About

Our ultimate goal is to invent Tribally-created computational design experience prototypes that preserve Indigenous history, represent Indigenous communities’ ways of being and knowing, and can be effectively shared in K-12 classrooms. We intend for this project to empower Tribal members to (re)engage technologies that have historically created and perpetuated disparities that have caused significant harm to their communities. 

The lack of representation of Indigenous issues and perspectives in K-12 education curricula in the United States has led to numerous negative consequences for Indigenous students and is a disservice to all students. While technology has the potential to support teachers and Indigenous Knowledge Holders in addressing this issue, very little work has been done on Indigenous representation within the context of narrative technologies. We argue that these technologies perpetuate systemic racism and potentially cause further harm and disenfranchisement for Indigenous communities. As such, our proposed project aims to examine and reformulate the underlying computational models of these technologies to fundamentally decolonize the process of creating them, making them more inclusive and respectful of Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

The Braiding Knowledge Project is a collaboration between Utah State University and the University of Utah.

This material was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202200170). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. #2119573 and #2119630. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.