Ceh'e3teekuu! —Listen—This is Arapaho Land

Abstract

We know about the rapid loss of our world's plants, animals and wilderness but few of us are aware of the parallel, perhaps more rapid and equally devastating, extinction of our planet's human cultural diversity and ongoing cultural genocide. The Vision Quest-University of Wyoming (VQ-UWYO) project addresses the physical occupation of Arapaho lands and the concomitant erasure of Arapaho culture as evidenced by the critically endangered status of the Arapaho language. VQ-UWYO is an augmented reality (AR) mobile place-based learning game that teaches Arapaho language and culture on the UWYO campus. The affordances of mobile technology in general and mapping and locative technologies like the global positioning system (GPS) in particular are present-day extensions of the European colonial enterprise of map making which named, mapped and thereby claimed ownership of the entire world. VQ-UWYO uses these same technologies to push back against the tide of cultural genocide and re-anchor Arapaho place names, language and culture to the UWYO campus. The foundational assumption that the land that is now the UWYO campus was a terra nullius to be freely taken, occupied and used is being challenged in order to begin to heal generations and centuries of colonialization and oppression perpetrated on first peoples in general and upon the Arapaho Nation in particular. The VQ-UWYO project seeks new ways to speak the truths of the past so that we as individuals and as a campus community can finally stand on equal ground.