VIRTUAL ELSEWHERE/S:

DECOLONIZING CYBERSPACE IN SKAWENNATI’S DIGITAL TERRITORIES

A thesis submitted to the College of the Arts

of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

by

Abby Lis Hermosilla

May 2021

Thesis written by

Abby Lis Hermosilla

B.A. Kent State University, 2018

M.A. Kent State University, 2021

Approved by

______Shana Klein, Ph.D., Advisor

______Marie Bukowski, M.F.A., Director, School of Art

______John R. Crawford-Spinelli, Ed.D., Dean, College of the Arts TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………….……………………………………..iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………….……………………………………..v

CHAPTERS

I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………….………………………………1

II. LOCATING INDIGENEITY IN CYBERSPACE…………….…………...... 8

III. LAND: CYBERPOWWOW (1996 - 2004) AND ABORIGINAL

TERRITORIES IN CYBERSPACE (2005 - )…………………...……………..………20

IV. NARRATIVE: TIMETRAVELLER™ (2008-2013) AND

SHE FALLS FOR AGES (2015)………………………………………………………...34

V. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………48

FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………….50

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...…….72

iii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page 1. Installation view of A Thread That Never Breaks exhibition at AbTeC Gallery….………1 2. Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii……...... 8 3. ab. Skawennati. Imagining Indians in the 25th Century: paper dolls, time travel, and a millennium of First Nations history. Website………………………………….…15 4. Skawennati, Imagining Indians in the 25th Century. Ink on paper………………...…….15 5. ab. Skawennati. Imagining Indians in the 25th Century. 2000 Katitsahawi.…...……...... 16 6. “Longhouses, Past and Future” at AbTeC Island…………………….………………….19 7. Skawennati, Image from CyberPowWow 2………………………………….………...... 25 8. ab. Installation view from CyberPowWow. 1996 with work by Bradlee Larocque……..27 9. Michelle Nahanee. Lilgirls from onguard…………………………………………….....28 10. Marilyn Burgess. Git yer cowgirl avatar here!...... 29 11. “AbTeC Land” at AbTeC Island………………………………………………..…….....32 12. Skawennati. Face Off………………………………..…………………………………..34 13. Shaney Komulainen. Face to Face…………..………………………………………….34 14. Skawennati. Dakotas Raise Weapons……………..…………………………………….38 15. Skawennati. Saying Goodbye…………………………...……………………………….40 16. Skawennati. Native Love……………………………………...…………………………41 17. Skawennati. Celestial Tree: She Falls for Ages…………………..……………………..43 18. Skawennati. She Falls for Ages……………………………………….…………………43 19. Skawennati, screenshot from She Falls for Ages…………………………..……………43 20. Skawennati. Falling Asleep…………………………………………………….………..43 21. Skawennati. Renewal: She Falls for Ages……………………………………….………44 22. Skawennati. Dancing With Myself………………………………………………….……49

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several people in my life helped me get to this point in my academic career. Firstly, this thesis would not be complete without the guidance of my advisor Dr. Shana Klein, who first introduced me to topics of contemporary Native art and decolonization studies. I took her class upon returning to Kent State during a time of much uncertainty in my life path and the experience transformed how I saw my future. I will be forever grateful for her in terms of my graduate studies and see her as a personal role model as an art historian and human being.

Moreover, my thesis committee members Dr. Joseph Underwood and Dr. John-Michael Warner were incredibly influential in my decision to discuss subjects of colonialism and frontier/borderland studies within contexts of cyberspace. Their individual support was invaluable as they always challenged me to push myself as a writer and critical thinker.

I also must thank my mother Olga and my father Luis for exposing me to the humanities from a young age and always encouraging me to pursue my passions. Their sacrifices and lived experiences have shaped who I am today and everything I do is to honor them. I would not be able to submit this thesis without their undying love and support. This would also not be possible without the compassion of my significant other Ethan, and my friends, including my fellow cohort members, specifically Maria, Maddy, and Gloria. We really did it! I never doubted us.

Finally, I want to thank the artist Skawennati for speaking with me in 2019 when I was initially crafting this research. Her kindness and personal insight sparked my fascination with cyberspace as a tool for decolonial processes and I will always be indebted to her remarkable artistic practice for this.

v 1

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

It is Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto (IFWTO). Some of us are flying, others are dancing, and still, a few of us are simply standing and watching. There is mild commotion of voices as the curators prepare their opening remarks and some visitors figure out how to move around the gallery. It is January 28th, 2021, nearly a full year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are all awaiting the gallery opening for the exhibition A Thread That Never Breaks curated by

Lisa Meyers (Anishinaabe) and Sage Paul (Dene) [Fig. 1]. Skawennati, or as she is known in

Second Life, xox Voyager, addresses the crowd and we gather around the central steps of the gallery space. The artist, depicted by her Second Life avatar as a cyber-punk heroine with spiky pigtails and a black tutu, begins the event by reciting the Thanksgiving Address, a spiritual address of the Haudenosaunee () confederacy spoken in the language of the

Kanyen'kehà:ka (Mohawk) peoples. A few of us are still dancing or flying in the air, unsure of how to fully control the algorithmic actions of our digital avatars, but we are all closely listening to Skawennati’s recitation. She repeats: Akwé:kon énska, “we are all one,” as she gives thanks for elements of the natural world, Our Mother the Earth, such as the gift of Her waters, fish, grass and plants, fruits of harvest, creatures of the land, and Our elder brother the Sun, Our grandmother the Moon, among many others.1

Amid the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists and curators have sought out alternative modes for hosting exhibition openings. One solution for the organizers of IFWTO

1 “Thanksgiving Address: Giving Greetings to the Natural World • KANIEN'KÉHA LANGUAGE INITIATIVE (Mohawk Dictionary),” Mohawk Dictionary (Kanien'kéha: An Open Source Endangered Language Initiative), accessed March 19, 2021, https://kanienkeha.net/blogs/ohenton-karihwatehkwen/. 2 was to turn to the Indigenously-determined space AbTeC Gallery. The aforementioned gallery space is located on AbTeC Island, a virtual extension of the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

(AbTeC) in the open-platform online virtual world Second Life.2 Established and co-created by

Skawennati as a research-creation network for Native and Aboriginal peoples, AbTeC provides opportunities for Indigenous Internet users to create and produce virtual narratives in the form of machinimas (machine + cinema) and online video games. Additionally, it hosts a virtual gallery space for Indigenous artists and curators to display their work and research. Thus, during this virtual event for IFWTO, Skawennati’s Thanksgiving Address powerfully considers the importance of Indigenously-determined spaces in both physical and virtual senses, a crucial element to her long-established artist practice in cyberspace.

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, or simply known as Skawennati, is a new media artist working in who has spent the past three decades establishing Indigenous territories in cyberspace. It should be noted that this term “cyberspace” existed long before the innovation of

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or the physical laying down of fiber optic cables across the continents of North America. Since the 1960s, “cyberspace” has referred to a figurative non- physical expanse of digital interconnectivity created through new media technologies.3 Over time, it became a virtual destination ripe with undefined potential for anyone with access to the appropriate technological devices. Much like the Western frontier as the subject of art and fascination in the nineteenth-century United States, and the contested borderlands between

2 Second Life is an online virtual world, developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003. By 2013, Second Life had approximately one million regular users; at the end of 2017 active user count totals “between 800,000 and 900,000”. https://www.lindenlab.com/releases/infographic-10-years-of-second-life 3 Mathias Kryger Jacob Lillemose et al., “The (Re)Invention of Cyberspace,” Kunstkritikk (Nordic Art Review, September 22, 2015), https://kunstkritikk.com/the-reinvention-of- cyberspace/. 3

Mexico and the United States that garnered great attention in the twentieth century, cyberspace emerged as a new frontier and borderland to be figuratively and literally negotiated well into the twenty-first century.

The act of establishing territory within the new frontier known as cyberspace might appear vaguely entrepreneurial. This notion can be owed to the current status of cyberspace as a host to social media websites such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter through which influencer- culture and Internet celebrity has spawned. Whether facilitated by major corporations or an individual with 50k followers, much of our relationships with cyberspace today are based on profit, be it financial gain or social clout. In this way, cyberspace expands on the capitalistic ventures of settler colonial expansion into land now known as North America. The settler ownership of land in the New World required both the depletion of its capital resources and the determination of its social order. Therefore, if cyberspace is a digital expanse, a virtual space akin to land defined by colonial frontiers which promote systems of economic and social profit, then who exactly is given precedence over this new frontier? And is cyberspace truly as democratically interconnected as it appears?

As an early adapter to the Internet in the 1990s, Skawennati contended with similar questions regarding the capitalistic frontier language of cyberspace. Her experiences as a

Mohawk-Italian woman living and working during the precipice of the newest Information Age revealed that there were in fact limitations to who is represented in cyberspace.4 Much like the figurative imagery of Western frontiers as unclaimed land, cyberspace was sold to computer users by Internet service corporations as a new unwritten space, all while these businesses substantially profited from systems of domain ownership and digital capital. Although identity

4 Skawennati, personal interview with author, November 7, 2019. 4 on the Internet is seemingly liberatory through options of customizability, there exist structures of colonial and capitalistic power that dictate the online choices and actions made available to its users. This paradox might serve as a point of contention for Indigenous peoples surfing the

World Wide Web. Does the Internet only serve as a neo-colonial force, continuing to diminish the voices of colonized peoples and to perpetuate settler visions of the “new frontier”? Or can individual users harness the new powers of the Internet and transform the possibilities of cyberspace through anti-colonial knowledge and action?

During a personal interview with Skawennati, the artist recalled a need at this time in the late 20th century for Indigenous peoples of North America to be networked and online, so as to dispel the colonial idea that Native identity is a relic of the past.5 This is in reference to the colonial histories of the settler frontiers and borderlands of North America, which systematically extinguished Native peoples from their own land and their contemporary ways of living. After receiving her BFA in Graphic Design from , Skawennati quickly recognized cyber-network technology as the “right tool” to envision contemporary Indigenous peoples.6 The artist has since established cyber-spaces that are sovereign to Indigenous identities, lands, and narratives, wielding the potential of cyberspace as a critical outlet for Native futurity.

Employing cyberspace as medium, the artist experimented with early digital aesthetics and interfaces, developing physical and virtual networks of Native users who were interested in creating art and alternative spaces with digital material. Today, she has transformed and expanded upon these early successes of new-media technologies in crafting indigenously- determined territories that are accessible to all Internet users. In this thesis, I will posit that

5 Skawennati, personal interview with author, November 7, 2019. 6 Ibid. 5

Skawennati’s virtual territories and digitally-rendered narratives envision Native futurity and sovereignty of land, and provide decolonial opportunities for Internet users, Native and non-

Native alike, in cyberspace.

This research is contingent upon understandings of coloniality and decoloniality posited by scholars of postcolonial studies and Latin American subaltern studies, along with processes of decolonization as conceptualized by scholars of Indigenous studies. Coloniality, as described by

Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, refers to the matrix of power enforced by European practices of colonial social order and forms of knowledge.7 Argentinian semiotician Walter

Mignolo builds off this concept by contextualizing coloniality's intrinsic relationship to modernity, as proliferated by Western colonial epistemologies of Christian salvation and technological progress.8 Through this matrix of “coloniality/modernity,” Mignolo suggests that decoloniality requires modes of action and knowledge that disrupt colonial matrices of power.

This disruption is epitomized by Mignolo’s concept of “delinking,” or the act of disobeying colonial epistemologies through decolonial thought and effort.

Within contexts of settler colonialism in North America, decoloniality must be considered as a co-occurring process with decolonization, which refers to the physical repatriation of Indigenous land and life, as presented by scholars Eve Tuck (Unangax̂ ) and K.

Wayne Yang. To enact decolonization, Tuck and Yang posit that decolonial knowledge and action must be materialized through Indigenous sovereignty over land and futurity. In other words, decolonization requires that settler colonialism be dismantled through both epistemological and material reconfigurations of colonial social orders. Decolonization is not

7 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8. 8 Ibid, 205-6. 6 concerned with reconciling settler histories and making metaphorical space for both settler and

Indigenous futures; it demands a future in which Native peoples have material agency over their own lands and lives.

Therefore, this thesis will contend with issues of identity politics in cyberspace by analyzing Skawennati’s virtual territories and narratives through epistemic lenses of decoloniality and material processes of decolonization. This will be explored in Chapter II through preliminary understandings of identity in cyberspace as posited by both Native and non-

Native scholars and artists of the late 20th century. This framework will foreground

Skawennati’s encounters with cyberspace during her early career as a new media artist by considering the matrices of power that dictate processes of identity-formation through digital interconnectivity. Excavations of digital identity politics provide a sense as to how Indigeneity is located and materialized in cyberspace through Skawennati’s early new media artwork

Imagining Indians in the 25th Century: paper dolls, time travel, and a millennium of First

Nations history (2001).

Chapter III will contextualize Skawennati’s new media project at the turn of the 21st century entitled CyberPowWow (1996 - 2004), a series of virtual events and digital gallery spaces presented by early indigenously-determined territories in cyberspace. Furthermore, this chapter will expand upon the ideas of Native and non-Native interactivity facilitated through

CyberPowWow, ultimately contributing to the creation of AbTeC in 2005. Through epistemic notions of decoloniality and processes of decolonization, the subsequent establishment of AbTeC

Island as a publicly accessible digital territory materializes as a “virtual elsewhere,” a place in cyberspace that is fully sovereign to Indigenous land and life. 7

The role of AbTeC Island as not only a gallery space, but also a virtual location in which

Skawennati produces her machinimas, or films generated within digital environments, foregrounds the virtual narratives explored in Chapter IV. Through analysis of Skawennati’s machinimas TimeTraveller™ (2008 - 2013) and She Falls For Ages (2015), this chapter will demonstrate how virtual narratives produced within indigenously-sovereign spaces “delink” from coloniality through critical tenets of Native storytelling. These narratives, envisioned by aesthetics of Indigenous Futurism, contribute to the material processes of decolonization by foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies of non-linear time and vital practices of oral storytelling.

The aim of this research is to demonstrate the importance of Skawennati’s indigenously- determined territories in cyberspace as a “virtual elsewhere” established through decolonial knowledge and Native sovereignty. While processes of decolonization are far from complete,

Skawennati’s virtual territories materialize the crucial role of Indigenous identity, land, and narrative towards dismantling coloniality in the 21st century. These cyber-spaces are powerful odes to Native futurity, which prioritize the thrivance of Indigenous peoples. Skawennati’s innovative synthesis of the virtual and the physical provides critical interventions on the colonial matrix of power and envision material possibilities for Native land. These materials are not meant to be separated by tangible differences between life on and offline. Instead, the virtual and the physical are one, much like the natural elements celebrated in the Haudenosaunee

Thanksgiving Address.

8

CHAPTER II

LOCATING INDIGENEITY IN CYBERSPACE

A standard map of the continental United States is defined by strict lines of state-borders and networks of Interstate highways. Some of these boundaries are named after settler language and logic such as the state of New York or the route Interstate 80, while others appropriate

Indigenous language such as the Seneca word ohi:yo’ or the Choctaw concept okla humma. In the mid 1990s, video-art “pioneer” Nam June Paik envisioned the United States map as an irregular grid of neon tubing surrounding stacks of flickering televisions screens. The new media sculpture was appropriately named Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii

(1995) [Fig. 2]. Paik designed his map so that each video feed looped a different visual for each state, such as clips from The Wizard of Oz in the area marked as Kansas, bunches of potatoes in

Idaho, and snippets from 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern’s presidential campaign in South Dakota. These video feeds were selected purely based on popular culture associations with each state, resulting in a cacophony of sounds and images that saturate the viewer’s senses.

In this way, it is argued that Paik’s map foresaw the sensations of cyberspace as we know it today.

Ironically, Paik’s prediction for the 21st-century as overloaded with virtual networks dates back two decades prior to the display of Electronic Superhighway. He coined the term

'electronic superhighway’ in an essay entitled “Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society”

(1974). While describing the benefits of the “broadband communication revolution,” he introduced the notion of an electronic superhighway, through which electronic telecommunication would span the distance of the continental United States. Paik entails the possibilities of a digitally interconnected society, enriched by the United States’ economic, 9 social, and political influence over the proposed electronic superhighway that would provide great “benefits in term of by-products.”9 Recognized as a precursor to the idea of the Internet as an “information highway,” Paik’s early utopian conceptualization of what would lead to the invention of the Internet did not materialize. Instead, the electronic superhighway was subsumed by economic and social matrices of power.

Paik reimagined his electronic network as an “information overload,” in 1995, the same year in which Skawennati was preparing to launch the first iteration of CyberPowWow. While working within the artist collective Nation to Nation, Skawennati described the saturation of content and capital that was inscribed into many pages of the World Wide Web as “limited in scope.”10 She posited: “If we are going to help shape this medium, let's do it right. Let's make it content-rich, and not just another tool for selling nifty consumer goods.”11 Furthermore, the artist entails the newly interconnected status of Natives on Turtle Island (North America) through the

Internet, positing that there is no longer a need for strict regional boundaries of reservation systems; instead, Natives now have the “infinite expanses of cyberspace,” through which they can connect and create their own territory. With Native Internet users at the forefront of Internet activity in the 1990s, Skawennati’s vision for CyberPowWow emerged as a way to help define cyberspace through modes of Indigenous identity at the turn of the 21st century.

In this chapter, I will briefly discuss the recent history of scholars and artists in search of locating and marking identity in Cyberspace. It will consider Native and non-Native understandings of Cyberspace, so as to contextualize the broader scope of new media aesthetics

9 Nam June Paik, “Media Art Net: Source Text,” Media Art Net | Source Text, accessed March 19, 2021, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/33/. 10 Skawennati, “When I First Started Surfin', I Was Seduced! But My Love Was Not Blind...,” CyberPowWow, 1996, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/nation2nation/triciawork2.html. 11 Ibid. 10 and methods to and from which Skawennati and Native cyber-artists responded and subverted.

This history will not be linear and often features contradictions between artists and scholars who have conceptualized cyberspace since the late 20th century, but commonly include discourse related to social hegemonies on and offline. The aim of this chapter is to forefront visual and scholarly excavations of identity in cyberspace while contemplating the work of Skawennati as a decolonial intervention that is sovereign to Native futurity through virtual and physical means.

Around the same time as Paik’s Electronic Superhighway was displayed around the globe and as Skawennati’s virtual gallery spaces were first materialized through CyberPowWow, Métis

Cree Canadian filmmaker Loretta Todd published her seminal essay “Aboriginal Narratives in

Cyberspace” (1996). Todd’s essay begins with Cree narrative history related to Ka-Kanata

(Canada) as a clean land, not to be misinterpreted through Judeo-Christian understandings of

‘purity,’ but through Cree values of “balance and harmony.”12 Witnessing the emergence of cyberspace as a new territory, Todd questions how Aboriginal narratives, histories, languages, and knowledge can “find meaning,” in cyberspace, considering Cree contexts of clean land.13

She contemplates cyberspace as a potential neo-colonizing force, dominating cyber-land with colonizer language and domain ownership, asking, “what ideology will have agency in cyberspace”?14 While Western culture has imagined cyberspace through “an aversion to nature” and fantastical escapism from life offline, Todd states that Aboriginal philosophies can impact how we envision cyberspace through tenets of balance and visions of ‘the clean land.’15

12 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 179. 13 Ibid, 179. 14 Ibid, 180. 15 Ibid, 184. 11

These Native philosophies are not meant to be monolithic, considering the several nation- tribes that present their own social understandings through different languages and traditions.

However, Todd suggests there is a sense of dynamism that informs many Native cultures, seeking knowledge through adaptability. She presents Native conceptualizations of time as demonstrated in traditional modes of oral storytelling, which considers the past’s place in the future through a dynamic sense of non-linearity. Thus, instead of cyberspace as a looming mystery and a realm defined by profit, Todd suggests Native futurity might influence how we envision cyberspace through a system of planning and consideration.16 This visually opposes the muddied overload of media-saturation as materialized by Paik’s electronic superhighway.

Todd’s concern for the Western-centric fusion of human and machine, or the notion of human being reborn within the machine through cyberspace, corresponds with feminist scholar

Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of the ‘cyborg’ during the decades leading up to commercialization of the Internet. The ‘cyborg’ of Haraway’s manifesto on cybernetics and socialist feminism is no longer a character of science-fiction, but a social reality steeped in hybridity between organism and machine. Borrowing from Chéla Sandoval’s model of mestizaje, in which women of color embody the post-modernist political identity of “oppositional consciousness,” created from “otherness and difference,” Haraway suggests that these identities as ‘cyborgs’ have radical potential to “subvert command and control.”17 Haraway’s cyborg in its inherent resistance to structures of technology dominated by “corporations, the military, and the

16 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 186. 17 Donna Jeanne Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7-46, 14. 12 state,” idealizes the role of women of color as hybrid identities that might form the basis for a coalition of collective action amongst feminisms.

Criticisms of Haraway’s cyborg model included those by Sandoval herself, which suggested that despite Haraway’s attempts to form alliances across the fractured fields of feminism of the late 20th century, cyborg feminism in fact marginalizes the contributions of

“third-world” feminists and feminists of color, in a way that “flattened the specificities of differential feminism.”18 Feminist theorist Maria Fernandez reflects on cyborg-feminism, positing that Haraway’s notion of the mestizaje-cyborg ultimately strips agency away from women of color as “quintessential cyborgs” that are seen as a “hybrid animal, machine, and human.”19

Todd might have considered Haraway’s cyborg as part of Western culture’s fetishization of cyberspace’s ‘unknown’ potential.20 The ‘electronic superhighway’ and the ‘cyborg’ identity suggest a possible “breakdown of central authorities,” without considering concrete consequences to Internet users of the future.21 Instead, the future is shrouded in an unspecified notion of freedom or liberation that would still prioritize Western logic regarding the individual.

This is further reflected in Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life On the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, which posits that Internet users “explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives,”

18 Rebecca Pohl, An Analysis of Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (London, UK: Macat, 2018), 59. 19 Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, and Michelle Wright, Domain Errors!: Cyberfeminist Practices (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2002), 32. 20 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 186. 21 Donna Jeanne Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7-46, 18. 13 through a craved sense of intimacy with the machine.22 Much of Turkle’s analysis of life on the screen comes from hundreds of interviews performed by the psychologist with Internet users who are engaged with MUDS (Multi-User Domains) and describes the fluidity and malleability of post-modernist identities in cyberspace: “The anonymity of MUDS - one is known on the

MUD only by the name of one’s character or characters - gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones.”23 Todd reflects on this element of identity in virtual spaces in her essay, suggesting that the “alienated psyche” of Western internet users will never find the connection for which they’re searching. She states: “you can go anywhere, be anyone - but you are still alone.”24

Scholars and artists responding to the emerging age of the ‘electronic superhighway’ and the cyborg-identity were in full swing at the time of Skawennati’s early cyber-practice. First

Nations and Indigenous Studies scholar David Gaertner counters Todd’s positions of Western- centric cyberspace as a mode of escapism, in which computer users are alienated between “land and the body,” with Skawennati’s Indigenously-determined territory in cyberspace as a mode of overcoming this Western cyber-narrative. This territory emerged as CyberPowWow, “a virtual exhibition and chat space,” that would claim “a little corner of cyberspace,” for Native artists and writers to cultivate for themselves. Native identities within this territory are not transformed into radical hybridity as suggested by Haraway’s ‘cyborg’ model. Instead, they are fully embodied by

Native-designed avatars, programmed and presented through Native language, and connected

22 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), 26. 23 Ibid, 12. 24 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 193. 14 through IRL “gathering places,” that prioritize community over the individual, and thereby

“decoloniz[e] digital terrains.”25

Thus, understanding elements of decoloniality and processes of decolonization is crucial to the production of Indigenously-determined territories in cyberspace. Within Indigenous studies, ‘decolonization,’ has undergone several contexts, sourced from nineteenth and twentieth-century global contexts of separating and undoing colonial structures within previously colonized nation-states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the 21st century, the term has been conflated with ideas such as ‘diversification,’ or ‘social justice,’ ideas that are amenable to settler colonial domain ownership of land and social institutions. Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne

Yang contend with this use of ‘decolonization,’ as commensurable with settler colonialist futurity, one that attempts to absolve settler colonialism by envisioning a future that has space for both settlers and (maybe) Natives. Tuck and Yang’s seminal essay “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” (2012) ardently argues against this use of ‘decolonization,’ which cannot be fully enacted while there continues to be a metaphorical obligation towards settlers and Western- centricity. Instead, they posit that “decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity . . . [it] offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one.”26

Scholars of decolonial processes distinguish between ‘decolonization’ and

‘decoloniality,’ such as seen in the rhetoric presented by Walter Mignolo. According to Mignolo,

‘decolonization,’ as similarly posited by Tuck and Yang, epitomizes goals “to expel. . . imperial

25 David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): pp. 55-78, 61. 26 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 36. 15 administration from. . . territory.”27 In other words, ‘decolonization’ must contend with the repatriation and Native sovereignty of land. Within Mignolo’s academic contexts, the term

‘decoloniality,’ - versus ‘decolonization’ - transitions the focus from “expelling the colonizer,” from Indigenous territories, to the decolonization of knowledge and the process of “delinking from the colonial matrix of power.”28 For the purposes of this thesis and the analysis of

Skawennati’s cyber-practices, both terms ‘decoloniality,’ and ‘decolonization,’ will be considered to further illustrate the unsettling complexities of Native sovereignty and futurity which contend with Indigenous agency over not only land, but also identity and narrative. Within the context of digital terrain, Todd’s questions regarding ideology (Western vs. Native) are critical to locating decolonial epistemologies and material processes of decolonization within cyberspace. Unlike Turkle’s suggestion of the virtual world as “the new location for our fantasies,”29 Todd suggests other ways of imagining cyberspace, “not as a place born of greed, fear, and hunger but instead a place of nourishment.”30

Therefore, Skawennati’s early artistic practice directly challenged the colonial matrix of power that has relegated Native identity as an artifact of the past. In an interview with the artist in 2019, Skawennati described the onset of her new media artworks with questions related to

Native identity at the turn of the 21st century, saying “I want to point out how important it was at that time, in 1996. People were asking the question, are you authentically native? Are you a real

27 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 53. 28 Ibid, 54. 29 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), 26. 30 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 193. 16

Native artist if you make digital work? Can it be called Native art if it’s digital?”31 After experiencing a vast network of Native artists and writers online through the efforts of

CyberPowWow (which will be further discussed as a virtual territory in Chapter III), Skawennati knew the answer to these questions was a confident, “yes!” She stated, “Of course we answered the question, yes, you can. But it was a question, you know?”32 Referring to the monolithic-like identity of Native peoples as constructed by the colonial matrix of power, the process of embedding Skawennati’s personal identity, full of intersections and multiplicities, into cyberspace, functions as a decolonial effort, or a ‘delinking’ from coloniality.

This can be exemplified by her 2001 artwork entitled Imagining Indians in the 25th

Century: paper dolls, time travel, and a millennium of First Nations history [Fig. 3ab]. The artist described the work in 2002 as, “a bit of web art that allowed me to work out a scenario in which this continent could once again be populated and run by Native people.”33 The piece resembles paper-doll dress-up games and represents a synthesis of analog and digital aesthetics [Fig. 4].34

Moreover, the game is contingent upon user interactivity as one is asked to scan an official timeline of outfits worn by Indigenous women in North America, ranging from the year 1490 in

Tenochtitlan to the year 2488 at the Edmonton Olympics. Such work by Skawennati demonstrates the natural marriage, not divorce, between Native makers and the digital world.

Imagining Indians in the 25th Century intentionally begins in the present during the year

2000, so that users must straddle the pasts and futures of Native peoples through purposeful non-

31 Skawennati, personal interview with author, November 7, 2019. 32 Ibid. 33 Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, “Ohmygod! The Bad Guy Is Native??,” Fuse Magazine, 2002, pp. 37-38, 38. 34 This piece was printed onto paper and collected by the Canadian Art Bank, as seen in Figure 4. The work has been presented in exhibitions across the continent and is accessible online at http://www.skawennati.com/ImaginingIndians/index.htm. 17 linearity. Each outfit is attached to a journal entry, a peek into the creative mind of Skawennati, who is traveling across space and time to bring us the thoughts and feelings of these Native characters. The first character is twenty-something year-old Katsitsahawi, who is featured with a hot pink baby-tee, a black basic skirt, “kick-ass” boots, and a handheld Personal Digital Assistant

(PDA) [Fig. 5ab]. The journal entry is auto-biographical to Skawennati’s life, describing her character as a Mohawk-Italian woman living in urban centers, located far from any rural reservation, and working as a web designer during the new millennium. Each character makes some comments about Native “affairs'' at the time of their journal entry, with Katsitsahawi expressing similar griefs to those held by the artist over paternalistic blood-quantum laws enforced by Native communities.

Once users absorb Katsitsahawi’s identity in the year 2000, the decision to hop back and forth through time is completely up to the viewer. This recalls statements by Todd regarding user interactivity within cyberspace: “. . . if poetry requires the willing suspension of disbelief, then here virtual reality/cyberspace requires the ‘willing suspension of the flesh.’”35 This further resonates with scholarship by art historian Michelle Treva Pullen, who states that rather than labelling all women of color as ‘cyborgs,’ we can imagine that, “all bodies occupy a cyborg status through the accumulation of historical lineages, cultural influences and individualized perspectives that make up our complex identities-in-politics both in our online avatars and in our physical bodies.”36 Pullen is specifically referencing Skawennati’s digital avatars developed later in her career, which embody parts of the artist herself in different forms, from her rendition of

35 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 193. 36 Treva Michelle Pullen, “Skawennati's TimeTraveller TM: Deconstructing the Colonial Matrix in Virtual Reality,” AlterNative 12, no. 3 (2016): pp. 236-249, 244. 18

Algonquin-Mohawk Catholic saint in the year 1680 to the jet-pack-wearing

Mohawk assassin Hunter who lives in the 22nd-century sovereign nation of Montreal. A precursor to this exploration of personal Native identity, Imagining Indians in the 25th Century emphasizes non-linearity of time and explores the status of identities-in-politics, both of which are powerful tenets of Indigenous Futurism and crucial elements to Skawennati’s later cyber- practice within AbTeC.

In the end, Skawennati’s Imagining Indians in the 25th Century does not ask Internet users to be subsumed by life on the screen, to become malleable and passive to the ‘electronic superhighway’ or the ‘cyborg’ identity. Instead, through agency shared by artist and user,

Skawennati’s work resonates with Todd’s understanding of Native identity in cyberspace, in which, “the individual is endowed with the freedom to express and experience singular emotions and thoughts, which are then shared with the community through narrative, ceremony, and ritual.”37 Although Todd was appropriately skeptical of these possibilities in cyberspace, which

“could well consume ‘the native,’” Skawennati provides decolonial strategies that can envision cyberspace as, “a place where people can find their own dreams . . . dreams of humanity and of ways to keep the land clean.”

Moreover, Skawennati’s early cyber-practice acts out decolonial epistemologies articulated by Tuck and Yang, who posit within their essay that ‘decolonization,’ “means abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Natives peoples. . . removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional

37 Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), pp. 179-194, 183. 19 clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence.”38 They powerfully conclude that, “decolonization is not an ‘and.’ It is an elsewhere.”39 As seen in works such as

Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, Skawennati contends with decoloniality and ‘delinking’ from the colonial matrix of power through excavations of her personal identity within contexts that are sovereign to Native futurity. Yet, Skawennati takes these decolonial efforts to new and important levels when establishing virtual lands and creating virtual narratives that function to emancipate indigeneity, past, present, and future, from coloniality. In this sense, Skawennati’s cyber-practice produces a virtual ‘elsewhere,’ a place in cyberspace that is commensurable to

Todd’s ‘clean land,’ and incorporates physical and virtual means that are sovereign to Native land and futurity.

38 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 36. 39 Ibid, 36. 20

CHAPTER III

LAND:

CYBERPOWOW (1996 - 2004) AND

ABORIGINAL TERRITORIES IN CYBERSPACE (2005 - )

Several times throughout the process of writing this thesis, I visited AbTeC Island as my

Second Life avatar, a tall plain-Jane type uncreatively named ‘ahermosi.’ These first-hand experiences as a digital avatar within the virtual territory offered invaluable insights into how

Skawennati and the artists and content-creators of AbTeC envision and navigate cyberspace today. Many sections of the virtual island feature digital sets from Skawennati’s machinimas, while others provide digital terrain with which visitors are encouraged to interact. Every Friday, the territory hosts an event known as “Activating AbTeC Island,” through which AbTeC members help teach Native and non-Native visitors how to customize their Second Life avatars, fly around the digital world, and interact with one another through algorithmic functions such as

“wave” and “hug.”

According to Pullen, this act of transferring technological knowledge from person to person resembles Indigenous oral storytelling formats of knowledge-sharing passed from generation to generation. Furthermore, the visual aesthetics of AbTeC Island correspond with tenets of Indigenous Futurism, such as seen in the area named “Longhouses, Past and Future”

[Fig. 6]. The auditory crackling of digital fire simmers throughout the space as one traverses the twin structures, the first composed of virtual wood that resembles traditional Iroquois longhouses, and the other, of illuminated futuristic technology that materializes from an octagonal metal floor. Within this one space in AbTeC Island, past and future are given equal 21 importance and value, standing side by side on sovereign digital land, recalling Todd’s position of Native futurity and non-linear time.

This chapter will discuss understandings of cyberspace as a non-physical expanse through Indigenously-determined spaces and virtual land established and produced by

Skawennati. It will contextualize Skawennti’s early production of cyber-projects such as

CyberPowWow (1996-2004) which are fundamental to the establishment of her co-directed research-creation network Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) (2005 - ). I will argue that these Indigenously-determined spaces not only serve as hubs for communication and interactivity for Native Internet users, but also exemplify Indigenous knowledge and action that actively subvert from settler colonial matrices of power on and offline. Thus, decolonial opportunities of sovereign virtual land such as AbTeC can be considered crucial steps towards decolonization in both virtual and physical spaces.

It is vital to establish Skawennati’s territories in cyberspace not merely as general gestures of social justice, but as material repatriations of Indigenous land and life. Tuck and

Yang argue that one must dismantle ongoing structures of settler colonialism to properly contextualize decolonization and repatriation as material possibility. The foremost concern of settler colonialism is land as ‘property’ through which “human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property.”40 Settler versus Indigenous epistemologies, such as Todd’s use of the Cree conceptualization of ‘clean land,’ are inherently incompatible, a tension which threatens settler futurity. Through settler colonialism, total eradication of

Indigenous land and life is required in order to make room for settler sovereignty over land. In

40 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 5. 22 order for decolonization to be enacted, it must be recognized that settler sovereignty is not commensurable to, or does not account for, Native futurity, and vice-versa.41 Instead, according to Tuck and Yang, incommensurability is “an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world,” in reference to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

(1963).42

Tuck and Yang’s idea that settler conceptions of land would ever be commensurate with

Native futurity is referred to as ‘moves to settler innocence.’ Settler innocence is described as a mode of relinquishing responsibility over the effects of settler colonialism, and by result, relegates possibilities for ‘decolonization,’ to metaphor status. One mode of settler innocence is concerned with the codified settler representation of Indigenous peoples as “at risk,” or

“asterisk,” peoples.43 These representations passively push Native peoples and their cultures to the margins, positing that Indigeneity today only exists in history textbooks or within the confines of rural poverty-stricken reservations. Importantly, these representations crucially dismiss urban land as Native land.44 As is evident in Loretta Todd’s essay, Skawennati’s online paper-doll game, and the establishment of CyberPowWow as virtual Aboriginal territory, many

Indigenous peoples and most Native youths live in urban environments,45 and thus, contend with

“digital urban space,” on a daily basis.46 Gaertner presents this idea in his analysis of

CyberPowWow as online Indigenous territory: “CyberPowWow utilized the logic of remediation

41 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 31. 42 Ibid, 31. 43 Ibid, 22. 44 Ibid, 23. 45 Ibid, 23. 46 David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): pp. 55-78, 59. 23 to draw a clear line of connection between material urban spaces and digital urban spaces, illustrating how an established Indigenous ceremony could be translated into the widely unknown and sometimes intimidating space of the Internet.”47

CyberPowWow (1996 - 2004)

Powwow is considered a vital tradition that resists codified settler representation and promotes unity across Native and First Nations peoples. Amid settler displacement of Native peoples in the late 19th century, powwows were established as a form of intertribal ceremony performed within Indigenously-sovereign territories. Banned by settlers as an effort to decimate

Indigenous identity, powwows were historically performed in secret to preserve Indigenous culture, ceremonies, and dances, and to resist settler colonial authority. Powwows are proudly celebrated in the 21st century, often taking place both on reservations and near urban centers, reflecting the many definitions of Native land that exist today. Inserting this gathering into digital space thus seems like a natural extension of traditional Indigenous life and values, argues

Gaertner.48 In a personal interview with Skawennati, she posited that, “the things we do on the

Internet and in cyberspace can affect the real world.”49 This not to say that, simply because there is Aboriginal territory in cyberspace, Indigenous peoples do not need physical land.50 It is instead an argument that they can and should be entitled to have both. This is similar to Todd’s suggestion that cyberspace can be a source of sustainable nourishment, a way to keep the

47 David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): pp. 55-78, 59. 48 Ibid, 59. 49 Skawennati, personal interview with author, November 7, 2019. 50 Ibid. 24 physical land clean. Through CyberPowWow, Skawennati initially explored how virtual territory can offer Indigenous Internet users a sense of place that is sovereign to Indigenous land and life.

At the time of CyberPowWow’s construction within the graphical chat-space known as

“The Palace,” cyberspace was undergoing a major shift in its image and user-accessibility. In

1994, the first Internet web browser Netscape Navigator was made commercially available.

Computer users could now access public cyber-networks which were previously only known by specific corporations, military sects, and academic circles. This represented a shift in identity within cyberspace from a private to a public entity. Gaertner and sociologist Saskia Sassen independently describe this shift during the mid-1990s through similar ideas related to online interconnectedness. Sassen, however, prefaces the commercial shift of cyberspace by way of the

Internet as a product, which resulted in, “its representation as a universal space.”51 She posits that early Internet users had to contend with commercial ideas behind public cyberspace, which was marketed through “new frontier” language and a romantic sense of freedom and interconnectivity.52 Gaertner proposes that this shift to commercialization, “radically changed how Indigenous users could conceive the reproduction of traditional knowledge in digital space.”53 Thus, Native Internet users during this shift to the World Wide Web had to grapple with visions of cyberspace as a site of individualistic freedom, while at the same time, recognizing its status as, “embedded in actual societal structures and power dynamics.”54

51 Saskia Sassen, “On the Internet and Sovereignty,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5, no. 2 (1998): pp. 545-559, 549. 52 Ibid, 549. 53 David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): pp. 55-78, 62. 54 Saskia Sassen, “On the Internet and Sovereignty,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5, no. 2 (1998): pp. 545-559, 553. 25

Skawennati and AbTeC partner Jason Lewis reflect on this era in cyberspace, recognizing that since the commercialization of the Internet, cyberspace was marketed as “a free and open space,” through similar visions of the New World concocted by European settlers.55 They continue: “. . .if Aboriginal peoples learned one thing from [European] contact, it is the danger of seeing any place as terra nullius, even cyberspace.”56 This vision of cyberspace as “nobody’s land,” is contradicted by histories of network technologies that were initially used for militaristic and surveillance purposes. Skawennati and Lewis refer to those preliminary designers and users as “ghosts,” that “continue to haunt the blank spaces,” of cyberspace.57 During the shift from private to public, Sassen poses questions of “intentionality and use,” behind the infrastructure of cyberspace, which will be far more accessible in “highly industrialized countries,” than in those geographies that are “less-developed,” and reaching middle class households more easily than the lower class.58 She is referring to the problematics of the ‘digital divide,’ or the socio- economic gap between access to the digital age and how some users are disenfranchised with limited ability to connect.

It could be argued that the digital divide serves as a form of neo-colonialism on a global scale and has reproduced functions to settler colonialism, as described by Tuck and Yang. They posit that settler colonialism, “operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony.”59 As stated earlier, land is

55 Skawennati Tricia Fragnito and Jason Lewis, “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2005): pp. 29-31, 30. 56 Ibid, 30. 57 Ibid, 30. 58 Saskia Sassen, “On the Internet and Sovereignty,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5, no. 2 (1998): pp. 545-559, 553. 59 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 5. 26 the most valuable element of power because it not only serves as a capital resource but it can also reinforce epistemological violence against Native cultures that are decimated by Euro-American settlers. Tuck and Yang posit that the destruction of Indigenous communities, knowledge, and ways of life, is critical for settler colonialism, rendering Indigenous peoples into “ghosts,” of the land.60 Imagery of ghosts haunting the sites of physical and virtual frontiers provides a provocative connection between settler colonialism and the digital divide. Native notions of land, whether it be rural or urban (or, digital), are systematically contested, while settler visions are posed through digestible frameworks of property, capital, and limitless potentiality. Either

Skawennati considered notions of neo-colonialism and the digital divide while constructing CyberPowWow during the late 1990s. In order to consider “basic issues of access,”

Gaertner posits that Skawennati organized IRL (in real life) ‘gathering sites,’ which served as physical concurrent events during which Indigenous Internet users would offer access to network technologies and teach those in their community how to navigate “The Palace.” The artist additionally recognizes the imperialistic name of “The Palace,” a graphical chat space developed and released by Time Warner in 1995, stating: “It can sometimes be a problematic name to a bunch of Indians who are trying to stake a claim in the territory of cyberspace.”61 Yet,

Skawennati describes The Palace as a “multi-functional site” that was selected to house

CyberPowWow for two reasons: “Its user-friendliness and its customizability.”62 This sense of direct agency over the cyber-space provided unique opportunities for Native artists to depict

Indigenous identity, land, and narrative through community-based traditions and ceremonies.

60 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 6. 61 Skawennati, “CPW 2K : A Chatroom Is Worth A Thousand Words by Skawennati,” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/STFwork.html. 62 Ibid. 27

Skawennati created a graphic explaining The Palace interface within CyberPowWow

[Fig. 7], noting the clear text-communication tools and the option to select a Native-designed avatar to navigate the ironic teepees, or rooms, within the space. What exists of CyberPowWow today is an archive of the multiple rooms within The Palace produced and created by artists such as Jason Lewis (Hawaiian and Samoan), Michelle Nahanee (Squamish), Edward Poitras (Métis), and Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew (Cree Métis), in addition to cyber-artworks and texts by Lee

Crowchild (Tsuut'ina), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), Marilyn Burgess, Paul Chaat Smith

(Comanche), and Audra Simpson (Mohawk). These digital materials accumulated over four iterations of CyberPowWow that took place between 1996 to 2004: CyberPowWow,

CyberPowWow 2, CPW 2K, and CPW04.

In terms of artistic aesthetics, Lewis notes that producing digital artwork “forces the question: what makes it Indigenous? Because it’s being made by an Indigenous person?”63 He further contends with new media as a mode of “transforming tradition” into contemporary visual language that might render settler notions of traditional indigeneity almost unrecognizable, but are perfectly knowable by users involved in the project. In this way, artists and writers contributing to CyberPowWow were first hand agents and witnesses of these digital aesthetics being recontextualized and “culturally grounded,” by Aboriginal territory.64 This is exemplified in an image taken during the first CyberPowWow of Skawennati’s avatar xox [Fig. 8a] posing within the virtual gallery space featuring “transmediated” artworks, or physical works by artists that have been rendered into the digital space, such as Bradlee LaRocque’s hanging wooden stick sculpture [Fig. 8b].

63 Rebecca Smyth, “Jason Edward Lewis: The Indigenous Future Imaginary,” LUMA Quarterly 1, no. 3 (2016). 64 Ibid. 28

The third iteration of CyberPowWow took place directly after the turn of the 21st century, entitled CPW2K. Co-curated by Archer Pechawis (Mistawasis) and Skawennati, CPW2K was imagined as an international event (their curatorial essay was entitled “CyberPowWow Goes

Global!”65). Six IRL gathering sites, located in artist-run centres, public galleries or educational institutions, were established across the coasts of Turtle Island (North America).66 These spaces served as combattants to the digital divide, creating open-access to the commercial spaces of the

World Wide Web by providing the physical computer technology and the shared instruction needed to navigate the virtual gallery space.

A critical element of CPW2K was the fact that non-Native participants were officially encouraged to join, establishing Native and non-Native relationships that are not defined by settler colonial conflict-ridden space, but rather within “a borderless, self-determined Aboriginal territory.”67 Two projects within CPW2K, Michelle Nahanee’s five-room suite entitled onguard

(2001) and Marilyn Burgess’s single room named Git yer cowgirl avatar here! (2001), contend with settler colonial representations of Native identities, specifically referencing gendered visions of Indigenous “princesses” and “cowgirls.” Nahanee’s suite, an ironic commentary on the tourist industry’s relationship with First Nations peoples, features imagery of commercially- produced “Indian baby-dolls” [Fig. 9].68 Skawennati describes the room as the scene of a debate between two of the identical dolls, arguing who is the real “Indian princess.” This might serve as a reference to settler adoptions of Native identity through a claim of obscure familial ancestry to

65 Archer Pechawis, “CPW2K: Not So Much A Land Claim,” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/archerweb/index.html. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Skawennati, “CPW 2K: A Chatroom Is Worth A Thousand Words,” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/STFwork-mn.html. 29 a “Pocahontas” figure, as seen in the case of US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who claimed Native heritage as the great-granddaughter of a ‘Cherokee princess.' Such conversations also mock and criticize the notion that all Native American women are nubile princesses, as perpetuated in distorted narratives about the history of Pocahontas.

Burgess’s room is concerned with similar performances of “Indian” identity, featuring several avatars of Native “cowgirl” characters developed by the artist [Fig. 10]. In this room, she provides scholarly contexts of historical representations as white and First Nations women who played the role of “Indian” in traveling vaudeville performances such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild

West Shows.69 Vaudeville “Indians” relied on stereotypical performativity of “Indianness” for white audiences such as the problematic “Indian princess” or “cowgirl.” These roles were often played by recruited Native and non-Native actors and musicians that were billed as spectacles or oddities. Burgess’s work also reflects on archival images of “Indian cowgirls” while contemplating the artist’s identity as a white woman interested in studying these ethnographically-centered materials. The imagery featured in both Nahanee and Burgess’s suites reflect upon the curatorial premise of CPW2K as posited by Skawennati and Pechawis, through which “Native meets non-Native.”70 Not only are Native and non-Native creative works displayed simultaneously, but their co-occurrence further teases out the complex potential of navigating Indigeneity between settler representation and self-determined Native identity.

Pechawis further notes that CPW2K is a continued expression of Indigenous practices that have always adopted new technologies, “be it steel knives or Unix-based computer

69 Marilyn Burgess, “Indian Cowgirls; or, a Tale of Some ‘White Sioux Queens,’” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/mareweb/cowgirls.pdf. 70 Archer Pechawis, “CPW2K: Not So Much A Land Claim,” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/archerweb/index.html. 30 networks.”71 This exemplifies artist Jimmie Durham’s notion of “dynamism,” as a regular facet of Native communities that value “adaptability [and] the inclusion of new ways and new materials.”72 Visual historian Jolene Rickard affirms Durham’s points and described the activity of CyberPowWow within the First Nation territory in cyberspace as artists “doing what people in our communities have always done. They are transforming our cultures into the language of the future.”73 Thus, the transition from CyberPowWow in “The Palace” to the establishment of

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace within Second Life reflects Skawennati’s interest in expanding the possibilities of Native futurity through Indigenously-determined virtual spaces. In a 2005 essay, Skawennati and Lewis posited that AbTeC further develops the CyberPowWow model as an online Aboriginal territory that hosts ongoing virtual art gallery exhibitions, in addition to physical workshops, symposia, programming, and artist production.

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC Island)

One of the most notable visual shifts between CyberPowWow and Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) is the major difference between flat, 2D aesthetics of “The Palace'' and the complex 3D modelling software of Second Life. The online open-platform virtual world contains 3D avatars that are highly detailed and have programmable interactive abilities with objects within the virtual space. Moreover, it contains an internal economy with currency known as Linden dollars with which users can buy or trade land and/or goods and services with each

71 Archer Pechawis, “CPW2K: Not So Much A Land Claim,” CyberPowWow, 2001, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/archerweb/index.html. 72 David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): pp. 55-78, 66. 73 Jolene Rickard, “First Nation Territory in Cyber Space Declared: No Treaties Needed,” CyberPowWow, 1999, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/nation2nation/jolenework.html. 31 other. Over time, Second Life has taken on a cultural association with its cybersex and porn communities, seen as a virtual space to explore ones fetishes in an alternate cyber-reality. It is also the site of massive entrepreneurial activity by users who buy, sell, and rent virtual real estate, resulting in one user becoming the first real-life millionaire to build their fortune entirely from within the platform in 2006. Within these contexts, it is fairly easy to connect Second Life with the capitalist individualism of the ‘electronic superhighway’ or cyberspace as ‘the new frontier.’

With hundreds of thousands of monthly users just during the platform’s least active years,

Second Life seemingly upholds the Western notions of cyberspace as a source of unbounded potential. Yet, Skawennati’s vision for virtual territory through the establishment of AbTeC

Island builds off core ideas from CyberPowWow. In addition to customizable avatars that embody Native users and the ability to create elaborate and interactive digital terrains, territory in Second Life offers the opportunity for knowledge-sharing and technological-accessibility. The research-creation network of AbTeC is only partly virtual, primarily through its extension on

AbTeC Island and the digital creations produced within the space. The other element continues to exist through physical networks of Native and non-Native users as decolonial action, concerned with sharing and cultivating Native technological knowledge.

Tuck and Yang’s position of decolonization as ‘an elsewhere,’ can be enacted within the digital and physical spaces produced by AbTeC. While AbTeC Island contains several buildings such as the Longhouses, Past and Future, the territory also includes a section simply labeled

‘AbTeC Land,’ near its ocean shores. Intense digital detail is reflected in the rocky knolls that dip into the coastal sands of the island, featuring a lone canoe that is docked into the ground. The visual tension of a virtual environment depicting characteristics of a natural landscape is made 32 even more provocative by a recent sky-installation from artist Swarm’s performance sculpture

Multiverse Traversers (2020), which peaks into view from above [Fig. 11]. A closer look at the digital sculpture unveils galactic spheres of radiant colors, into which ones avatar can fly and become enveloped by cosmic digital matter.

While the imagery of AbTeC Island promotes fantastic aesthetics of Indigenous

Futurism, it also contains certain points of contention between settler and Native notions of land.

Growing accustomed to the visual matrices of CyberPowWow and AbTeC Island can pose a provocative challenge for Internet users that are not familiar with Skawennati's artistic endeavors to indigenize cyberspace, nor aware of Native and First Nations creative production in new media. Moreover, the spaces are only accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity, in a similar vein as Tuck and Yang’s propositions for decolonization. As a result, there is a sense of unsettled tension, one that does not create conflict, but promotes new ways of envisioning the cyber-spaces of the Internet. The virtual lands of CyberPowWow and AbTeC are not metaphorical symbols for decolonization, but actual digital expanses with real physical and virtual impacts on their users. They contain digital waters, grass, plants, and other elements of the natural world, for which users can give thanks, as reflected in Skawennati’s oration of the

Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. Moreover, the acceptance of non-Native users within these spaces suggests Native agency over the territory, similar to Tuck and Yang’s position that decolonization requires “a change in the order of the world.”74 This is not to say that Natives and non-Natives will simply switch spots of power, rendering non-Natives as marginalized.75 Instead,

74 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1-40, 31. 75 Ibid, 31. 33 decolonization is about restructuring hegemonies and answering questions for Indigenous futures.

Skawennati’s virtual territories in cyberspace have greatly evolved and transformed over the past three decades of collaborative decolonial development and indigenization. Through online exhibitions, increasingly sophisticated modes of interactivity, and visions of land that are sovereign to Indigenous life, these territories are populated with futuristic aesthetics that dazzle and inspire. In uprooting colonial matrices of power by centralizing Indigenous land and life, these decolonial actions within cyberspace become material steps towards the decolonization of virtual and physical worlds. Contemplating issues of access, knowledge-sharing, and the Native occupation of land, Skawennati and the physical network of Indigenous artists, writers, and computer users that enact CyberPowWow and AbTeC sanction a virtual ‘elsewhere.’ Within this

‘elsewhere,’ Skawennati draws from Indigenous identities and histories to produce life and land that uphold critical efforts of decolonization and indigenization in cyberspace.

34

CHAPTER IV

NARRATIVE:

TIMETRAVELLER™ (2008-2013) AND SHE FALLS FOR AGES (2015)

Face Off (2010) [Fig. 12] replicates a visceral moment of tension between a Canadian soldier and the masked Anishinaabe activist Brad Larocque during the Oka Crisis of 1990 in

Quebec, Canada. In this composition, Skawennati’s machinimagraph directly references a famous documentary photograph by Canadian photographer Shaney Komulainen [Fig. 13], sna