The Indigenous Design Collective (IDC) was established by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), TCU faculty and other “digital equity” stakeholders interested in encouraging and supporting faculty and student exploration of digital media in instruction, communication, information sharing, and creative expression.

There are two motivating drivers of IDC. First, people with digital media development skills in video, animation, and virtual reality are in great demand, and developers can earn very good incomes working from home, or wherever they like. Second, and most importantly, there is an emerging global digital, media-based ecosystem in which different cultural groups are competing for space and attention across media platforms. This digital media “metaverse,” as Mark Zuckerberg and others call it, is a cultural space within which Indigenous peoples can stake their claim for a place where culturally grounded ways of thinking, interacting, and being can be shared and experienced.

Preservation and promotion of Native language and culture are at the core of the TCU mission. They are what makes TCUs unique in higher education and provide a basis for a wide range of course and program design in which Indigenous knowledge, such as traditional ecological knowledge, is integrated with Western knowledge, such as environmental science. The emergence of digital media and its universal access through all of our devices—especially our cell phones—provides both a challenge and an opportunity for TCUs to extend their cultural mission into the metaverse.

The Indigenous Design Collective is intended to be a community of digital media practice, with TCU faculty and students sharing and investigating media platforms and technologies. Ilisagvik College and Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College have been particularly active in this work. The Centre for Inclusive Design Research at Ontario College of Art and Design University and the Adobe Corporation have been important partners outside the tribal college community. Since 2020, the IDC has been meeting weekly, hearing from experts in areas such as online course design, animation, game development, virtual reality, and more. Anyone can access recordings of many of the sessions from the AIHEC Indigenous Design Collective YouTube channel. Discussions have focused on ways to incorporate these technologies in instruction, and on ways to encourage and support student development of digital media content. The idea of an Indigenous digital media festival, Thunder InDIGIfest, hosted by Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in 2021, came out of these discussions.

Thunder InDIGIfest was an ambitious and successful pilot event that, like the AIHEC spring student conference, involved workshops, panel discussions, and competitions. TCU students, faculty, and staff participants heard from a wide range of media professionals in film / video production, animation, etc. They competed in categories such as short video, photography, and audio production. There was even a virtual poetry slam, a popular event during the AIHEC spring conference.

The success of Thunder InDIGIfest motivated AIHEC’s board of directors to pass a motion that included a digital media event as an annual AIHEC/TCU activity. This event is Indigeverse. The inaugural Indigeverse is scheduled for mid-April of 2022. It will include all of the activities of Thunder InDIGIfest, but with additional activities suggested and organized by TCU faculty and students. Planners envision Indigeverse to be the flagship activity for engaging TCUs and the larger Indigenous media community—it is the Indigenous answer to metaverse. AIHEC strongly urges everyone at all TCUs to participate.