Sharing deep history as digital knowledge: An ontology of the Sq’éwlets website project

Abstract

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, and relation. This paper presents an ontology of the Sq’éwlets Virtual Museum of Canada Website Project, a project that has focused on creating a digital community biography of the Sq’éwlets First Nation ( www.digitalsqewlets.ca ). Based on several decades of community archaeology and the recent production of short video documentaries, the website presents a long-term perspective of what it means to be a Sq’éwlets person and community member today. We explore how this project came to focus on the nature of being Sq’éwlets; how community members conceived the nature, structure, and nomenclature of the website; and how this Sq’éwlets being-ness is translated for outside audiences. We suggest what lessons this approach has for anthropological conventions of naming and knowing as they relate to Indigenous histories, and consider how archaeological knowledge can be transformed into a digital platform within a community-based process.

Assembling “Effective Archaeologies” toward Equitable Futures

“…This has proven transformative in cases where scholars have engaged in building the substantive relationships on which successful initiatives depend (e.g., Croes, Carriere, and Stapp ; Lyons et al. ). However, community archaeology is a label that can paper over power relations within communities and the complex relationships of present‐day peoples to the archaeological landscapes within which they dwell (Chirikure and Pwiti ; Smith and Waterton ; Thiaw ).…”

“…On the colonial side of the abyssal line, we see emergent disciplinary practice that shifts from imagining community as an "audience"-a term that implies watching and listening-to collaborative, decolonizing research practices (Atalay 2012;Cipolla, Quinn, and Levy 2019;Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008;Gnecco and Ayala 2011;McNiven 2016;Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016;Silliman 2008;Watkins 2000). This has proven transformative in cases where scholars have engaged in building the substantive relationships on which successful initiatives depend (e.g., Croes, Carriere, and Stapp 2018;Lyons et al 2016). However, community archaeology is a label that can paper over power relations within communities and the complex relationships of present-day peoples to the archaeological landscapes within which they dwell (Chirikure and Pwiti 2008;Smith and Waterton 2009;Thiaw 2003).…”

Re-coding Collaborative Archaeology: Digital Teaching and Learning for a Decolonised Future

“…Building on Susan Dion's (2009) use of the term 'braiding histories' , one of the most profound contributions has come from Sonya Atalay and the concept of braiding knowledge, to reflect the potential for diverse sources and forms of knowledge to be valued, reworked and combined in community-based archaeology projects. Rather than thinking of archaeology as being fundamentally at odds with indigenous knowledge, Atalay and others have since discussed the ways in which analogue media (like graphic novels) and digital media (including animation and virtual reality) can be used to partner indigenous and archaeological ways of knowing to 'mobilise knowledge' , weaving it together and moving it into places where it is accessible by multiple public audiences (Atalay 2012;Lyons et al 2016).…”

Creating tangible interactions with cultural heritage: lessons learned from a large scale, long term co-design project

“…Participatory Design frameworks and methodologies have been adopted and applied for long-term projects in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to develop interactive systems in many domains, from healthcare (Bowen et al 2010) to local governance (Bødker and Zander 2015). However, such long-term efforts are rare when it comes to HCI work in cultural heritage: examples exist where heritage institutions, researchers and developers worked together to create large-scale digital resources, particularly regarding indigenous cultural heritage, where the participation of local institutions is essential (see Lyons et al 2016;Rowley 2013). These examples, however, did not lead to novel interaction platforms.…”