Reckoning with a Haunting: Creating Indigenous Future Imaginaries through Relationality and Engagement within Human-Technology Relationships

This thesis examines the research-creation network Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace or, AbTeC, co-founded and co-directed by artist Skawennati (Kanien’kehá:ka or Mohawk) and digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis (Cherokee, Kānaka Maoli, Samoan). AbTeC creates images, narratives, and metaphors of Indigenous peoples in cyberspace to fill the Indigenous future imaginary. This thesis examines the project Calico & Camouflage (2021) – a digital and physical fashion collection created by Skawennati and co-produced by AbTeC. AbTeC’s projects demonstrate the importance of Indigenous engagement and production of digital technologies to ensure their future livelihoods. AbTeC seeks to confront settler-colonial representations of Indigenous peoples that persist within the settler future imaginary. Drawing from personal interviews with Lewis and Skawennati, this thesis is grounded in a desire-based research framework as defined by scholars Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang. Indigenous and non-Indigenous theories of hauntology are utilized throughout this thesis in conjunction with Indigenous conceptions of relationality. Relationality as framed by theorists Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli), Archer Pechawis (Cree), and Suzanne Kite (Ogala Lakota) presents the possibility of treating digital technologies as non-human kin. This approach to relationality is further applied to the process of engagement within human-technology relationships as framed by white-settler cultural theorist Anne Cranny-Francis. Each theory is used to analyze Calico & Camouflage and how the project’s various physical and digital formulations enact modes of Indigenous resistance, sovereignty, and cultural revitalization