Collaborative Virtual Environments for Indigenous Resurgence: An exploratory paper around XR supporting traditional ways of knowing and being – a New Zealand example

Indigenous connection to place is an important part of Indigenous identity around the world. But, with increasing numbers of Indigenous people living in diasporic spaces this connection to place is necessarily changing. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) and other digital technologies provide interesting ways in which Indigenous peoples might be able to proactively use these technologies to maintain traditional connections to place in an active way. A number of different digital technologies are discussed in this paper in terms of the way in which they have been able to support us, as one particular Indigenous group, to maintain, revitalize, and even rethink how we can best continue our traditional practices in the modern environment we all now inhabit. The underlying goal to this work was that, if we understand how better to do this, it could help us adapt different digital technologies to our world but also possibly provide general schema and practices that other Indigenous groups may be able to use in their own work. In this respect this paper describes ways in which, following Arturo Escobar, we might be able to achieve a form of design practice aimed at “enabling the ecological, social, and technological conditions where multiple worlds and knowledges, involving humans and non-humans, can nourish in mutually enhancing ways.” It is important to note though that this paper is exploratory. It is exploratory in the sense that it reports on work that we as a hapū (clan) have begun to undertake in our efforts to once again assert our status as kaitieki (stewards of our traditional lands and waters). In doing this we move beyond recent research which has explored the way design and work with digital technologies can be extended to be more inclusive of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The paper begins exploring the ways in which Indigenous peoples can use XR to rebuild traditional knowledge within our own communities and to then put XR technologies into use as a mechanism to practice our traditional ways of knowing and being in the world.