ATLANTIC INSTITUTE | BEING HUMAN
PODCAST 05 | INDIGENOUS APPROACHES

TRANSCRIPT

MUSIC Intro sting – Rovador for AudioJungle, Fantasy Cinematic

F Sweeney: Hello and welcome to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.

Today, Alice Wroe, the Atlantic Institute’s Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead, joins me to discuss the use of AR and VR to communicate indigenous culture.

You will also hear from Mikaela Jade, CEO of Indigital, Australia’s first indigenous edutech company, who – with Shane Webster, Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity – took part in an Atlantic Fellows webinar on the topic earlier this year.

Now over to Alice for more about the webinar.

A Wroe: We heard from Mikaela Jade, the founder of Indigital, which is Australia’s first indigenous edutech company, and also from Shane Webster, who is an Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity.  And Michaela had a fantastic story about how she found her way into augmented and virtual realities.  

MJ01: using VR/AR to communicate indigenous culture

I grew up actually disconnected from my culture. I descend from one of the first of the five stolen generations from Governor Macquarie. So we ended up growing up not knowing our cultural connection to our country but I always had it!  So I was always in the bush, grinding down [okies], and weaving things, and making things out of paper bark. I became a park ranger because I thought, I'm just really good at the bush and I feel really comfortable in the bush.

I went to the Pilbara and lived over there at Ningaloo for a few years. It was at that point where I was making these signs for the Department in front of really significant cultural places, tens of thousands of years old and very culturally significant and I was like, why are we putting signs in front of these places?  It was just so incongruent, because the way that parks at the time was managing content for visitors too was always through the lens of anthropologists, archaeologists, not Mob, and sometimes the signs were just, ‘This is a cultural site, don't tread on it.’  I found that really a banal way to express culture.

It was at the time when I moved back to the East Coast that I got connected back up with my people and really found who I am and connected with my community in western Sydney, and really understood my own family history. And I decided I was going to dedicate my life to making things better for our Mob. And went to the University of Canberra in 2012 and saw augmented reality. And I was just like, ‘Oh, my gosh! Imagine you could put your phone up to a cultural place and our stories could come alive in front of you. And you could understand the right story, right time, right place, right language, the right reasons. I kind of cogitated on this idea and thought we could also build a business model around this so our Mob don’t have to be out there entertaining tourists. They can spend their time translating knowledge, language and law to our people.

A Wroe: And this is what started her journey with Indigital.

And then we also heard from Shane Webster, who is a Senior Fellow for Social Equity. Shane’s energy in this area is just contagious.  He completely can see how augmented and virtual realities could be a positive force for good within an indigenous context, and he can see how to bring his community along with him.  

F Sweeney: And a lot of thought had been given, clearly, to how AR/VR might help the challenges that indigenous communities face.

A Wroe: Absolutely.  So, Mikaela shared a video where she was showing a workshop that Indigital did in a school, where they brought elders and children together to collaborate on an AR experience that would enable them to learn about their past and connect with each other in an intergenerational way.  That was really beautiful, seeing the technology transcend generations and bring a community together.  

MJ02: using AR/VR to create community

Something that’s really special about the technology is not actually the technology; it’s that bringing together old and young people to design an experience together that’s based on storytelling and language and law.  So that’s really the part that gets me out of bed. The technology is cool and that’s an opportunity to get people excited, but it’s really not about the tech in the end.  Really the enduring part of it is people coming together and forming relationships and working on other things together.  So that’s really why I do what I do.

F Sweeney: We’ve talked in previous episodes, Alice, about the challenges of using AR/VR ethically.  What are the moral rights challenges, IP challenges, that indigenous communities face when using this technology?

A Wroe: Both Shane and Mikaela speak very powerfully about this.  And one of the things that really struck me was around, not only intellectual property and permissions, and who has access to experiencing certain content, but also around who has access to creating the content.  Indigenous communities need to be co-creators and they need to be part of the development process of these experiences in augmented and virtual realities.

MJ03: cultural, IP & moral rights challenges

When I got to make the first iteration of my technology I was living in Kakadu National Park, which is a very remote area in the Northern Territory and worked with Bininj/Mungguy community to build the first AR app that was expressing indigenous culture.  So ended up taking that to the United Nations in 2015, and doing an intervention at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues around our digital rights, because all of a sudden, as a new developer, I realised that, “My gosh, you’re dealing with other people’s data.  You have to put the story somewhere. They’re not just like bedtime stories; they’re really important stories”.  I started going through and thinking about ‘What are the cultural and intellectual property and moral rights challenges associated with us putting our culture in this technology?’ The data management needed to be sorted out.  

I went to work with Microsoft and Telstra in 2018, and we totally pivoted what we were doing.  My passion then was, “We need to make this accessible, we need to train our Mob to create their own content and their own stories, and they need to be fully in control of this information”.  

F Sweeney: With indigenous communities and societies, so much of the history, or herstory, has been passed down through the oral tradition.  

A Wroe: Absolutely, and I think that was where the conversation just really fizzed as the Fellows and the audience started to understand how AR and VR could be used for storytelling, how we could connect generations around stories.  That’s something that Mikaela’s organisation, Indigital, do a lot of. It’s: “How can we share stories from the past, co-create them intergenerationally, and then keep them and cherish them in this medium.  And what she spoke most powerfully about was the importance of truth telling.

MJ04: importance of truth-telling

So, we’re working with the Saik'uz Nation in BC and truth-telling is a really important part of everyone being able to move forward as collective people living on the same country, and we’ve had a lot of discussions with elders about truth-telling.  Back in 2015, Abel Naborlhborlh, who’s one of the senior traditional artists that work with us in Kakadu, said, “Never sanitise our culture for the comfort of others”.  So, I’m trying to stay true to Uncle Abel in that discussion.  So, I think we need to give permission for our elders to share stories in the ways that they want to share them. They’re really intelligent and sensitive and empathetic people, and we just need to give them permission to do that in the right way that they want to do it in.

F Sweeney: There’s also the access question, which we’ve discussed in previous podcasts, access for communities that really need it in parts of the world where they are surviving.

A Wroe: Yes, and Shane’s work is all around that, in terms of how to close this digital divide between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.  And I think that’s what Mikaela and Shane are united by. They not only are trying to get indigenous communities to use new and emerging technologies, kind of embrace them, navigate their lives through them, but also, and crucially, contribute to new and emerging technologies.  And I think that’s the real clincher. It’s not enough just to kind of accept new technology. These communities have got to be, as Shane and Mikaela describe it, part of that journey, and co-creating, working in the technology, rather than just passively consuming it.

And one of the major issues is that this technology moves faster than policy and it falls to organisations like Mikaela’s to do that ethical work that we all so desperately need in this area.

MJ05: pace of AR/VR outstripping the law - need for ethical stance

Because the tech laws and policies and strategies are not keeping up with the pace of these technologies there are a lot of gaps and a lot of unknowns and a lot of grey spaces.  And something that happens with the grey space is that it’s down to companies like mine to take ethical positions on whether we will or won’t create something.  We’re not really beholden to anything or any laws, it’s really down to ethics, and that’s a scary place to be I think when you’re leaning on companies and private organisations to set the tone of how this technology will be used.  And then obviously for our Mobs to be involved, there’s the skills gap, there’s finance, just getting money to be able to work in this content is incredibly difficult.

A Wroe: This idea of needing to rely on the goodwill of tech companies has really run through the whole series.  If we were to think about one of the biggest issues, it’s this. And if there was a call to action out of the series it would be what Jeremy mentioned in the health session about how can we, as a community, come together and form some sort of framework around policy in terms of AR/VR and health, or AR/VR and indigenous approaches.  And if our expertise as a community could really support the world in that, because, my goodness, does the world need it.  

F Sweeney: When you talk about running through the entire discourse, it seems that, while there are specific challenges that the indigenous communities around the world are looking at when it comes to the use of AR/VR and its impact on them, there are common threads for everyone involved as they look at this emergent technology, which will soon, in a matter of years if not before, be a very present part of everyone’s life.  

In terms of reflecting on the conversations we’ve had to date about the use of AR/VR, do you really think that it’s realistic that there will be an opportunity to shape the conversation or the narrative around this use in a way that is ethical and that allows us to feel safe with it, essentially?

A Wroe: I, 100 per cent, think there is an opportunity here.  Being part of this series and listening to the Fellows responding to the external speakers that we’ve brought in, listening to the conversations that have been happening in the breakout rooms, having conversations afterwards with Fellows who want to continue the conversation outside of the series, I absolutely know that the minds in this community are the perfect ones to be engaging in this sort of discourse.  They are socially minded, they are creative, and they are proactive people, or we are, as a community.  

It’s been evident through the conversations between external speakers and Fellows that there is a very important conversation to be had, that we are capable of having it, and it’s about how do we shift this from an internal moment that we’re having together into action, potentially slightly more external-facing, and also building up a confidence together to be really active in these ideas and own them and shift them into action.  So, I absolutely am hopeful. We’ve said throughout the whole series we’ve got hopeful hearts but really eyes wide open critics, and that’s the balance that I think we need to use moving forward, and I have every confidence that we can do that as a community.

F Sweeney: What do you think the learnings are, if it’s not too premature?

A Wroe: There’s an artwork that is incredibly important for the formation of this series. The artwork is a situationist artwork. It’s one of the first examples that we have of graffiti, that is meant to snap you out of your everyday life and see the world a little bit differently. And it says that, “The future will only contain what we put into it now”.  I really believe that we have this moment of opportunity as a community, where we have done all this learning, we’ve heard from all these people, we’ve immersed ourselves, we’ve seen what each other has done in our own communities, and now is our chance to think, “OK, what do we want the future to look like, what can we do now to shape it?”

F Sweeney: And that was Alice Wroe, Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead at the Atlantic Institute.  Please join us next time when we discuss the ethical issues around the use of AR and VR.

You’ve been listening to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.  To find out more, visit our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.

MUSIC Outro sting – Rovador for AudioJungle, Fantasy Cinematic

ENDS | Duration 12’ 36  

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