Hi! I am curious to learn more about your inspiration to make these awesome games. How do you see Native American voices and sovereignty being applied in your games and how have your games impacted other Native Americans?
Hi! Ya sure!
How do you see Native American voices and sovereignty being applied in your games?
It's tricky to pull any one thing out of my work and say "that!" specifically because my work is an expression of my worldview as an Indigenous person. One of the things I think is hugely different between Indigenous people and settlers is their view on what "post-apocalypse" looks like. When I started working on this game I was actually thinking about what would the world look like after cars are gone. Like eventually it's going to happen, but does it have to be a grim-dark future where everything is bad? So I started building what a city of the future could look like and because cars were out of the picture I had to think about what that means in terms of how a city is set up and what kind of things we wouldn't have anymore. That led me to think about what kind of things we could have instead! Like most people don't know that all the plants native to Turtle Island are either food, medicine, our food's food or material (for clothes, buildings, furniture, toys, etc). That means there's a lot of things we could plant on every corner and rooftop that would replace a lot of things that would go into corner stores. That's probably a really long way of saying "it's in everything." lol
How have your games impacted other Native Americans?
I don't know about impact, but I do know from the conversations I've had with other N8Vs (especially about Hill Agency: PURITYdecay) is that they love how the worlds I build feel to them. A lot of stuff that looks "native" doesn't really feel that way to Indigenous people. My big hope is that more Indigenous people start making their own worlds in games so I can play them!
Hi Meagan! thank you so much for your response, and I am doing a paper on Indigenous ideas against the background of migration, displacement and trans-nationalism. I love video games and I wonder how Indigenous ideas fit into one of all of the three concepts mentioned. I just got started looking at Twitch streamers who identify as Native Americans and there must be some soft cosmopolitan energy happening here as well as the trans-nationalism. Moreover, Settlers displaced a lot of first nations into urban areas or reservations and what you are doing is what I feel is asserting your Indigeneity onto Steam (owned by a settler) with your games, and sharing the ideas you mentioned about "post-apocalypse" being distinct from other ideas. I don't think that interactive media, particular video games, get enough attention as a medium of passing down information of having cultural influence for Native Americans and I want to help share that video games do help pass knowledge and the medium is accessible and fun! I know this is not the best place for this talk but I am happy to learn and support Indigenous creators!
Oh awesome! You should check out https://www.indigenousgamedevs.com/