Digital dispossessions: the importance of regional specificity and sovereign spaces to video game representations of native American cultural heritage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indigenous peoples and their culturalheritages, their ways of knowing and living, are tied to land. As Mishuana Goeman states,“Land is foundational topeople’s cultural practices, and if we define culture as meaning making ratherthan as differentiation and isolation in a multicultural neoliberal model, thanby thinking through land as a meaning-making process rather than a claimedobject, the aspiration of Native people are apparent and clear,” (Goeman, 73).Goeman asserts here that land is not limited to physical space, and that landlocates a group of people physically, culturally, spiritually, intellectually,etc. and provides them with both an internal and external locus of understandingfor and within broader society. When digital representations of Indigenouspeoples are completely removed from any meaningful connection to their land, anerasure of culture occurs. Moreover, the physical removal of Indigenous peoplesfrom the virtual representations of their lands is another form ofdispossession and the enactment of digital Manifest Destiny. This paperutilizes a decolonial Indigenous framework to analyze the dispossessions thattake place within the digital realm of the video game, why they occur sofrequently, and why they are so harmful.