership of these communities are far beyond the scope of this article, what is important to note is that Indigenous media is not merely the placing of Indigenous characters and cultures on screen but rather attention to the way an Indigenous framework inflects all aspects of a production from representation and narrative to production practice, distribution and exhibition. Following Barclay’s articulation of Indigenous Cinema as Fourth Cinema, a category that derives from the lineage of First (Hollywood), Second (European Auteur) and Third (Politically Motivated Third World) Cinemas, we seek to understand how Indigenous media practices combine with new VR technologies to create a Fourth VR.

Although Indigenous creatives do not often have access to the same resources and exhibition opportunities that have emerged from Silicon Valley and Hollywood’s support for VR, they have found ways to access, adapt and innovate VR technology. Our exploration of this terrain suggests radical adaptation of a new technology that folds together cultural traditions and VR’s unique audiovisual configurations to resist dominant, particularly colonial, frameworks. Within this context, three significant questions arise that speak to both the new possibilities offered by VR technology and how they link to and shed light on ongoing Indigenous media practice: how is VR as a new technology creating space and capacity for Indigenous creatives to tell their stories? How do Indigenous creatives negotiate Eurocentric modes of production and distribution? What does an Indigenous-centred VR production framework look like? To provide answers to these questions, we have built a snapshot of Indigenous VR works that has been published as a publicly available database: fourthvr.com (Fourth VR, 2020). This article provides an overview of how this database answers our research questions as well as examines three case studies drawn from the database – The Hunt (2018), Future Dreaming (2019) and Crow: The Legend (2018) – to engage more deeply with these questions.

Indigenous media, Indigenous Futurism and VR

Much of the literature on Indigenous audiovisual media has focused on cinema and, since the early 2000s, has frequently referred to Barry Barclay’s (2003) articulation of Fourth Cinema. For Barclay, Fourth Cinema was largely synonymous with Indigenous Cinema and subsequent scholars have built on Barclay’s ideas to describe Fourth/Indigenous Cinema as ‘employing and centering Native voices in the act of media self-determination and representation’ (Marubbio, 2010: 3). Christine Milligan, for example, argues that Fourth Cinema ‘seeks to establish the pre-eminence of the voice of the Indigenous’ (2015: 351), and Brendan Hokowhitu sees it as a way of disrupting colonial and postcolonial structures, which silence Indigenous peoples (2012: 111). The ability to articulate these possibilities in the 21st century was a shift away from a sense of pessimism in the 20th century when Gretchen Bataille and Charles Silet noted that ‘perhaps if there were more Native Americans “in the business,” we would begin to receive something other than an outside view of Indian experience. The probability of this is unlikely at this time, however’ (1980: vii). Increasing numbers of Indigenous film-makers had their works screened in the 21st century, bolstered by festivals such as ImagineNative in Canada, FICWallmapu in Latin America and Māoriland in Aotearoa New Zealand. Taika Waititi’s Oscar win, and acceptance speech, in 2020 also foregrounded the possibilities open to Indigenous film-makers (Graham-McLay, 2020). At the same time, scholarship was able to excavate the past to show a lengthy history of Indigenous agency in cinema. For example, Michelle Raheja’s focus on visual sovereignty outlined the way Indigenous cinema engages with other cinemas in

a reading practice for thinking about the space between resistance and compliance wherein Indigenous filmmakers and actors revisit, contribute to, borrow from, critique, and reconfigure ethnographic film conventions, at the same time operating within and stretching the boundaries created by those conventions. (2007: 1161).

Applying sovereignty to wider media practice, Elizabeth LaPensée states that ‘sovereignty in media means self-determined work and collaborations with communities that are by us (if needed, with help from genuine allies who really listen), primarily for us’ (Roanhorse et al., 2017). She specifies that in implementing this in the game industry,

it is important for game developers not to ignore the historical fact that Indigenous people have often been denied the power, status and authority to tell their own stories. Game players will get the most powerful and authentic experiences of Indigenous insights when Indigenous people are involved in the games’ design and development. It is a vital act of self-determination for us to be the ones determining how our people are portrayed and our stories are told. (LaPensée, 2017)

This is evident in Indigenous VR games like Ksiistsikom that not only place Indigenous narratives at the forefront of the experience, they also work towards Indigenous aims of language revitalization.

In approaching Indigenous VR in this article, we see Fourth VR as the myriad ways in which Indigenous peoples have employed VR technology to challenge mainstream stereotypes of Indigenous cultures, invigorate new means of visual sovereignty and revitalize and strengthen their own communities through Indigenous-centred storytelling. This use of new technologies to serve these Fourth VR goals finds close alignment with many of the theoretical and political positions outlined by Indigenous Futurism. Although the term Indigenous Futurism has been closely associated with science fiction literature, in part due to Grace L. Dillon’s use of the term in her seminal 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Dillon, 2012), other scholars and creatives, including Dillon, have expanded it to mean more broadly ‘Indigenous storytelling about the future’ (Baudemann, 2016: 117; see also Dillon, 2016). Discussing North American Indigenous Art, Kristina Baudemann describes Indigenous Futurism’s visual power to rework and dismantle colonial narratives: ‘in order to envision Indigenous futures, Indigenous artists dismantle the representational language of sf and devise new structures of meaning’ (2016: 127). Although the term suggests looking into the future, she makes it clear that time is not simply linear, and the strength of Indigenous Futurism is developing relationships with the past. This point is exemplified in the experimental VR work Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky (2018) in which Anishnaabe artist Scott Benesiinaabandan links wormhole technology and the future of space travel back to the ancient Anishnaabe creation myth in which the people are brought to earth by a spider woman on a spider web. Drawing on Amir Eshel, Kristina Baudemann goes on to note that ‘remembering the past is a central trope in the language of futurity. Re-appropriating the past is crucial in order to imagine a future different from the one imposed by grand narratives’ (2016: 127). In this context, VR is seen as a futuristic technology but its ability to rethink the past is essential and this has characterized the application of Indigenous Futurism to VR (Bye, 2018; LaPensée, 2020; Nixon, 2016).

The attention to and articulation of Indigenous Futurisms in the 2010s coincided with major shifts in the VR landscape in two major ways. Firstly, VR re-entered mainstream public discussion when Palmer Luckey’s 2012 Kick Starter campaign for funding to produce a new HMD garnered significant attention. Within just a few years, commercially available consumer headsets (Oculus, HTC Vive, Playstation 4 and Gear VR among others) have made it possible for users to interact with a wide range of VR content such as six degrees of freedom (room scale) interactive, whereby users can both navigate a three-dimensional space and use hand controllers or other mechanisms to manipulate objects/select narrative options; six degrees of freedom (room scale) non-interactive, whereby users can navigate a three-dimensional space but cannot change the space, objects or narrative; live-action 360 video, whereby users can choose where to look in a spherical view that contains live-action footage but cannot otherwise navigate it; digitally animated 360 video, whereby users can choose where to look in a spherical view that contains digitally animated footage but cannot otherwise navigate it. In turn, production tools have become more readily available such as VR-enabled game engines and 360° camera rigs. These have allowed Indigenous practitioners to engage with production processes that frequently correlate with the concepts of cyberspace, science fiction and advanced technologies that are the hallmarks of Indigenous Futurism, as well as showcase this work to wide audiences.

Secondly, there was a shift in the discourse surrounding VR that was concerned with embodiment and the interaction with virtual worlds. In the late 1980s through the early 2000s, there was a significant concern with how the emerging realm of cyberspace – through which VR was seen as the epitome of how to enter this new space – would question established understandings of human subjectivities and their relation to the lived world around them (Batchen, 1998; Bukatman, 1993; Grau, 2003; Heim, 1998; Hillis, 1999). Referring to prototype systems that spoke more to VR’s potential than its contemporary manifestation, these concerns ranged from identifying Alternate World Syndrome, a sickness of kinaesthetic disconnect (Heim, 1998: 52), the fragmentation of identity (Hillis, 1999: 164) and ‘the serious contradiction between corporeal reality and artificial image illusion’ (Grau, 2003: 203). Written mostly from an Anglophone, Western context, scholarly discourse in this era rarely took into account the already existent challenges to subjectivity that had been experienced by communities suffering from ongoing processes of colonization wherein corporeal disconnect –through lack of access to ancestral lands, myths of vanishing races or absence in representations of the nation – was a substantial aspect of daily life (Scott, 2016). Indigenous Futurism (as well as Afrofuturism, Asian Futurism and other similar movements) was already responding with strategies for making sense of this disconnect and the means of negotiating between the virtual and the real without recourse to a Western emphasis on disembodiment (2Bears, 2010; Todd, 1996). For example, when writing about Yuxweluptun’s 1990s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights, Loretta Todd notes that ‘Yuxweluptun does not want you to forget your body. Your identity is as intact here as it might be in the material world’ (1996: 191). Similarly, Jackson 2Bears asks:

can we think about Yuxweluptun’s VR helmet as being analogous to the Sxwaixwe mask, a spiritual mediator between the incommensurable, death and life, embodiment and disembodiment, virtuality and flesh? That is, considered as a reversal of the codes of simulation, can technology here become hauntological, where dreams and visions are synonymous with that of technological immersion at the site of the collapse between the boundaries of the virtual and biological organisms? (2Bears, 2010)

With the 2016 release of commercial HMDs, scholars, journalists and the public had greater access to fully explore what VR might offer and thus catch up with the nuanced ways in which VR might offer new subjective and embodied engagements. This included discussion of the possibility (and impossibility) of greater empathy (Bollmer, 2017; Jason et al., 2017; Milk, 2015; Mitchell, 2017), bodily sensations of presence and absence (Popat, 2016) and how VR can allow subjects to body swap (Jarvis, 2019). In this way, VR provided ways to produce Indigenous Futurism that could not be articulated in other media forms. At the same time, VR practice was able to learn from the diverse articulations of place, space and body that Indigenous Futurism was already providing.

Fourth VR database

Even though the potential for close links between Indigenous Futurism and VR were in place, and even though Fourth VR was being produced, Sarah Eagle Heart’s comment about a lack of Indigenous creatives working in this space spoke to a lack of visibility. By undertaking research into the spread of Indigenous creatives working with VR, we hoped to investigate what initial work was taking place and where the potential for further work might be. We were cautious that creating a database of works specific to Fourth VR would risk ‘ghettoizing’ these practitioners, placing them as separate from and outstream ‘mainstream’ VR rather than significant contributors to the rapidly changing landscape of VR production. However, we were conscious that work needed to be done to make visible these rich contributions. We also drew upon the experience of Indigenous digital media artists, such as Jason Edward Lewis who articulated the value in separating Indigenous practice from mainstream practice at times:

if it had been more integrated, Indigenous practice would most likely have been a minority practice within a larger, existing narrative, a few lonely examples within an existing cannon – subaltern – subject to established theory […] The way it has unfolded over the last two decades, though, is that we have developed our own critics, our own critical frameworks, our own antecedents, our own canon […] Thus, we have not been preoccupied with getting “added on” or “brought in” to the narrative, to the canon, to the theory. (2016: 44–45).

By only including Indigenous VR works in our database, we were able to draw the connections between them rather than ask for them to be compared to mainstream works, without negating the fact that many of them, such as Crow (which is discussed further below), do already operate in the mainstream.

To compile the database, we searched through publicly available information, including press articles, information provided in HMD’s libraries of available content and festival guides. We also reached out to practitioners working in this area to add to the data we had on each VR work as well as provide information about VR works that we had not previously found. Contrary to our initial expectations, compiling the data has led us to realize that Indigenous VR practice is not a scarce and latent endeavour but, rather, well established. We found that Indigenous VR spans all the major delivery modes: six degrees of freedom interactive, six degrees of freedom non-interactive, live-action 360 video and digitally animated 360 video. It is available across the major platforms via, for example, the Oculus Store, Viveport, Steam, Google Cardboard and YouTube. The works also display a variety of formats from VR games to non-narrative experimental artworks to cinematic VR experiences. The database currently displays 43 VR works, yet we know that we will not have captured all existent works (particularly as our language capacity meant we were limited to searching for works with information available in English and/or Spanish). We also know that there are more works in production and the picture will only widen in coming years.

From our survey, we have found a wide geographical spread, with production locations extending from Inuit lands in the far north to Aotearoa New Zealand in the south. However, we also note significant concentration in North America. It is out of the scope of this article to fully examine the historical and cultural reasons why Indigenous VR is being produced more frequently in some geographical locations rather than others, but the map layout of the online database makes clear the geographical spread. Wherever possible, we have geolocated the VR works to sites of production and/or location of the storytelling. The circle icon on the map represents this geolocation. When specific geolocation information is not available, the work is marked by a diamond icon to indicate that the location refers to the nation state in which the VR work was produced. Although we recognize the problematic nature of using national boundaries as locators, considering their contested relationship with Indigenous territories, we felt that connecting these projects to the landscapes from which they emerged was important when examining Indigenous creative projects.

Having uncovered the wide spread of Fourth VR, it did feel necessary to dig into production processes to get a sense of how Indigenous capacity has being developed and what this could mean for further expansion, as well as ongoing visual sovereignty. Our organization of the data thus takes place in the context of Barclay’s call for a Fourth Cinema, and by extension our call for a Fourth VR, that interrogates where agency operates in these production processes: is the (virtual) camera placed fully in the hands of Indigenous creatives or are other mechanisms taking place so that there is agency in the collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous creatives? To explore this, we separated the Indigenous VR works into three categories: Indigenous Led, Indigenous Partnership and Indigenous Collaboration. Indigenous Led refers to works where the project has been driven by Indigenous creatives, frequently meaning that leadership roles such as director and producer are performed by Indigenous practitioners. Indigenous Partnership refers to works where Indigenous practitioners contribute to and are extensively involved in various levels of production, for example as producer, writer or designer, even though non-Indigenous practitioners may perform key creative and technical roles. Indigenous Collaboration refers to works where Indigenous practitioners do not normally fulfil substantial creative or technical roles but have participated and contributed to the way their stories are told. This latter category can include extensive consultation and/or input into the final work but can also include scenarios where Indigenous agencies contract non-Indigenous organizations to create the work. Although perspectives, such as those by Sarah Eagle Heart, meant we expected to find few VR works in the first category, Indigenous Led, we instead found 27 of the VR works were Indigenous Led, 10 were Indigenous Partnership and 6 were Indigenous Collaboration.

These categories are teased out further, below, in our case studies that demonstrate specific examples, but it is important to note here that these are not hierarchical taxonomies that suggest one model is better than the other. Rather, within the context of articulating a Fourth VR, they allow us to maintain a focus on the operation of agency, the development of Indigenous VR capacity and how different production models suit the different storytelling desires of Indigenous communities. What this does mean is that we did not include works where Indigenous communities or people were placed ‘on screen’, but there was no clear indication that Indigenous communities had participated in the production.

To more fully answer the research questions, our three case studies, The Hunt (2018), Future Dreaming (2019) and Crow: The Legend (2018), are examined to understand both their production background and the storytelling that occurs within the VR work. To investigate the first question, how VR as a new technology creates space and capacity for Indigenous creatives to tell their stories, we focus on the way textual components representing significant aspects of Indigenous storytelling – such as community, temporal relations and the interconnectivity of all living beings – are realized within the parameters of VR’s technological possibilities. For the second question, concerning how indigenous creatives negotiate Eurocentric modes of production and distribution, we consider the processes leading to and during the creation of the VR work with a particular emphasis on Indigenous input, as well as how the VR works reach audiences. The level of Indigenous engagement with each VR project was determined through close consideration of publicly available production information, including interviews and other materials associated with the release of individual projects. The combination of a close examination of these case studies and attention to the wider survey provided by the database, in turn, allows us to answer what an Indigenous-centred VR production framework looks like.

Case study 1: Indigenous led and The Hunt

Danis Goulet’s The Hunt presents a dystopic and yet hopeful imagining of the future. In the 6-min, live-action 360 video, the long history of Mohawk resistance is extended into a future where colonial laws are enforced by a fleet of automated orbs. As Goulet notes in an interview, ‘Indigenous existence is resistance’ (Jason et al., 2017), and The Hunt offers an opportunity for the user to see resistance play out around them in a 360° space rather than at the distance provided by the typical 2D screen. The project originated when imagineNATIVE, Toronto International Film Festival, Pinnguaq and The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (TIFF) implemented the 2167 project that commissioned Indigenous film-makers and artists to create VR works with the specific task of setting their work 150 years in the future; 2167 was conceived as a response to the Canadian Government’s Canada 150 project that was celebrating 150 years of Canada’s confederation. As imagineNATIVE Artistic Director Jason Ryle notes, ‘the initial Canada 150 was really focused on celebrating the past 150 years; the works had to be celebratory – there was no subversion, it seemed, from their requirements. 2167 came about envisioning 150 years into the future, and turning it over to Indigenous artists’ (Jason et al., 2017). Another imagineNATIVE director, Daniel Northway-Frank, confirmed that, for the most part, the entire project was Indigenous driven (Anderson, 2017).

For 2167, Goulet drew upon her previous short film work, which had explicitly addressed Indigenous Futurism, and then developed new production processes such as bird-eye mapping and staging scenes to capture her story within a 360° field of view(Goulet, 2017). Using a full Mohawk cast, and filmed on the Six Nations reserve in Canada, The Hunt combines VR technology and Indigenous narrative frameworks to celebrate ‘the ingenious ways we resist colonization’ (Jason et al., 2017). It was exhibited along with the other 2167 VR works at the imagineNATIVE festival, TIFF and via a cross-Canada tour that allowed it to reach over 1000 people in 13 communities across Canada (Anderson, 2017).

The Hunt foregrounds what 150 years might add to 500 years of Mohawk resistance by foregrounding two major themes: the strength of the Mohawk language and how colonizing tools can be turned upon themselves as part of the resistance. The human characters all use Mohawk and only switch to English when addressing the automated orbs. In this way, English remains embedded within colonial structures, while Mohawk is presented as the language of the internal community. As Goulet notes, ‘the linguist and translator were working to translate words like “terrain cruiser” which don’t really have Mohawk words associated with them…. [Our linguist was] calling around to Indigenous elders to get a consensus on what these things should be called’ (Jason et al., 2017). This was similar to the process another of the 2167 artists, Benesiinaabandan, went through in his production of Blueberry Pie. Part of the work of producing Blueberry Pie meant figuring out ways to express sci-fi terms like blackhole in a way which would reflect the Anishinaabe relationship to the world rather than a literal translation (Jason et al., 2017).

Goulet went on to say that this process of finding new language expressions is ‘really cool because it really counters the idea that Indigenous people are stuck in the past, it’s like we’re not relics or these old archaic people that are running around on the prairie – you know, the total stereotype…. it’s cultural evolution, and Indigenous communities are absolutely involved in that’ (Goulet, 2017). This cultural evolution in The Hunt meant placing the Mohawk language in relation to new technologies, as represented by the dialogue about the orbs, but also by carefully choosing where the language would be in the 360° space created by the VR technology. Camera placement means the user hears the Mohawk language from characters who are physically close to them, while the orbs are for the most part presented at the peripheries of the 360° space. For the Mohawk-speaking user, this proximity is most acute because they can hear the dialogue while choosing which character to focus on. However, for the non-Mohawk-speaker, the placement of subtitles in only one section of the 360° field of view means that they are restricted with regards to how much they can see and hear/understand at the same time. In this way, the non-Mohawk speaker is not given the same access to this community and they have to work to establish their personal relationship with it. These positionings thus undermine what Goulet calls ‘the fetishization and weird fascination where Indigenous people and marginalized communities are the objects of someone’s gaze’ (Jason et al., 2017).

In terms of subverting colonial tools, 360° aerial footage provides both a narrative feature and a VR production tool. The Hunt opens with moving footage that captures a bird-eye view over the Six Nations reserve. On the one hand, it can be read in the narrative as footage from the automated orbs, attempting to survey and control the landscape. On the other hand, it aligns with the contemporary use of VR aerial shots to replicate the colonial tropes of a land under command that have been produced in 2D media (Leotta and Ross, 2018). However, within the Indigenous frameworks provided by The Hunt, this footage and production technique is turned upon itself. The landscape, as experienced in an Indigenous framework, is not a passive landmass but an active agent. Its use in The Hunt aligns with what Michelle H. Raheja found in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001):

The land is not something that the characters of the film are in conflict with and attempt to overcome, but a varied and essential backdrop against which the particularities of the narrative are played out. This is especially key to understanding the film since communities in the Arctic continue to rely on the land and its plant and animal population for survival. (Raheja, 2007: 1178)

Similarly, Māori film-maker Merata Mita spoke of the way she retained an indigenous focus when filming on the land ‘so it’s there in its Māori context and not a Pākehā [settler] one’ (cited in Parekōwhai, 1988). The Hunt’s VR exploration of the land thus resists the typical colonial trope of aerial control. The resistance of colonialism is then emphasized in the narrative which ends by showing that the Mohawk community has been capturing and reprogramming the orbs as a means of resistance.

By combining an Indigenous-led use of VR technology with Goulet’s narrative tools, it was thus possible to repeat what Paul Lawrence Yuxweluptun found himself doing in the 1990s. As Yuxweluptun explains, when he combined native experiences with western world experiences and technology, he was ‘[e]mploying technology that in the past has been used against native people’ (1996: 316). Three decades later, VR technology provides Goulet with the capacity to tell her stories in a new way. As a further iteration of Goulet’s Indigenous Futurism, The Hunt provides a technological framework for demonstrating how resistance can play out as well as what possible visions of the future might look like. The Hunt’s development and distribution in the 2167 project is a direct response to the way a Eurocentric framework was implied in the Canada 150 project, but 2167’s Indigenous-centred model allowed its VR creatives to produce Indigenous stories and bring them to Indigenous communities in a way that foregrounded a non-Eurocentric vision of Canada’s past and future.

Case study 2: Indigenous partnership and Future Dreaming

The combination of Indigenous experiences with colonial technologies is also a powerful part of the Aboriginal VR experience Future Dreaming. As an example of Indigenous Partnership VR, Future Dreaming demonstrates how VR technologies provide a platform for re-visioning traditional practices. In Future Dreaming, users are given access to the Dreaming of a group of four Aboriginal teenagers from the Pilbara district of Western Australia. This VR Dreaming was the result of an ongoing partnership between well-known non-Indigenous XR artist Sutu and Aboriginal youth of Roebourne, Western Australia. Their work together began in 2010 as part of the Yijala Yala community-based art project that highlighted contemporary cultural heritage. This connection between Sutu and the community of Roebourne has produced a variety of creative work, including the award-winning digital comic Nomad. Like Nomad, where Roebourne youth learnt advanced visual techniques and participated in driving the storytelling, the creation of Future Dreaming trained the protagonists in VR techniques as part of the process of converting their dreams for the future to the medium of VR. The four young Aboriginal artists who co-created Future Dreaming, as well as starred as protagonists in the work, may not have initiated the project, but the project’s development facilitated capacity-building, putting them at the centre of a technologically advanced creative practice. In this way, the narrative of Future Dreaming focuses on Indigenous imaginings of their own futures.

Specifically, the protagonists were asked to imagine where they would be 1 week, 5 years and 20 years in the future. They were then encouraged to articulate this within the VR space, leading to Future Dreaming’s presentation as a six degrees of freedom, non-interactive work in which the user is taken into and placed in the centre of spaces correlating with each artist/protagonist’s dream. These spaces range from the Pilbara desert region of Western Australia to the imaginary outer space colony, Deya. Because the artists/protagonists were captured with live-action cameras and placed in the digital worlds they created, they directly address the user during the VR work and help integrate the user within the Dreaming. This means that although the user is visibly absent from the diegesis they are provided with a connection, linking them to people and place in a network that merges the temporal states of present and future. This is conceptualized within the Aboriginal visualization technique of Dreaming that the project references, not only within the VR work but also in the information provided about the project. According to Lynne Hume, the Dreaming represents a ‘subliminal reality that Aboriginals can tap into through various means’ (1999, p. 1), while Stanner suggests that the Dreaming is ‘a continuing highway […] between subliminal reality and immediate reality’ (1976: 23). The Dreaming in Future Dreaming frequently demonstrates travel and negotiation of space at the literal level – where the artists/protagonists go – but the temporal unfolding of these journey within 360° space places their journeys within the Dreaming’s traversal of realities. Furthermore, the visual construction – and deconstruction – of the VR landscapes often means that transparent fields of light pass through the user, thus embodying the user in the journey along with the artist/protagonist. This construction and amendment of landscapes around the user are evocative of the mentalization techniques of Dreaming. Like the ancestors who left ‘tangible expressions of themselves’ in the landscape (Hume, 2000: 126), the artists/protagonists of Future Dreaming imprint themselves onto the VR world by constructing and deconstructing the world around them in relation to their imaginations.

Within Future Dreaming, the Dreaming is clearly connected to elements of Indigenous Futurism. The imagined future colony, for example, is powered by emus on treadmills and governed by one of the artists/protagonists, Maxie. It thus signals, in a playful way, that Indigenous people, and the creatures they connect to, will be leaders in the future, with the creativity to radically change our future. At another point, Maverick – one of the other artists/protagonists – is imagining himself 1 week in the future sitting at the cinema watching Pacific Rim Uprising (2018). He then dreams himself in control of a giant robot. Here there is a confluence of past, present and future: this event is part of the near present (1 week in the future) but involves dreaming a future of Indigenous-controlled robots. When Maverick then reworks the robot’s destructive power by converting it into a dancing entertainer, he rewrites past colonial narratives about who has agency in the Pacific and what can be done with that agency. Furthermore, the revisualizing of the pop culture experience that is Pacific Rim Uprising resonates with Debra Yepa-Pappan’s 2008 Indigenous Futurism collage Live Long and Prosper (Spock was a Half-Breed). In this collage, a Native woman’s braids are presented as neon purple and her hand forms Mr. Spock from Star Trek’s trademark Vulcan salute. As Kristina Baudemann notes, ‘imagining the girl as a Vulcan in Live Long and Prosper […] is neither another empty pop art simulation of Indigenous absence […] nor escapism but an Indigenous futurism that asserts Indigenous presence in the form of the creative control of the Indigenous artist over the simulation’ (2016: 138). Future Dreaming’s blend of multiple cultural references and its future orientation thus situates the agency of the artists/protagonists as both participants in cultural futures and creators of those same futures.

At another point in the Future Dreaming experience, Maverick has imagined himself surrounded by women claiming he is the father of their children. As the others remind him, however, he can rewrite his future, leading Maverick to imagine a future where his robot companion is able to prove the children are not his. Although another tongue in cheek moment, it combines with the rest of the Dreaming to demonstrates Jason Edward Lewis’s assertion that ‘we are now turning towards claiming territory in the future imaginary, or, better yet, creating our own’ (2016: 37). By allowing VR technology to position users in the centre of these stories, Future Dreaming allows this territorial claim to encompass the user, providing space for Indigenous users to see their own participation in an Indigenous Futurism. For the non-Indigenous user, they are equally centred in this space but without claims to territory, and thus, the non-Indigenous user is invited to be supportive of these territory claiming processes.

As a partnership work, Future Dreaming’s production relied upon the expertise of non-Indigenous creatives, particularly Sutu, and its exhibition through the Australian and US festival circuit (Melbourne International Film Festival, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Tribeca festival, etc.) meant that it traversed mostly Eurocentric distribution networks. However, like the Hunt, Future Dreaming clearly presents the capacity for VR to provide new iterations of Indigenous Futurism. For example, the decision to audiovisually present the young Aboriginal artists in the work, directly speaking to the user, foregrounds their agency and sovereignty. Its different use of VR technologies, when compared to The Hunt, also highlights the diverse ways in which an Indigenous VR production framework can be constructed.

Case study 3: Indigenous collaboration and Crow: The Legend

The role of non-Indigenous creatives in allowing space and developing capacity for Indigenous VR practitioners is also present in Baobab Studio’s Crow: The Legend. Developed using the Unity game engine, Crow is perhaps the most well-known Indigenous VR experience. The project was awarded four Daytime Emmy Awards: Outstanding Interactive Media for a Daytime Program, two Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation awards and Outstanding Directing for an Animated Program. Although the 15-member team at Baobab are not Indigenous and the star-studded cast are mostly not Indigenous, this project’s collaboration with NAP – a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering Indigenous communities – reveals the ways in which Indigenous VR projects can integrate Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners, and users, in multiple, overlapping ways.

Drawing on the Lenape legend of the Rainbow Crow, Crow presents a six degrees of freedom interactive experience with detailed, digitally rendered animation. Voice over narration guides the user through the major story arc: The Spirit of the Seasons has brought snow for the first time and, as a result, the animals of the forest are freezing to death. Crow, the titular character, is chosen to fly across the galaxy to convince The One Who Creates Everything by Thinking to take away the snow. Instead, he is given the gift of fire which ultimately saves the forest community but strips him of his beautiful coloured feathers and renowned singing voice.

In determining it as a work of Indigenous Collaboration, we considered the project’s initiation by the Baobab team and subsequent decision to recruit Sarah Eagle Heart of NAP and Randy Edmonds of the National Urban Indian Council to act as advisors for the project. Eric Darnell, Baobab’s Chief Creative Officer, stated that although the Crow project has been an important one since Baobab’s inception in 2015, ‘Darnell was acutely aware that his family ancestry didn’t give him much authority on subjects of Native American culture’ (Roettgers, 2018). In this context, the incorporation of Edmonds and Eagle Heart as consulting producers allowed for Indigenous input into the experience from early on. Eagle Heart then provided the voice of the moon while Edmonds narrated the entire VR work. Combined, this input protected the integrity of the original story. It also developed Indigenous capacity in VR production: as a result of the project, NAP partnered with Baobab and two Indigenous media organizations (Vision Maker Media and Longhouse Media) to create the #GenIndigenous Youth Fellowship with the first appointment being announced in November 2018.

Signalling a desire to engage with Indigenous communities, rather than exploit them, Baobab CEO Maureen Fan made it clear that Crow was not seen as a profit-driven project. ‘There are always [chances] for us to make money, but for this one in particular, we made a conscious choice not to’ (Takahashi, 2018). The distribution of Crow further reflected the engagement with Indigenous communities. Rather than premiering first at a large international festival, it was screened at the Gathering of Nations powwow and this process contrasted Baobab’s earlier works Invasion! (2016) and Asteroids! (2017), which premiered at the Tribeca and Sundance festivals, respectively. Its exhibition at the Gathering of Nations powwow aligns with Barclay’s discussion of and support for Māori film-makers who accompany their films to venues and engage with Indigenous customs around the release of art projects (2003: 11). The Crow’s later release for free on the Oculus Store, as well as a 360° video version on YouTube, served to facilitate greater access with an eye on how this could serve Indigenous youth. As Fan explains:

When we were creating this, they taught us that many Native American youth were forced into re-education camps and told that they were not allowed to tell stories like this. They were considered pagan. Many of their stories were wiped from history, so to them, it was a big deal that we’re sharing this story. Our piece is one of the only, if not the first, animated pieces that shows an indigenous world view where they’re telling the story authentically rather than just us doing it. (Takahashi, 2018)

It is in an examination of Crow’s content, however, that reveals its ability to tell Indigenous stories. Both Eagle Heart and Baobab emphasize the importance of community as a narrative device, but they also envisage it working in slightly different ways. For Baobab, community is an exploration of racial harmony and acceptance, an idea further expressed in their inclusion of ethnically diverse voice actors who are ‘advocates of their own minority, underrepresented groups’(Zahed, 2018). This aspect is also emphasized by the addition of a minor romantic subplot between Crow and Skunk that suggests intra-community relationship building. The idea of community for Eagle Heart, however, goes beyond these aspects and is grounded in the importance of the interrelationality of all things. For Eagle Heart, community is an integral aspect of mitakuye oyasin, a Lakota teaching which is integral to storytelling. The concept of mitakuye oyasin acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things with parallels found in other Indigenous belief systems whereby ‘there is no separation of body, mind, spirit and heart’ (Todd, 1996, p. 181), and the ‘interrelationships between all entities are of paramount importance, and space is a more important referent than time’ (Little Bear, 2011: 77; see also Country et al., 2016: 456). Jackson 2Bears extends this concept into an understanding of VR technology where

an Indigenous theory of virtuality would be about thinking technology animistically – computer simulations come alive and begin to have for us what Jung referred to as a “psychic significance.” Here, the technological does not become about what Jung foresaw as a radical denial of existence and the natural world, but rather simulations that return to embed themselves back into the material instantiation of the flesh and reinscribe an emotional and unconscious identity with biological organisms, spirits and other natural phenomenon. (2Bears, 2010)

Crow articulates this through the position of the user as a central component in the narrative. The user is named as the character ‘The Spirit of the Seasons’ and is directly addressed by the narrator. When they look down, they see tree branches extending from their hands’ positions. These hands/branches are a technological extension that is able to impact upon the virtual environment: a swish of the hands in the forest ruffles leaves, they help extend the snow fields when the landscape starts to freeze over and they return colour to Crow after he returns. In this way, the user is asked to undertake an embodied position of interconnectedness that cannot be separated from the natural (virtual) world. Although similar technological affordances have been developed and emphasized in non-Indigenous VR (Ross, 2020), in Crow, they allow VR technology to serve as ‘the perfect medium for [Indigenous forms] of transformational storytelling’ (Baobab Studios, n.d.). The user is provided with a technologically informed ability to transform the landscape/characters that would not be possible in other media. At the same time, the haptic feedback provided by the hand controllers when, for example, the user passes through celestial planes means that this is an embodied and connected agency rather than an omniscient and disembodied power. This agency is troublesome to begin with because The Spirit of the Seasons/user brings about the snow, in effect enacting devastating climate change. However, this act becomes a tale to be learnt from, aided by the end of the narrative arc when The Spirit of the Seasons/user brushes away the snow.

Discussing the difference between colonial and Indigenous strategies in VR, Sarah King draws on Lorretta Todd to state that Indigenous virtual worlds are ‘those in which “freedom from consequences” becomes unimaginable because the environment cannot be objectified by those assumed superior’ (2017: 190). Referencing Indigenous knowledge, Crow demonstrates, in both a metaphorical and techno-embodied sense, that our engagement with the environment is not consequence-free. It thus uses VR technology to bring together a narrative that is accessible to a range of audiences but, as with The Hunt and Future Dreaming, centres Indigenous storytelling. While Crow’s development in Baobab Studio means it is the most firmly located within a Eurocentric production process, its engagement with Indigenous creators, and willingness to premiere to Indigenous audiences, demonstrates there are opportunities to carry on the work begun in the late 20th century to expand VR beyond its Eurocentric roots.

Conclusion

As these case studies demonstrate, Indigenous practitioners are using existing VR tools, techniques and workflows but, in each case – whether led, in partnership, or in collaboration – they are situating their VR enabled storytelling within wider Indigenous practice. Their radical adaptation of this new technology is seen in the way VR is used to speak back to, subvert and provide new pathways through ongoing colonial structures with a frequent emphasis on the way Indigenous subjects can be placed at the centre of Indigenous-directed futures. Although we have provided extended details of just three case studies, the wider range of works in the Fourth VR database demonstrate that these processes are happening in wide-ranging geographical locations and across multiple VR formats. In this way, Fourth VR is creating space and capacity for Indigenous creatives to tell their stories.

Collectively, the 43 projects captured by the Fourth VR database show that an Indigenous-centred VR production framework is diverse but repeated trends emerge such as the ability to use VR to express and realize Indigenous Futurism; foreground native languages in virtual worlds; provide new articulations of Indigenous activism; embody connections between the past, present and future and demonstrate the interconnectivity of all living things. The different ways in which Indigenous practitioners lead, partner or collaborate on these projects also demonstrate a canny capacity to negotiate Eurocentric modes of production and distribution, so that their work reaches a range of audiences. While a cursory glimpse of the VR landscape might suggest the absence of Indigenous voices, this growing body of work, engaging with the full spectrum of VR formats and tools, does exist and provides a rich contribution to the wider arena of VR practice.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Miriam Ross

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