Publication Date
2025
Placement
First Prize
Class Year
2025
Department
Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
Advisor
Tarren Andrews
Abstract
In Indigenous Technology Futurisms: Reclaiming Mackinac Island in Virtual Reality, Madeline A. Gupta introduces a place-based digital storytelling project that uses interactive mapping as the foundation for cultural reconnection and community wellness. Centered on Mackinac Island—ancestral land of the Anishinaabe people—the project features a custom-designed map by an Anishinaabe artist, allowing users to navigate a VR website by selecting specific locations across northern Michigan. Each map point opens into a spatial video experience paired with traditional audio content, including oral histories, poetry, and songs.
The project reframes digital cartography through an Indigenous lens, challenging Western colonial mapping practices that erase Native presence. Rather than representing land as a static commodity, the interactive map functions as a living archive, guiding users through ancestral landscapes that are layered with story, memory, and meaning. It also serves as an educational and technical bridge for Indigenous youth, who are invited to see themselves reflected not only in the land, but also in the act of digitally stewarding and remapping it.
By fusing modern cartographic interfaces with Indigenous pedagogies, this work contributes to new forms of spatial literacy, digital sovereignty, and decolonial geographic representation. The map becomes more than a navigation tool—it becomes a sovereign act of reclaiming and reimagining Indigenous space in both physical and digital worlds.
Recommended Citation
Gupta, Madeline A., "Indigenous Technology Futurisms: Reclaiming Mackinac Island in Virtual Reality" (2025). Library Map Prize. 20.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/library_map_prize/20
This Article is Open Access