Looking out of a canoe house window, Dakota elders point to the Oceti Sakowin (7 Council Fires), depicted in the stars of the Big Dipper, and explain, “we as Dakota people are in a sense star people because we come from the stars, we cross the river the Milky Way to come to this place we call home MniSotaMakoce.” As they talk, children climb aboard physical platforms, elegantly integrated into the built environment, and don mixed reality headsets that transform their platforms into canoes. They hold simple physical props (e.g., wooden handles), but in the digital world now superimposed using new low-cost displays, these handles are represented as canoe paddles. We paddle toward the Bdote Mnisota, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Elders from both indigenous communities now identify constellations and share names and stories, using stars and water to provide a trans-indigenous link.

Then, taking a “virtual atoll,” the digital displays morph from the fresh waters of Bdote Mnisota to the Micronesian ocean. The physical props held by the children transition from paddles to the lines and wooden tillers that control the Micronesian sailing canoes. Off the Marianas Archipelago, we plot a course to Polowat Atoll, noting the constellation Tolon Up (Crux setting) setting in its direction, west of Romanum and the Chuuk Lagoon, both of which from the vantage point of the Marianas would be sitting under Tan Maharuw (Scorpion s Tail rising). Using the TEK navigational technique of etak or “moving islands,” we will be able to track our progress as Romanum island in the Chuuk Lagoon “moves” in incremental steps from where it sat under Tan Maharuw to Tan Mailap (Altair rising), where it should be when finally viewed from (when we finally reach) our destination Polowat. This scenario is a possible long term outcome of our project, though of course our cues from Dakota and Micronesian knowledge holders will determine how, or if we eve might ever be able, to integrate this knowledge into academic inquiry however conceived. We hope the next section will help build the trust necessary for a positive outcome.

Research and practice in design and architecture, inherently future-focused disciplines, can take many forms. Of these, participatory design (Simonsen & Robertson, 2012) necessarily takes a position of expanding the academic tradition beyond the design canon by focusing it on engagement in issues of primary significance to communities, including indigenous and local communities. Such participatory design that is directed at decolonization (Cochran, P. A. et al., 2008), cultural survival, continuity and thriving of these communities goes further to try to shape a promising future for communities and perhaps in doing so tries to somewhat redress and heal historical wrongs along the way. Participatory design or co-design (Smith, Bossen & Kanstrup, 2017; Sanders & Stappers, 2008) carefully facilitated, can catalyze communities and provide tangible agency towards decolonization and selfdetermination. Design, implying architecture, landscape and artefact, in this research project is primarily a cultural activity addressing community needs with new design propositions rooted in cultural and material history of these Minnesota communities, bringing to bear the intellectual resources and creativity of faculty and student researchers from the academy in participation with community members and in service of specific community issues.

Design in an indigenous context (RAIC, 2016; RAIC, 2017) reveals the possibility of a strong interdependence between humans and their changing environment, a reconnection of technology, ritual and ceremony, and to the empirical and the intuitive (Kroeker & Singh, 2007). Further, design while leading to outcomes and products is essentially a process, an act of partnership (Singh, 2015). An important question in such two-way community-university research (Weerts & Sandmann, 2008) is: who will benefit and how? We hope that by working closely with community partners and centering questions and outcomes on community futures their benefits are the focus. For the Dakota communities, the expected benefit will be direct acknowledgment of their tragic histories and land loss and potential for kinship and promise of expansion of contemporary cultural revitalization already underway in ways that are truly respectful and supportive. For the Micronesian community the expected benefit will be progress in making Minnesota home while in kinship with Dakota communities and in relationship with the local community. The research team and university will also obviously benefit in advancing our knowledge work and discovering specific case and context-based solutions to grand challenges. Students involved in the project will gain needed and innovative expertise in working with indigenous communities.

There is an increasing convergence between indigenous concerns and traditional and modern solutions with current global environmental concerns and these synergies are well-recognized in the field of regenerative design (Mang & Haggard, 2016) that is at the forefront of evolving sustainability ideas in design, which is both a design and an outcome of this project. These methods have been tested in long-term ways with Co-PI Singh’s work in the Design for Community Resilience program most recently in 2018 with Hmong communities is southwestern Minnesota (Singh & Chang, 2018).

Because indigenous history, present and future is at its essence place-based (land and water) though affected by voluntary and forced migration due to colonization and/or a changing climate, place will be a critical factor in this mixed reality exploration, both in its physical and virtual forms. The site of the design exploration will be Milan, Minnesota, better known by Dakota as Yellow Medicine. Specifically, this research will continue the prototype briefly tested in the aforementioned Catalyst Architecture Studio that involved Dakota, Micronesian and other communities in response to the expanded question: How can design create a community center/canoe house for Micronesians in Milan in kinship with Dakota communities as well as in relationship to the local community? While the research project will be largely focused on indigenous futures, for the design component it is critical that the local Scandinavian/Norwegian community is also engaged to identify synergies and create designed futures that will express a shared future for all communities in Milan and navigate and leverage current political and governmental structures with a positive intention towards a unifying future. Research will include examination of architecture and landscape design precedents, material culture and traditional and contemporary technologies such as pattern, material, form, connections, use, ornament, and language and inform the development of design scenarios of the proposed design in collaboration with the VR explorations. Implications for social, economic and environmental factors will be additional drivers for research and the design.

Embodied Computing for TEK Preservation, Teaching, and Research. The sense of presence felt in the immersive computing environments we will use can transport participants to another place, time, or even body in ways that can be concretely measured by physiological and emotional responses (Sanchez-Vives and Slater, 2005). This property has enabled applications to phobia therapies (Parsons and Rizzo, 2008), physical rehabilitation (Schultheis and Rizzo, 2001), non-opioid treatments for acute (Hoffman et al., 2000) and chronic pain (Schroeder et al., 2013), and promoting empathy for people of a different race, age, gender, or ability (Peck et al., 2013). In a prior collaboration, Keefe and Guy combined novel crowd simulation algorithms with virtual reconstructions and a speech user interface to enable scholars of ancient rhetoric to literally feel what it was like to present a speech to 10,000 Athenian citizens at the hillside of the Pnyx in the year 500 BCE (Kim et al., 2015). Meanwhile, Park has developed algorithms for sensing and modeling human experiences from first-person video (e.g., extracting a 3D model of a trail through the woods, complete with the forces exerted on the bike at each moment in time, from the video footage of a mountain biker wearing a GoProTM camera) (Park and Shi, 2016).

Leveraging these technologies and participatory design with indigenous communities, we hypothesize that it will be possible to create virtual TEK experiences that are physically accurate, and that these experiences (e.g., while in a sailing canoe judging the distance and heading to a far-off island by feeling the swells and waves bent as they passed by the island) can serve as effective tools for TEK preservation, teaching, and research. In turn, TEK provides a novel “challenge problem” for computer science research that will require significant advances in: (i) computer vision for understanding and modeling highly dynamic TEK water environments (waves, swells, canoe physics) that are far more dynamic than even Park’s state of the artwork with mountain biking, (ii) computer graphics simulation algorithms that are fast enough to work with MR displays, as opposed to movies, which can be rendered offline (Guy’s expertise), and (iii) storytelling, multisensory embodied experiences, and tangible user interfaces, all of which are currently being redefined given new low-cost VR/AR/MR displays (Keefe’s expertise).

In addition to these advances in “traditional” CS research, the most anticipated computer science impact of the project is in changing the values and participants in STEM. Students will be trained in creating socially conscious and equitable technologies, and the new approaches will be integrated into courses, shared with colleagues, and influence the department and university strategic planning around the future of computing. Portions of such an approach were piloted in Keefe’s recent honors seminar, HSEM-2520H Visualization and Virtual Reality for Social Justice, which attracted 65% women. (The national average is around 17% (National Academies, 2018). Several women students reflected: a. A semester later, I can confidently say I am not intimidated by coding anymore. b. I thought there would be a limited amount of programming I could contribute to the team, but the results have shown that I simply had low expectations for myself. c. Imagining what could be done with more collaboration between computer science professionals and activists increases my commitment to raising awareness about the possibilities… for making social justice issues more comprehensible to all.