2024 Great Plains conference: Dr. Margaret Huettl

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

04/11/2024 Added

3 Plays

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Dr. Margaret Huettl (Anishinaabe) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She gave a talk titled "Here Lies the Pioneer: (Re)Covering the Oregon Trail" at the 2024 Great Plains conference, "Confronting the Legendary Great Plains."

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[00:00:00.000]And the project co-director
[00:00:02.400]for the Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors project
[00:00:06.000]at UNL, co-directing with Margaret Jacobs.
[00:00:12.060]I'm here today to introduce Margaret Huettl
[00:00:16.530]for her presentation,
[00:00:17.460]Here Lies the Pioneer: Recovering the Oregon Trail.
[00:00:21.510]Like the rest of her generation,
[00:00:22.920]Margaret Huettl Anishinaabeg grew up playing
[00:00:26.010]the classic version of the Oregon Trail in school
[00:00:28.560]with its narrative of US expansion complicated only
[00:00:31.800]by dysentery and broken wagon axles.
[00:00:35.490]Recently, she has worked with game developers
[00:00:37.530]and other indigenous historians
[00:00:39.360]to repopulate The Oregon Trail with indigenous people
[00:00:42.360]and perspectives and recover more inclusive,
[00:00:45.300]complex stories of expansion and indigenous persistence.
[00:00:50.070]This talk considers the stories we tell
[00:00:51.990]about our shared past, exploring how scholars, educators,
[00:00:56.079]and communities can reimagine our understanding
[00:00:57.590]of indigenous experiences in the Great Plains,
[00:01:00.600]not only in the past,
[00:01:02.237]but also in the present and toward the future.
[00:01:05.137]Huettl is an assistant professor
[00:01:06.590]of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh,
[00:01:10.020]whose research interests include Ojibwe,
[00:01:12.570]Anishinaabe sovereignty and treaty rights,
[00:01:15.240]indigenous studies, North America, west,
[00:01:17.220]indigenous sustainability and resilience
[00:01:19.590]and digital humanities.
[00:01:21.270]Please join me in welcoming Margaret Huettl.
[00:01:24.277](audience applauding)
[00:01:41.640]Bonjour.
[00:01:43.003]Hello, everybody.
[00:01:44.610]Take that off, I think.
[00:01:46.830]Thank you everybody for being here today.
[00:01:49.020]I am grateful to be here, a visitor on Otto, Missouri,
[00:01:53.400]Ponty, Omaha, and Kansas Lands,
[00:01:56.460]sharing space and conversations.
[00:01:58.890]I've been part of so many wonderful conversations
[00:02:01.290]the past two days, and as a special treat,
[00:02:04.290]Lincoln used to be my home for six years
[00:02:06.810]and it's good to be here again.
[00:02:10.140]Okay, so let's start with a show of hands.
[00:02:13.980]How many of you have played any version
[00:02:18.912]of The Oregon Trail game?
[00:02:21.460]Okay, yeah, that is a lot of people.
[00:02:24.913]I was among you.
[00:02:27.270]There's a reason pop culture pundits coined the term
[00:02:30.810]The Oregon Trail Generation,
[00:02:33.420]which is a bridge between Gen X and millennials.
[00:02:38.190]The game was my first introduction to both the Great Plains
[00:02:42.960]and technology literacy.
[00:02:45.330]I'm pretty sure I can credit The Oregon Trail
[00:02:48.990]with my 90 words per minute typing skills
[00:02:52.770]because I would rush through my typing lesson
[00:02:55.020]so I could slide that sweet grayish tan floppiness
[00:02:59.220]into the computer and get ready to die in dysentery.
[00:03:05.418]I played hours and hours of this game
[00:03:08.250]in the school computer lab, and later,
[00:03:10.530]a CD-ROM version that I played at home.
[00:03:13.380]It's a part of my core memories,
[00:03:16.560]even though I never played it with any sort
[00:03:19.110]of pedagogical framing or intervention.
[00:03:22.800]And in 2020, I got the once in a lifetime iconic
[00:03:28.650]and just a little bit terrifying opportunity
[00:03:32.280]to participate in a revamped version of the game
[00:03:36.173]that I played so much as a kid.
[00:03:37.500]That year, Houghton Mifflin,
[00:03:39.360]who owned the rights to Oregon Trail,
[00:03:42.240]partnered with Gameloft, a global mobile games developer
[00:03:46.020]to release an updated version of the classic game
[00:03:49.380]for the newly watched Apple RP platform.
[00:03:52.380]They wanted it to feel like the original
[00:03:55.260]with the eight bit charm,
[00:03:57.300]choose your own adventure game play,
[00:03:59.310]and the nostalgic perils of dysentery,
[00:04:02.460]but also to take advantage of how much the world of gaming
[00:04:06.000]had changed and expanded.
[00:04:09.120]Honestly, working on the game is probably the most fun
[00:04:12.660]that I'll ever get to have as a historian,
[00:04:15.720]and I enjoy talking about it almost as much
[00:04:18.510]as I enjoy working on it.
[00:04:20.940]I'll say it always feels a little weird and disingenuous
[00:04:24.180]to be up here talking about it by myself
[00:04:27.420]because I've worked so closely on this game
[00:04:29.400]with two other amazing indigenous historians,
[00:04:33.390]William Bauer and Katrina Phillips,
[00:04:36.240]as well as the Gameloft programmers and artists
[00:04:39.240]who were working outta Brisbane, Australia.
[00:04:42.360]And I mean, all of us in this room know
[00:04:44.430]that none of us do the work that we do alone.
[00:04:49.230]As a historian, my job is stories,
[00:04:52.710]building stories from facts, from scraps of evidence,
[00:04:55.890]and a tapestry of human and ecological context.
[00:04:59.610]As a public historian and digital humanist,
[00:05:02.370]I also believe in the transformative power of play.
[00:05:06.900]There's something about being immersed in visuals and sounds
[00:05:10.380]that helps a lot of us connect with what we're learning
[00:05:14.070]and interactive play,
[00:05:15.900]where we get a chance to inhabit other people's stories,
[00:05:19.620]has a unique ability to teach us empathy
[00:05:22.620]and help us work through the ethical play Mars
[00:05:25.200]of history and the world we live in.
[00:05:28.290]Whether we're making a game to introduce coding skills
[00:05:32.370]or using a game to bring history or literature
[00:05:35.190]or science to life, we are all working with stories.
[00:05:41.490]All of our work,
[00:05:43.236]the many kinds of work all of us do in this room is stories,
[00:05:48.112]and it's the stories that we tell
[00:05:48.990]that I want to talk about today.
[00:05:51.660]I have less of an argument or consistent point
[00:05:55.440]and more of a collection of reflections
[00:05:58.110]about what rethinking the stories we tell
[00:06:01.590]about the Great Plains and the West more generally
[00:06:04.620]looks like for me and my experiences working
[00:06:07.860]on The Oregon Trail game.
[00:06:11.160]When you grow up both in love with history and indigenous,
[00:06:16.200]you figure out pretty quickly
[00:06:17.610]that there's a tension or a disconnect.
[00:06:20.880]I knew that the Pixelated Indians I saw
[00:06:23.760]on my computer screen every Wednesday
[00:06:25.830]didn't actually represent my indigenous ancestors
[00:06:29.160]because I grew up hearing a different version of that past
[00:06:33.570]than the one we were taught in school
[00:06:35.640]or that I encountered on TV and in games,
[00:06:38.730]a version that actually included indigenous people
[00:06:42.120]and perspectives.
[00:06:43.620]So this picture helps to give you a quick example,
[00:06:47.760]which is related to a classic classroom activity
[00:06:51.150]that I think so maybe takes place in classrooms
[00:06:54.390]across the country.
[00:06:55.830]So I grew up in Wisconsin.
[00:06:58.617]I'm the descendant of Lac Courte Anishinaabeg,
[00:07:01.830]Assyrian refugees, and European settlers,
[00:07:06.508]and in fourth grade,
[00:07:07.341]which is state history year in social studies,
[00:07:10.740]we were supposed to build log cabins
[00:07:13.500]to represent what we've learned about the settlers,
[00:07:16.440]my teacher called the first inhabitants of our state.
[00:07:20.580]I didn't build a cabin.
[00:07:22.830]Instead, I had my grandpa
[00:07:25.080]who you see here help me build a wigwam
[00:07:27.690]out of birch bark and sticks instead.
[00:07:30.960]For my Ojibwe family,
[00:07:32.337]the story of Wisconsin's founding is not necessarily one
[00:07:36.330]of brave explorers or pioneers who deserve to be celebrated.
[00:07:41.160]It's the story of several hundred years of efforts
[00:07:43.980]to dislocate us from our homelands.
[00:07:46.530]It's a story of survival,
[00:07:48.360]not always triumphant or perfect or pretty,
[00:07:52.380]but survival that continues to the present day
[00:07:55.440]and into the future.
[00:07:56.910]And it's a story that absolutely deserves a place
[00:07:59.970]in our schools, our media, and other national narratives.
[00:08:04.710]In the dominant narratives all around us,
[00:08:06.990]from popular culture to public statues,
[00:08:10.230]native stories are often absent, erased, or distorted.
[00:08:15.690]We're the threat looking in the tall prairie grasses.
[00:08:22.530]We're the merciless and hand savages
[00:08:24.540]in the Declaration of Independence and something else.
[00:08:28.680]In national news statistics,
[00:08:30.480]this is from the 2020 elections on CNN.
[00:08:35.550]If you're on any form of native social media,
[00:08:39.310]you will recognize the something else means.
[00:08:43.710]My favorite statue to pick on is here in Lincoln,
[00:08:47.877]and many of you are probably watching us many times, right?
[00:08:51.870]This is a statue, you can't see from this angle,
[00:08:54.660]but the native child there is holding an American flag.
[00:08:59.100]It's a statue that uncritically celebrates
[00:09:02.100]American expansion and the coming of the United States
[00:09:08.550]to the Great Plains.
[00:09:11.100]In children's books, you're more likely to see stories
[00:09:14.550]about animals than about native people, past or present.
[00:09:19.777]And also, I mean that also includes any intersections
[00:09:23.153]of people of color, disability, or LGBTQ plus folks as well.
[00:09:28.417]The trend holds in video games,
[00:09:31.560]although the numbers for the past couple
[00:09:34.991]of years do show some improvement,
[00:09:37.530]as creators have grown more diverse,
[00:09:40.320]not through natural ecological processes,
[00:09:43.680]but through the hard work and advocacy of makers
[00:09:46.500]of color and allies.
[00:09:48.630]The stories being told in games have similarly started
[00:09:51.840]to diversify.
[00:09:54.271]And I was curious.
[00:09:55.104]So last week when I was getting these slides together,
[00:09:58.560]I looked at the top Apple arcade games
[00:10:01.110]and did a quick breakdown,
[00:10:04.080]and The Oregon Trail remains in the top 20.
[00:10:07.350]It's number seven.
[00:10:09.090]So that's included here.
[00:10:12.063]But you can see here with these statistics
[00:10:15.600]that the vast majority of video games remain.
[00:10:22.410]You play from the perspective of a white man, right?
[00:10:26.490]That is still the vast majority of video games.
[00:10:30.360]Player POV means that there's no like avatar figure,
[00:10:33.990]no character that you're playing as it's like,
[00:10:36.120]it's from your own eyeballs.
[00:10:38.700]But you see, right?
[00:10:40.170]That there remain a lot of,
[00:10:44.040]it's still dominated by white male perspectives.
[00:10:49.190]That's the default to this day.
[00:10:52.170]So there's still a lot of room for doing better
[00:10:55.320]and what stories we tell
[00:10:57.030]and how we tell them matters just as much.
[00:11:01.080]I haven't figured out a way
[00:11:03.050]to capture that in a chart or a graph.
[00:11:06.595]So I know what I'm saying that in this room,
[00:11:10.530]I know when I'm saying that in this room this afternoon,
[00:11:13.619]I'm preaching to the proverbial choir.
[00:11:14.850]You are here because you care about reaching communities
[00:11:17.910]and students and engaging them in a kind of storytelling
[00:11:21.210]that can help us build better futures together.
[00:11:23.880]But I also know as a teacher, a creator, and a scholar,
[00:11:27.990]that it can feel like a daunting task.
[00:11:30.630]I know that when I got the email
[00:11:32.610]about joining The Oregon Trail team, I was daunted.
[00:11:36.600]This is a real love recreation of my brain for days
[00:11:41.010]after reading the email inviting you to participate
[00:11:45.277]in the game.
[00:11:47.160]And these are the questions that came up again and again
[00:11:49.710]as we were working through scripts, storyboards,
[00:11:52.860]data testing, and about three years of updates to the game.
[00:11:56.580]So I'm gonna walk through some of these questions,
[00:11:59.850]which I hope will just spark your own thoughts
[00:12:02.910]about the projects you're working on or dreaming up,
[00:12:06.030]or the occasionally problematic content you have
[00:12:09.240]to mediate in classrooms, museums, and other spaces.
[00:12:13.740]So first, why was I worried?
[00:12:17.580]What is the story that the original game leaves
[00:12:21.240]with its players?
[00:12:23.220]So the game has its origins as a teaching tool.
[00:12:27.630]The first version was the creation
[00:12:29.790]of three Minnesota teachers.
[00:12:32.850]They were student teachers actually
[00:12:34.560]when they came up with this game.
[00:12:36.900]They developed it as part
[00:12:38.400]of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, MECC.
[00:12:43.662]Many of us in this room may remember those letters
[00:12:45.390]across our screen.
[00:12:48.118]And it was distributed to schools as part
[00:12:49.650]of a software path, along with Apple two computers.
[00:12:53.490]65 million copies found their way into classrooms
[00:12:58.500]and computer labs, which is a truly massive reach.
[00:13:03.150]Like I said at the beginning,
[00:13:04.890]I only played this game as part of my computer classes,
[00:13:08.640]not with any social studies content attached to it.
[00:13:11.640]And from talking to people,
[00:13:12.960]I know that was usually people's experience
[00:13:16.440]in playing this game as well.
[00:13:19.410]The basic narrative
[00:13:21.330]that all players experience in the game goes like this.
[00:13:24.600]You're a part of a fluffy band
[00:13:26.610]of pioneers heading west across the Great Plains
[00:13:29.580]from Independence, Missouri to Oregon territory
[00:13:33.787]in the 1840s or 1850s.
[00:13:36.480]The four parts of the game are like this.
[00:13:38.850]You start by buying supplies and stocking your wagon.
[00:13:42.420]You purchase food at ports or hunt along the trail.
[00:13:46.620]You navigate calamities like snake bites and disease
[00:13:50.610]and you trade with occasional random passerby.
[00:13:54.150]The game ends either when the last member of your way
[00:13:57.540]and dies or you reach Oregon.
[00:14:00.900]Winning the game means staying alive
[00:14:03.030]and claiming a piece of land in Oregon.
[00:14:06.660]The game told entirely through the perspective
[00:14:09.000]of white settlers celebrates US expansion.
[00:14:15.750]Despite the good intentions of teachers just trying
[00:14:18.600]to get their students to care about history,
[00:14:21.240]and trust me, I'm a history professor.
[00:14:24.120]I know how hard it is to get students
[00:14:26.700]to care about history sometimes.
[00:14:29.730]Despite that the original Oregon Trail game
[00:14:32.730]perpetuates myths about The Oregon Trail.
[00:14:36.939]It erases native people when it's not stereotyping them
[00:14:39.480]as lurking, crunching savages.
[00:14:42.240]And it participates in a narrative
[00:14:45.270]that justifies US invasion and indigenous dispossession.
[00:14:50.730]One of the most obvious myths has to do with death
[00:14:54.510]and violence along the trail.
[00:14:57.270]What I think we all remember most
[00:14:59.850]about playing the game is dying.
[00:15:03.780]I don't think I made it all the way to Oregon
[00:15:06.030]until at least fifth grade.
[00:15:08.370]My personal death rate was about 90%.
[00:15:12.300]And actually all the memes that you see are about dysentery.
[00:15:16.541]But my downfall was usually hasty decisions
[00:15:19.320]about forwarding flooded rivers,
[00:15:22.050]which quite frankly was knowledge
[00:15:23.580]that came in handy when I was living in the Mojave Desert
[00:15:26.160]and knew better than to drive into a flooding program.
[00:15:30.420]Thank you, Oregon Trail.
[00:15:33.150]In our collective memory,
[00:15:34.740]The Oregon Trail and the Great Plains go hand in hand
[00:15:38.220]with death and Indians.
[00:15:41.190]This is, or so if you watch any westerns,
[00:15:43.860]you're familiar with the image of a burning wagon
[00:15:47.310]with arrows sticking outta it.
[00:15:49.590]This is where the phrase circle the wagons comes from.
[00:15:53.970]It's an image that persists both in our language
[00:15:58.380]and in media.
[00:16:01.560]This is an image from the recent TV show, 1883.
[00:16:06.310]I could give a whole other presentation
[00:16:07.830]about Taylor Sheridan's experience,
[00:16:09.600]but that's not what I'm supposed to do today,
[00:16:12.116]so I would avoid that,
[00:16:16.633]but the question is how does that compare
[00:16:19.860]to the lived experiences of people traveling the trail?
[00:16:23.550]Were people dying in mass?
[00:16:25.530]Was my 90% failure to survive actually accurate?
[00:16:32.130]So these are some real numbers
[00:16:33.990]that historians have put together.
[00:16:36.930]There were anywhere between 350,000 to 500,000 immigrants
[00:16:41.550]who traveled the Overland Trails.
[00:16:45.458]About 20,000 of those immigrants died
[00:16:49.710]while crossing the US West.
[00:16:52.320]That's about 6% of deaths
[00:16:57.270]or of people who traveled the trail.
[00:17:00.120]The leading causes of death were disease and accident.
[00:17:04.110]So for instance, not, these were, you know,
[00:17:08.437]city people sometimes,
[00:17:09.450]we didn't actually know how to use the guns
[00:17:11.400]that they were traveling with,
[00:17:13.440]wagon mishaps, that sort of thing.
[00:17:17.550]So it's, The Oregon Trail death rate.
[00:17:21.690]The game is inflated, right?
[00:17:23.850]Compared to the actual experience of travelers.
[00:17:27.840]And of that 6% of people who died,
[00:17:31.560]less than 1% of that 6% died in conflicts
[00:17:36.150]with indigenous people.
[00:17:38.730]So, and in fact, more indigenous people died in conflicts
[00:17:45.053]with settlers than settlers died in conflicts
[00:17:48.720]with indigenous people.
[00:17:52.110]This might seem like a small thing.
[00:17:54.270]What doesn't matter if we think the overland trails
[00:17:57.390]were deadlier than they actually were?
[00:18:00.420]I think it does matter
[00:18:02.130]because it feeds into larger narratives
[00:18:04.890]about how these brave pioneers earned and deserved the lands
[00:18:10.200]that they claimed over the disproportionate dead bodies
[00:18:13.800]of native, black, Asian,
[00:18:15.420]and Latinx men, women, and children.
[00:18:19.673]Here lies the pioneer.
[00:18:21.090]And you might say
[00:18:22.920]that the pioneer has been lying ever since.
[00:18:27.450]That's the heart of settler colonialism,
[00:18:30.240]the stories that justify the status quo.
[00:18:35.250]So the game also participates in the myth
[00:18:38.070]of the empty wilderness.
[00:18:41.040]This is a story that we tell where we imagine the West
[00:18:45.180]as a vast and empty space.
[00:18:48.690]There was nothing there, some people might say, but Indians.
[00:18:56.070]This is an example that relates to the Great Plains.
[00:19:01.440]This is from the Homestead National Monument website.
[00:19:06.157]And the language that the website uses
[00:19:08.430]to talk about the Great Plains before the arrival
[00:19:11.220]of settlers is untamed wilderness, remote frontiers, right?
[00:19:17.310]They don't even acknowledge the existence
[00:19:20.160]of the indigenous people who lived here
[00:19:23.310]before on this particular webpage.
[00:19:27.877]They do in other places, right?
[00:19:29.134]But in this overview,
[00:19:30.810]they use that language of emptiness, wilderness,
[00:19:37.980]remote, et cetera.
[00:19:42.120]The problem of course is that the Great Plains
[00:19:45.180]and the rest of the West were very much full of people
[00:19:49.260]for thousands and thousands of years with complex, messy,
[00:19:52.740]and interesting history.
[00:19:55.560]It's a lot easier though to claim land that's empty.
[00:20:01.830]This is a map from the original game.
[00:20:05.370]And you can see here the only things on the map
[00:20:09.620]are settler landmarks, right?
[00:20:10.560]There's nothing and no one in between.
[00:20:14.273]There's no sense of any other presence in this space.
[00:20:20.310]This is an admittedly problematic,
[00:20:22.500]but also, I mean, it shows the great diversity
[00:20:25.800]of indigenous borders and groups
[00:20:29.280]who actually lived in that space
[00:20:33.030]that gets erased in a game like The Oregon Trail.
[00:20:38.940]Within the original game,
[00:20:40.650]native people are usually just not there.
[00:20:43.830]When they do appear,
[00:20:45.000]they show up as stereotypes that further the narrative
[00:20:48.240]of justified even destined expansion.
[00:20:52.710]The rare natives in the game are almost exclusively men,
[00:21:00.366]often on horses and always with at least one feather,
[00:21:05.190]because if they don't have a feather,
[00:21:07.670]how do you know that they're native?
[00:21:10.470]Their speeches stilted
[00:21:11.880]and they're always reigned in reference to the settlers
[00:21:15.180]with that underlying aura of violence.
[00:21:20.250]In this image, which is from a late 1990s version
[00:21:25.071]of the game, you can see the Leo cluster TVs,
[00:21:28.890]no actual people, but there's just a cluster of TVs there,
[00:21:34.290]and natives here are depicted as obstacles alongside snakes,
[00:21:39.690]dead oxen, and the landscape itself.
[00:21:43.170]The game dialogue encourages this view of indigenous people.
[00:21:47.520]So this is one piece of dialogue from the original game.
[00:21:53.190]It pops up at Chainy Rock.
[00:21:55.770]We've had enough!
[00:21:56.603]Pesky flies all day and mosquitoes all night!
[00:21:58.920]It's either baking sun or oceans of mud, and sometimes both.
[00:22:02.820]Worry over Indians attacking,
[00:22:04.950]haven't seen any yet, but it's still a worry.
[00:22:09.360]So this,
[00:22:14.400]the original creators of the game used primary sources.
[00:22:17.550]This is from the Diary of an Overly Trail Immigrants
[00:22:22.230]along Hines.
[00:22:25.860]What the issue that I see
[00:22:27.753]is that the game uncritically reflects the biases obtained
[00:22:31.470]in those documents.
[00:22:32.580]If you're playing the game, there's no intervention,
[00:22:35.250]no way for a child playing this game
[00:22:38.310]to see a different perspective that shows
[00:22:41.730]that these are dangerous and factually inaccurate biases.
[00:22:49.009]The last main point I want to make about the original game
[00:22:51.540]and the narratives it tells is the way it plays
[00:22:54.030]into the trope of settler innocence,
[00:22:56.520]or what historians call inverted conquest,
[00:23:01.350]which is a really common feature in the stories we tell
[00:23:04.260]about US history.
[00:23:05.970]I put this example up here to show this narrative
[00:23:10.860]of inverted conquest or settler innocence,
[00:23:15.120]and this is an example from Nebraska
[00:23:18.030]where the massacre of a village
[00:23:22.230]of Lakota people becomes a battle, right?
[00:23:26.820]And I have the historical marker here
[00:23:30.300]because it captures the really common narrative
[00:23:33.090]that goes beyond this historical marker.
[00:23:36.245]It's in Wikipedia, it's everywhere.
[00:23:37.770]And as a side note,
[00:23:38.910]I know that History Nebraska is working on this very marker
[00:23:43.110]and rethinking the story that it tells.
[00:23:46.050]But what it says is the Army's attack avenged
[00:23:49.260]the Indian annihilation of a US army contingent, right?
[00:23:55.410]What it doesn't say is that that started
[00:23:58.560]when a Mormon overland trail traveler's cow
[00:24:02.250]went into Lakota territory.
[00:24:04.470]The Lakota people killed it so they could eat.
[00:24:07.945]And you have this lieutenant
[00:24:11.610]who comes into Lakota territory,
[00:24:13.560]tries to arrest a Lakota leader to punish them
[00:24:17.940]for killing the cow.
[00:24:19.290]The leader gets shot in the back and dies,
[00:24:22.080]and then the Lakota people attack the US army, right?
[00:24:29.190]And then you have the US army coming back
[00:24:33.390]and massacring a village full of men, women, and children.
[00:24:39.771]And so this is the kind of narrative
[00:24:41.490]that the gameplay in Oregon Trail,
[00:24:45.420]the original Oregon Trail feeds into.
[00:24:48.450]Because native people are sidelined as threats or obstacles
[00:24:53.340]or occasionally as helpful guides
[00:24:55.740]who will take your last $10
[00:24:58.705]and lower your points score at the end of the game.
[00:25:02.681]And because settler perspectives are centered.
[00:25:05.100]So the game makes the violence seem
[00:25:07.770]like native people's fault.
[00:25:13.710]So thinking about the revamped version of the game, oh,
[00:25:19.560]and I'll say I actually love using the original game
[00:25:23.700]in my classes to help students understand these myths
[00:25:27.840]and how pop culture perpetuates 'em.
[00:25:30.780]I have an activity where I assign them the profile
[00:25:33.990]of a historical figure and they have to play the game
[00:25:37.110]and justify their decisions
[00:25:38.730]and budget through that character,
[00:25:40.830]kind of an Oregon Trail meets DND or role playing,
[00:25:47.690]but trying to remake the game with the same core narrative.
[00:25:53.245]I wasn't sure that we could do it.
[00:25:54.540]Given my previous consulting experiences,
[00:25:57.660]I wasn't sure that the game makers would be interested
[00:26:00.690]in telling truths that challenge dominant
[00:26:03.600]and highly profitable game capitalism narratives.
[00:26:08.265]I also wasn't sure that I was the right person.
[00:26:10.530]I am not Pony, I am not Lakota, I'm not Ms. Purse.
[00:26:14.940]And I was and still am wary of being seen
[00:26:18.200]as speaking for any native nation.
[00:26:22.890]Ultimately, after talking with my colleagues
[00:26:26.460]and reaching out to mentors, we decided to go for it.
[00:26:32.520]The game was going to be made with or without us.
[00:26:36.315]And at the very least,
[00:26:37.593]we felt we had a responsibility to future generations
[00:26:40.590]and to our younger selves to do what we could
[00:26:42.890]to help tell a better, more complete story.
[00:26:46.980]What sealed it for me was how the game makers answered one
[00:26:51.840]of my big concerns, the what about token inclusion.
[00:26:56.010]In fact, they asked the question of us in one
[00:27:00.177]of our first meetings.
[00:27:01.440]Their idea was to include native people
[00:27:04.020]in the random characters generated
[00:27:06.270]to populate the wagon train,
[00:27:08.670]but they were worried that it was factually inaccurate.
[00:27:11.970]And they also, they knew that it could end
[00:27:19.800]up being just superficial inclusion.
[00:27:23.370]It wasn't enough.
[00:27:24.780]So Willie, Katie, and I looked at the evidence.
[00:27:27.870]There were definitely native people
[00:27:29.520]who were traveling west at this time.
[00:27:31.530]And I'm not talking about the forced removals
[00:27:34.260]like the ones experienced by the Ho-Chunk or the Pony
[00:27:38.117]who didn't even have the luxury of wagons,
[00:27:40.170]but many native people were being pushed outta their homes
[00:27:42.960]or pulled west in search of land and livelihoods
[00:27:46.260]or sometimes just food.
[00:27:48.600]One of the things that the game does,
[00:27:51.034]and you can see this here,
[00:27:51.867]is assign every member of career track
[00:27:54.690]that comes with certain skills in the game plan.
[00:27:58.260]The game makers wanted to know
[00:27:59.610]what careers would've been appropriate
[00:28:01.620]beyond guide or tracker.
[00:28:04.260]So we were able to give them documentation
[00:28:06.600]of native people in roles from carpenter to farmer
[00:28:10.410]to doctor and teacher.
[00:28:12.780]The only one we couldn't document in fact was banner.
[00:28:18.240]So we also insisted
[00:28:20.130]that every native person get a specific nation, (indistinct)
[00:28:24.390]or Cherokee, that sort of thing.
[00:28:27.630]And we found names from census roles, treaties,
[00:28:30.540]and other documents using a mix of indigenous language names
[00:28:34.920]and anglicized names, which reflected the way people,
[00:28:39.921]the way native people named themselves at the time.
[00:28:45.600]So one of the other things that we wanted
[00:28:50.550]to do in the game was include historical figures.
[00:28:55.560]And we pushed for some indigenous,
[00:28:58.290]indigenous storylines or mini games
[00:29:01.350]where all of the characters
[00:29:03.360]in that mini storyline are indigenous.
[00:29:06.510]So one example of this is the Black Beaver story,
[00:29:09.270]and Black Beaver is a historical (indistinct) perpetrator.
[00:29:13.770]And the game tells a story
[00:29:18.954]of black beaver and a fictional father and sister
[00:29:21.900]who were pushed out of their lands in Oklahoma
[00:29:24.630]after already facing a generation of removal.
[00:29:28.405]And the father and sister are looking
[00:29:29.700]for black beaver along The Oregon Trail.
[00:29:32.670]And along the way like this brings them
[00:29:34.783]to the Treaty of Fort Laramie,
[00:29:38.520]to other historical events along the trail.
[00:29:43.110]Another example of an indigenous
[00:29:46.955]or another example of an indigenous historical figure
[00:29:48.690]that they encounter is (indistinct) or crow leader.
[00:29:56.550]And another example of a parallel story
[00:30:02.220]and all indigenous storyline involves the Pony people,
[00:30:06.750]Pony people moving from their summer village
[00:30:10.009]to a winter camp.
[00:30:11.310]It follows a young man and his grandmother.
[00:30:14.730]And it's the same kind of game play
[00:30:16.800]as the main body of the game.
[00:30:19.680]And you're collecting information about local plants
[00:30:22.851]and animals and try, which you also do in the rest
[00:30:24.920]of the game and trying to stay fed and healthy.
[00:30:28.830]And it shows a plane's very much full of knowledge
[00:30:32.040]and people and ongoing relationships.
[00:30:35.850]And that brings me to the challenges of representation.
[00:30:41.610]In a video game format,
[00:30:44.451]we engage so much through visual data.
[00:30:47.550]It's part of what makes digital media so compelling
[00:30:50.820]and transformative.
[00:30:52.560]But as digital humanities scholars such as Amanda Phillips
[00:30:56.280]and others have pointed out,
[00:30:58.140]it also has the power unintentionally
[00:31:00.780]to transmit stereotypes and perpetuate racialized
[00:31:04.860]and gender hierarchies.
[00:31:07.230]The original games 8Bit Indians in the rare instances
[00:31:11.400]that they even show up at all,
[00:31:13.350]followed a standard stereotypical template.
[00:31:16.800]You got braids, buckskin, and feathers or single feather.
[00:31:22.230]They are a universal archetype
[00:31:25.620]that matched up dozens of distinct nations.
[00:31:29.670]And also, and they were also, like I said before,
[00:31:32.820]almost universally male.
[00:31:35.340]But even on the Central Plains,
[00:31:37.020]indigenous people have always been much more varied.
[00:31:40.860]So our goal was to help the game makers realize
[00:31:44.820]that diversity in their art
[00:31:47.130]through elements like character design.
[00:31:50.580]I wasn't wrong about the feathers.
[00:31:54.240]When they showed us the first draft of the character art,
[00:31:58.260]there were still a lot of feathers.
[00:32:01.350]Braids, got all the beige buckskin here,
[00:32:05.100]although they had made a clear effort
[00:32:07.530]to introduce tribally specific design elements.
[00:32:11.640]And so this is the first version
[00:32:13.140]of the GameMaker shared with us.
[00:32:14.730]And then we went back
[00:32:16.650]and shared some other sources with them.
[00:32:21.480]We sent them ledger art that documented blue
[00:32:26.340]and red trade cloth.
[00:32:28.080]We helped explain that photographs
[00:32:29.940]and paintings that they were working
[00:32:31.860]with were usually staged or ceremonial
[00:32:34.380]and did not represent little (indistinct) farmer,
[00:32:37.200]would wear on a dusty trip across the continent.
[00:32:41.711]One of the examples that stood out to me
[00:32:43.526]was this Pony woman's dress.
[00:32:46.170]So the original draft was a pretty exact replica
[00:32:51.247]of a famous photograph.
[00:32:52.797]But the dress in that photo is from my understanding
[00:32:57.150]for the Morning Star ceremony,
[00:32:59.910]not for traveling from summer village
[00:33:02.040]to winter hunting camp.
[00:33:03.780]Not to mention, many nations consider designs
[00:33:07.380]and regalia intellectual property.
[00:33:10.140]Copying it isn't exactly ethical.
[00:33:13.800]I understand the impulse behind it
[00:33:17.700]and the thought behind it.
[00:33:19.020]If we copy an image, we know it's accurate, it's authentic.
[00:33:24.150]But in the broader cultural context
[00:33:26.130]of constant appropriation,
[00:33:28.530]we wanted to try to not do further harm
[00:33:31.830]with the intent of being respectful.
[00:33:34.260]And I don't know if we achieved that.
[00:33:38.970]The revised designs include both more variation
[00:33:43.080]and less intricate patterns.
[00:33:45.660]So here you have a male Pony character
[00:33:47.700]who's wearing a red cotton shirt
[00:33:49.260]with buckskin leggings and felt studied
[00:33:52.267]with silver medallions while the female counterparts
[00:33:54.510]hide dress, avoids the star motif associated
[00:33:58.380]with the Morning Star ceremony.
[00:34:00.780]I am still not sure they have an everyday amount
[00:34:03.600]of fringe on, but the ceremonial references are gone,
[00:34:09.143]the dress is more generalized and we got color.
[00:34:12.930]This was a hard lesson for the game makers to learn
[00:34:16.170]and it's one that kept coming back.
[00:34:18.660]So there's a story in an update of the game
[00:34:24.630]because users always want more content.
[00:34:26.610]So there's an update in the game
[00:34:28.860]that takes place in Oklahoma and involves the Cherokee.
[00:34:35.499]And this version is the first one again
[00:34:36.813]that the game makers sent us.
[00:34:39.720]And it's back to buckskin, braids.
[00:34:42.570]And this is a game that,
[00:34:43.500]or this is supposed to be sent in like the 1870s, 1880s.
[00:34:48.803]And the pictures that they were using were either again,
[00:34:51.540]staged and ceremonial or from much further in the past.
[00:34:56.490]So we showed them a variety of pictures
[00:35:00.120]from the actual 1870s and they changed
[00:35:07.140]that is that accordingly gave.
[00:35:09.060]I think this is the Cherokee man
[00:35:11.172]with a really spectacular mustache,
[00:35:12.180]but it's small so you can't see it.
[00:35:16.136]I'll stand on this one first.
[00:35:19.376]So other characters, right?
[00:35:21.600]So we made sure that some characters were wearing their hair
[00:35:24.330]in buns, that they have short haircuts
[00:35:26.670]or other variations that just show indigenous people
[00:35:30.000]not as relics of a static past,
[00:35:33.150]but as part of a changing modern 19th century world.
[00:35:37.620]It might seem like a small shift,
[00:35:39.450]but it's an intervention that allows players both indigenous
[00:35:43.080]and non-indigenous to inhabit a historical world populated
[00:35:46.800]by vibrant, diverse indigenous people
[00:35:50.628]and hopefully avoids exploitative appropriation.
[00:35:54.660]We also had a lot of conversations
[00:35:56.820]about whether or not black beaver should hunt
[00:36:00.210]with a bow or a gun and documented he used a gun,
[00:36:04.040]but they wanted to use a bow because bows are cool,
[00:36:07.260]but in the end they used a gun.
[00:36:13.980]And you know,
[00:36:15.588]there are ways that we try to improve the representation.
[00:36:24.300]I could go on and on about examples forever.
[00:36:28.350]The last question that I wanna talk about today
[00:36:31.980]was one of the hardest ones for me personally.
[00:36:34.320]And that's reckoning with trauma.
[00:36:37.640]How can we tell a real story that accounts
[00:36:39.780]for historical trauma and violence in a video game?
[00:36:45.510]This is the screen that every player
[00:36:48.660]who starts the game sees.
[00:36:51.784]This is the first thing they see when they open the game.
[00:36:55.710]It says, "In creating this new game in the beloved
[00:36:59.508]of The Oregon Trail Series, we were determined
[00:37:01.200]to better depict Native American perspectives
[00:37:04.200]for indigenous people westward expansion
[00:37:06.240]was not an adventure but an invasion.
[00:37:08.880]Recognizing this complex history,
[00:37:11.070]we have collaborated with Native American scholars
[00:37:13.440]to bring a new level of respectful representation
[00:37:15.780]to the game."
[00:37:17.960]And it goes on to talk
[00:37:18.793]about how the game includes native playable characters,
[00:37:22.020]right?
[00:37:23.365]So this opening calls The Oregon Trail an invasion, right?
[00:37:29.670]It says that pretty clearly.
[00:37:32.220]And then you can click past it pretty quickly.
[00:37:36.115]I know some users have read it
[00:37:39.640]because they like to complain about it in the Apple arcade
[00:37:43.268]reviews as simple nonsense,
[00:37:48.563]but within, okay, so within the game it was important for us
[00:37:53.880]to include stories of resilience
[00:37:55.740]and survival of everyday life and to, but we did.
[00:38:03.750]So one of the things that happens sometimes
[00:38:05.850]when we're challenging myths of the West
[00:38:08.270]is that we overcorrect to a tragic victim narrative, right?
[00:38:12.540]And we wanted to remind people
[00:38:14.784]that native people are people, right?
[00:38:15.930]They live their lives,
[00:38:17.790]they were living their lives in the context
[00:38:20.010]of westward expansion.
[00:38:22.350]And we wanted to include some
[00:38:25.170]of those stories along the way.
[00:38:27.120]You also have native characters who speak difficult truths.
[00:38:30.480]So John and Annie Half Moon,
[00:38:32.250]who are the relatives of Black Beaver in the game,
[00:38:37.315]they talk about the ongoing and repeated removals,
[00:38:40.080]broken treaties, and environmental destruction
[00:38:43.950]that the (indistinct) based in Oklahoma.
[00:38:47.250]The Pony grandson in one of the Benny Games mentions
[00:38:50.700]how his father, I think it was his father,
[00:38:52.710]it might have been his uncle, was murdered by settlers
[00:38:55.650]because they thought he stole a cow.
[00:38:59.904]There's a couple other moments in the game.
[00:39:02.408]Oh, well, I thought I had another slide, but I didn't.
[00:39:06.450]There's a couple other moments in the game
[00:39:08.880]that talk about these questions.
[00:39:13.470]But the question for us was how to deal with violence.
[00:39:16.170]Some things don't belong in play.
[00:39:18.600]So this is a picture that comes from the Middle Passage,
[00:39:24.210]Tetris debacle of 2015 where some game makers
[00:39:28.770]thought it was a good idea
[00:39:30.180]to help students learn about the Middle Passage
[00:39:32.610]by stacking human bodies like Tetris.
[00:39:35.820]Not a good example.
[00:39:37.830]They were roundly berated on the internet for this.
[00:39:42.150]And this ended up being, I think, pulled from the game.
[00:39:47.950]And we were wondering, I'm gonna move off of that.
[00:39:50.858]What we were wondering how we can tell stories.
[00:39:53.814]So there's one example where the game makers came to us
[00:39:56.100]with this story about a Nez Perce boy
[00:40:03.000]who was lynched for killing a cat.
[00:40:07.620]And they wanted to tell,
[00:40:08.820]they wanted a mini game to talk about this story.
[00:40:12.594]But every draft that like we worked on together
[00:40:16.110]about the game continued to center settler perspectives.
[00:40:19.890]And it didn't, like none of us were Nez Perce,
[00:40:22.260]none of us thought that this was our story to tell
[00:40:25.980]and that we couldn't tell it in a way
[00:40:27.540]that felt respectful in the game.
[00:40:32.242]And in the end,
[00:40:33.876]that story simply didn't make it into the update, right?
[00:40:36.630]We made a decision not to include that story
[00:40:39.714]because we did not feel
[00:40:40.547]like we could respectfully represent it.
[00:40:43.200]This is an example of how the game gets,
[00:40:48.030]he tries to get players
[00:40:49.530]to like think about the consequences of their action.
[00:40:51.960]This is from early in the game
[00:40:53.670]where you're wing and train,
[00:40:56.160]meets a pair of black migrants who are,
[00:41:03.450]it's clear in the game that they are escaping enslavement
[00:41:07.800]and they ask you for food.
[00:41:10.383]You can give them food or you can ignore the family.
[00:41:14.640]And if you choose ignore the family,
[00:41:17.886]this is the dialogue box that pops up, which just says,
[00:41:22.182]"Am I a bad person?"
[00:41:23.015]Right?
[00:41:24.195]Like, so the point is that the game is trying
[00:41:25.230]to get you to think about the consequences of your actions,
[00:41:30.450]not make you feel guilty and like you are a bad person,
[00:41:33.480]right?
[00:41:34.758]But to think about the larger context
[00:41:38.250]of the choices that people in the past made.
[00:41:42.870]So there are a lot of limitations in the work
[00:41:46.680]that we did for this game.
[00:41:50.610]I'm proud of the work that we did, including small details
[00:41:53.910]that the general public might not notice.
[00:41:56.100]And I'm grateful for the space that Gameloft developers made
[00:41:59.700]for us to intervene in the dominant narrative.
[00:42:04.440]Nevertheless, the pioneer is hard to kill.
[00:42:10.104]Ultimately, it remains the same game where the goal
[00:42:13.020]is for your wagon train to make it to the Willamette Valley
[00:42:15.960]and claim a piece of land.
[00:42:18.642]And there are ways that the game continues
[00:42:20.520]to perpetuate myths about westward expansion.
[00:42:23.880]The gameplay is still set mostly in the late 1840s
[00:42:29.220]or early 1850s when all of this land
[00:42:32.040]was still both practically
[00:42:34.080]and legally indigenous nations land.
[00:42:38.741]The United States had only just begun
[00:42:40.320]to negotiate treaties for these lands.
[00:42:43.560]The 1852 Treaty of Fort Laramie confirmed
[00:42:46.680]that the upper Great Plains remained the sovereign domain
[00:42:49.560]of the (indistinct) and other indigenous nations.
[00:42:52.890]The Willamette Valley Treaty was not negotiated until 1855.
[00:42:57.720]The game, however, refers to this land as the United States.
[00:43:02.070]And the driving motivation of the main storyline
[00:43:04.830]is to claim a plot of that unseated land for yourself.
[00:43:08.970]Winning means participating in indigenous dispossession.
[00:43:14.730]And I wanna be clear, this is not an indigenous game.
[00:43:19.080]Most of the people working on this game,
[00:43:21.180]or settlers either here in the United States
[00:43:25.860]or in Australia,
[00:43:27.540]the money does not go back to native communities.
[00:43:32.550]And most of the creators, like I said,
[00:43:35.520]involved in the game, were not in fact indigenous.
[00:43:39.390]Not too long ago I was asked by another Ojibwe person
[00:43:43.410]why we didn't consult with or get approval
[00:43:46.170]from the individual nations mentioned in the game.
[00:43:49.350]It's a valid question.
[00:43:51.808]It's an important question and it's one
[00:43:55.320]where I don't have a good answer to that one.
[00:44:00.840]So I have an answer.
[00:44:01.920]I just don't think it's a very good one.
[00:44:04.050]And it's that it wasn't practical.
[00:44:06.000]The game developers had a timeline.
[00:44:08.670]Tribal historic preservation offices
[00:44:10.770]are already overwhelmed.
[00:44:13.230]Consulting with more than a dozen native nations
[00:44:16.653]means the game wouldn't have been made at all
[00:44:18.390]and the game developers weren't gonna do that.
[00:44:22.590]Those native driven games should exist.
[00:44:26.370]They do in fact exist.
[00:44:27.870]And I'll show you a list of some of my favorites
[00:44:30.270]in just a minute, but that's not the game that we made.
[00:44:34.860]The game can talk about native sovereignty,
[00:44:38.520]but it doesn't embody native sovereignty.
[00:44:43.380]So going back to maps,
[00:44:45.720]the original game projects settler colonial possession
[00:44:48.630]in the maps, engaging in midst of empty wilderness.
[00:44:52.440]The only places on the maps are those settler landmarks
[00:44:55.710]and significantly military forts.
[00:44:58.410]We advocated for maps in the new game
[00:45:01.140]that marked the land as indigenous,
[00:45:03.900]where you would see Lakota or Ponca inscribed
[00:45:08.370]into the background on the map.
[00:45:11.618]Ultimately, the game makers argued
[00:45:13.350]that it simply did not work from a design standpoint,
[00:45:17.070]and they were also reasonably wary of excluding,
[00:45:23.670]leaving out a nation that should have been mentioned
[00:45:29.761]or omitting overlapping indigenous territories.
[00:45:33.630]The compromise was including details like Pony,
[00:45:36.510]Earth lodges, brought in the map background
[00:45:39.690]to assert indigenous presence alongside,
[00:45:42.210]or if I'm being critical, in between settler landmarks
[00:45:49.020]and also to bear, change my colleagues at UNK,
[00:45:53.171]it completely, the landscape of Fort Kearny.
[00:45:57.207]It's a testament to the Australian understanding
[00:46:01.160]of the Great Plains.
[00:46:03.360]There's also small interventions
[00:46:05.100]that we made in the guidebook.
[00:46:07.770]So for instance, like explaining where the name
[00:46:10.980]of the Kansas River comes from.
[00:46:12.690]But again, this is something a viewer has to,
[00:46:15.114]or a player has to choose to click on.
[00:46:16.080]It's not something that everybody sees,
[00:46:18.570]so it doesn't fix the problem for me.
[00:46:22.740]Part of the imbalance is that we only worked on parts
[00:46:26.340]of the game that the game makers deemed indigenous.
[00:46:30.900]But what we as native historians know is that non-natives,
[00:46:34.710]or at least people not familiar with indigenous history
[00:46:37.290]and perspectives,
[00:46:38.220]often miss stories and places that are in fact indigenous.
[00:46:43.980]Additionally, in the game's marketing,
[00:46:47.310]the power of popular myths has remained pretty strong.
[00:46:52.144]A recent tweet or what's not that recent,
[00:46:55.194]a tweet from a couple years ago when The Oregon Trail game
[00:46:58.740]came out, includes a series of these colorful,
[00:47:02.940]beautifully lit landscapes
[00:47:04.830]that are completely devoid of any human presence.
[00:47:09.840]You've got Carson Pass, Police Creek, Emigrant Pass,
[00:47:12.900]and other very significantly settler named places.
[00:47:19.058]And the caption here exhorts users
[00:47:21.210]to experience the full majesty of America.
[00:47:26.010]So the advertisement empties the land of indigenous people
[00:47:29.490]and albeit unintentionally claims it for the United States.
[00:47:36.146]If beautiful images of wilderness draw a player
[00:47:40.290]in to download the game,
[00:47:42.879]or maybe it's the nostalgic of lure of dying of dysentery,
[00:47:47.622]they at least cannot avoid encountering reminders
[00:47:50.850]of indigenous people,
[00:47:52.800]both their dispossession and their ongoing presence.
[00:47:57.240]And we named The Oregon Trail for what it was,
[00:48:00.480]a colonial invasion that caused ongoing harm
[00:48:04.050]to indigenous peoples who nevertheless found ways
[00:48:07.830]to both survive and thrive.
[00:48:10.440]No gain can, especially one,
[00:48:13.890]a game made by mostly non-native people
[00:48:16.560]can single handedly dismantle the distorted narratives
[00:48:20.040]of US expansion.
[00:48:22.410]But my hope is that we have created an experience
[00:48:25.500]that at least sparks conversations
[00:48:27.600]like the one we are having here today,
[00:48:31.440]so that we can start to tell stories
[00:48:34.170]that look less like that and more like this.
[00:48:42.900]We watch thinking.
[00:48:45.026](audience applauding)

2024 Great Plains conference: Dr. Margaret Huettl

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2024 Great Plains conference: Dr. Margaret Huettl

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