At first, as one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was only water and sky. Based on oral tradition, when the Sky Woman became pregnant, she dropped through a hole within the clouds. While many animals guided her descent as she fell, she eventually found a spot on the turtle’s back. They worked together, with assistance from other water creatures, to lift the land from the depths of those primordial waters to create what we now know as our earth.
The brand new immersive experience, “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” is a vivid retelling of this creation story by multimedia artist Jackson 2bears, also referred to as Tékeniyáhsen Ohkwá:ri (Kanien’kehà:ka), the 2022–24 Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence on the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. “A variety of what drives my work is finding latest ways to maintain Haudenosaunee teachings and stories alive in our communities, finding latest ways to inform them, but in addition helping with the transmission and transformation of those stories as they’re for us, a living a part of our cultural practice,” he says.
A virtual recreation of the normal longhouse
2bears was first inspired to create a virtual reality version of a longhouse, a conventional Haudenosaunee structure, in collaboration with Thru the RedDoor, an Indigenous-owned media company in Six Nations on the Grand River that 2bears calls home. The longhouse is just not only a “functional dwelling,” says 2bears, but a vital spiritual and cultural center where creation myths are shared. “While we were developing the project, we were told by certainly one of our knowledge keepers locally that longhouses aren’t structures, they’re not the materials they’re made out of,” 2bears recalls, “They’re concerning the people, the Haudenosaunee people. And it’s about our creative cultural practices in that space that make it a sacred place.”
The virtual recreation of the longhouse connects storytelling to the physical landscape, while also offering a shared space for community members to collect. In Haudenosaunee worldview, says 2bears, “stories are each durational, but they’re also dimensional.” With “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” the longhouse was dropped at life with drumming, dancing, knowledge-sharing, and storytelling. The immersive experience was designed to be communal. “We desired to develop a story that we could work on with a bunch of other people slightly than simply having a story author or director,” 2bears says, “We didn’t wish to do headsets. We desired to do something where we could possibly be together, which is a component of the longhouse mentality,” he says.
The facility of collaboration
2bears produced the project with the support of Co-Creation Studio at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. “We expect of co-creation as a dance, as a way of working that challenges the notion of the singular writer, the only one viewpoint,” says documentarian Kat Cizek, the artistic director and co-founder of the studio, who began her work at MIT as a CAST visiting artist. “And Jackson does that. He does that throughout the community at Six Nations, but in addition with other communities and other Indigenous artists.”
In an individualist society that so often centers the thought of the singular writer, 2bears’s practice offers a strong example of what it means to work as a collective, says Cizek. “It’s very hard to operate, I believe, in any discipline without some level of collaboration,” she says, “What’s different about co-creation for us is that individuals enter the room with no set agenda. You come into the room and also you include questions and curiosity about what you may make together.”
2bears at MIT
At first, 2bears thought his time at MIT would help with the technical side of his work. But over time, he discovered a wealthy community at MIT, a spot to explore the larger philosophical questions regarding technology, Indigenous knowledge, and artificial intelligence. “We expect fairly often about not only human intelligence, but animal intelligence and the spirit of the sky and the trees and the grass and the living earth,” says 2bears, “and I’m seeing that type of reflected here at the varsity.”
In 2023, 2bears participated within the Co-Creation Studio Indigenous Immersive Incubator at MIT, an historic gathering of 10 Indigenous artists, who toured MIT labs and met with Indigenous leaders from MIT and beyond. As a part of the summit, he shared “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe” as a piece in progress. This spring, he presented the newest iteration of the work at MIT in smaller settings with groups of scholars, and in a big public lecture presented by CAST and the Art, Culture and Technology Program. His “experimental approach to storytelling and communication really conveys the ability of what it means to be a community as an Indigenous person, and the unique great thing about all of our people,” says Nicole McGaa, Oglala Lakota, co-president of MIT’s Native American Indigenous Association.
Storytelling in 360 degrees
2bear’s virtual recreation became much more vital after the longhouse locally unexpectedly burned down midway through the method, after the team had created 3D scans of the structure. With no constructing to project onto, they used ingenuity and creativity to pivot to the project’s current iteration.
The immersive experience was remarkable in its sheer size: 8-foot tall images played on a canvas screen 34 feet in diameter. With video mapping using multiple projectors and 14-channel surround sound, the story of Sky Woman coming right down to Turtle Island was given an immense form. It premiered on the 2RO MEDIA Festival, and was met with an enthusiastic response from the Six Nations community. “It was so beautiful. You’ll be able to look in any direction, and there was something happening,” says Gary Joseph, director of Thru the RedDoor. “It affects you in a way that you simply didn’t think you can be affected since you’re seeing the things which can be sacred to you being expressed in a way that you simply’ve never imagined.”
In the longer term, 2bears hopes to make the installation more interactive, so participants can engage with the experience in their very own ways, creating multiple versions of the creation story. “I’ve been fascinated with it as making a living installation,” he says. “It really was a project made in community, and I couldn’t have been happier about the way it turned out. And I’m really enthusiastic about where I see this project getting into the longer term.”
