Indigenous Virginia Digital Storytelling Project: A Creation Story

Abstract

Indigenous ways of knowing and being are invested in creating and maintaining relationships, respectful and equitable exchange, and collective but particularistic knowledges that are practical, useful, and helpful in extending meaning-making within communities. In this paper, we describe the ways that university faculty and tribal citizens come together to build meaningful relations through storytelling and counter-mapping. Focusing on what is currently known as Virginia (and the surrounding regions more broadly), the project aims to center Indigenous-created accounts of places and spaces as being infused with stories, memories, and life to reveal living histories layered into the fabric of these lands and waters. This paper details the careful, enjoyable, and challenging-at-times processes of relation-building between a university and local tribal citizens (which continues to take shape) for this project to become the Indigenous Virginia Digital Storytelling Project.