Materiality:

When thinking about materiality in regards to A Strong Fire, it is hard for me to not first think about what the game is not. Materiality, making, and location are deeply important elements of Indigenous values, practices, and beliefs. Despite the centrality of these concepts, the field of rhetoric and composition, as Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2019) noted, has historically chosen “not to include the work of Indigenous scholars and writers in thinking through material epistemologies and ontologies” (para 1). Filiberto Barajas-Lopez and Megan Bang (2018) reflect that, despite the recent excitement around making as engaged practice, “Indigenous technologies, like clay making and weaving, when not made completely invisible, are often reduced to artistic expressions only or deemed irrelevant to contemporary problems and solutions” (p. 10). Our traditional arts, which for Oneidas include weaving, raised beadwork, and pottery, are deeply entwined with our stories and histories. Wampum belts, made from polished shell beads, are but one example of how materiality and making have been central to our culture.

The image above, embedded from Our Stories: First Peoples in Canada, offers several examples of what wampum belts look like. Traditionally, they are used to mark important events and/or treaties. The first belt, a white belt with two purple rows that do not touch, is known as the Two Rows belt. It marks a treaty between the Haudenosaunee people and the Dutch. The two rows symbolize that our people will continue down the river of life together, but not interfere with each other in any way. As Our Stories explains, during the colonial period the misconception that the wampum beads were used as currency spread, based in part on the value such belts held. This belies what Barajas-Lopez and Bang (2018) describe as a settler-colonial approach to materiality, one that is focused on “conquering, owning, and commodifying” (p. 8). Wampum belts are/were not valuable because the wampum itself has intrinsic value (the way a diamond ring might be considered valuable due to the inherent value of the diamond). Instead, a wampum belt is valuable for how it embodies relationships within the land, the community, and the larger world. A belt is valuable for the respectful and careful process involved in gathering shells and making the beads, for the knowledge of symbology passed down through generations to create and read the belts, for the care and prayers that go into tying the knots on the belt, and for the relationality that they symbolize as embodiments of treaties.

Because of the importance of these forms of materiality (and the relationships they construct between human and non-human actors) to Indigenous peoples, there has been some reluctance to engage with digital games. Many Indigenous communities find themselves passionately trying to reconnect to traditions and practices that colonialism attempted to strip from them. In the face of this, there is sometimes a concern that a greater focus on digital environments will lead us further from our traditional teachings and values. Moreover, there is a deep apprehension of digital spaces amongst many (though certainly not all) Indigenous knowledge keepers and cultural leaders. Jennifer Wemigwans (2018), preparing for her own web-based Indigenous knowledge project, found “issues of cultural appropriation and fear of usurpation” amongst community members (p. 21). Indeed, as I laid the groundwork for A Strong Fire, I frequently encountered questions about who might use the site and how I might protect the language from misuse.

Of course, I also do not mean to imply in this section that there are no material concerns to be considered with digital games. As the design reflections section demonstrates, our artists, programmer, and composer were all deeply entrenched with everything from interface/device access to gameplay loops and timing. With their different backgrounds and frames of reference, they were each able to bring a valuable contribution. However, both as a scholar and as an Oneida woman, my own thinking immediately goes to how materiality has been traditionally constructed and to the comments from my community. Indeed, the Kanehelatúksla, described in more detail in the Good Mind section, is a blueprint for how we situate ourselves within nature.

In the face of these concerns, I believe Kristen Arola's (2018) definition of a land-based rhetoric offers the most productive explanation of how we have attempted to engage with materiality through the design of the game. Reflecting on her experience with a website made to share the culture and language of the Anishinaabe peoples, Arola (2018) reflects: “my experience with The Ways was a felt sense of belonging to a land, of being of a people—it was a melding of content and form that felt like home” (p. 199). This sense of feeling like home very much guided our design of A Strong Fire, often in very subtle ways.

One of the most important parts of Arola's (2018) land-based rhetoric includes acknowledging and honoring our “sensate experience and our memories of those experiences” (p. 205). In A Strong Fire we attempted to accomplish this with visual references to the material artifacts and environments important to the Oneida people. These references are not directly explained within the game, as doing so would potentially signal that the game is made for people that will not recognize these things and cannot share in the experience without interpretation and definition.

The opening screen for the interactive narrative depicts the inside of a longhouse. This is an incredibly powerful image for our community. The name of our confederation, Haudenosaunee, literally translates to “People of the Longhouse”. These are our traditional homes, but they are more than that. The longhouse is a community, often an intergenerational and sometimes multi-family dwelling. The phrase “a strong fire” comes from an Oneida aphorism: “A good mind. A good heart. A strong fire”. In this case, the strong fire is metonymy for the longhouse; a strong fire refers to a strong community. In using this imagery we hope to connect Oneidas to their embodied experiences and to create a sense of connection to the land and to home within the game.

Similarly, on loading screens and in the game title, we have explicitly included sky domes, and their shape is referenced in the semi-circle “play” and “read” buttons on the homepage. In the image above (a loading screen), the sky domes are found on either side of the game title and across the bottom of the screen. The half-circle dome represents Sky World, the place Sky Woman once resided, while the leaf within represents the Tree of Life. Obviously these are important elements to the narrative of the story, and so contextually they make sense to be included here for that reason alone. However, this is also an incredibly common design pattern and can frequently be seen in Oneida beading, embroidery, and other craftwork. Including the Sky Domes as a design element is a call to community and experience.

In reflecting upon her experience with The Ways website, Arola (2018) writes: “The design, the colors and shapes, speak to my active participation with my homeland” (209). This is what I hope we have accomplished with A Strong Fire and I can only ask, as is done in the Kanehelatúksla, that if anything is omitted I am forgiven my oversight.

Yawʌ·ko, thank you.