Home

10%

Keeping the Oneida Language and Culture Alive

Wendi Sierra's video game teaches the tribal language and folklore.

By TCU Magazine

November 15^th, 2021

by Lisa Martin

In the opening frame of Wendi Sierra’s video game, illustrated flames dance in a stone pit inside an Oneida Nation longhouse. The animated fire beckons players of A Strong Fire to navigate the legend of how the tribe’s founding members came to live on Turtle Island.

In the second frame, the fire sways on the water while geese streak across the sky. In English or Oneida — per the player’s choice — the narrator says, “Long ago, before there was any land here, there were creatures that lived in the Ohne·kánus and birds that flew above it.”

Players tap on the screen to learn that Ohne·kánus means water.

Sierra, assistant professor of game studies in the John V. Roach Honors College and a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, spent two years developing the mobile app, which was released in early 2021. She said she hopes the free game will teach the tribal language and also introduce new audiences to the tribe’s folklore and worldview.

The interactive format makes acquiring the knowledge fun.

The game’s origin story begins at a great tree at the center of a mythical place in the clouds. Though harming the tree means certain punishment, a hungry pregnant woman asks her mate to collect its roots and bark. He declines, so the mother-to-be takes up the quest.

She winds up plummeting through the skies.

Birds and water animals, including the giant turtle so pivotal to Oneida culture, save the woman. After she safely lands on the turtle, players tap on the otter, loon, muskrat and beaver to learn how the animals assisted her.

Players help advance the story, in one instance spreading dirt across the turtle’s back, which morphs into the land known as Turtle Island.

Sierra worked on the project with the Oneida Nation Arts Program and Second Avenue Learning, a company specializing in educational games. She also received a grant for almost $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The game is of the match-three type, similar to the mega-popular Candy Crush. Players click two icons next to each other to swap their positions and create a match of three or more to earn points.

The cards in the memory game include hand-drawn images of some key words and phrases for the tribe. When a player matches two cards, the voice of a child says the word in Oneida: A’no·wal for turtle; Ka’nikuhli·yo for a good mind.

“The thing about a game is that everyone in the family can have fun with it,” said Sierra, who began teaching at TCU in fall 2020. “There are so few first-language speakers left in our community that I feel passionately about the app as a way to teach and entertain.”

Wendi Sierra watches her daughter, Rhiannon, play A Strong Fire, the video game Sierra created to help others learn the Oneida language and share the tribe’s culture. Photo by Mark Graham

Auspicious Beginnings

As a child of gamers who grew up in Plano, Texas, Sierra cannot remember a time when video games weren’t integrated into her life.

Though an avid reader, she cared little about school during her youth but developed an abiding interest in Oneida culture and history.

The Oneida were part of the original five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, founded in what is now upstate New York. Victory for the colonists in the American Revolution cost the tribe nearly 5 million acres of its homeland.

Seeking to remain a self-governing nation, some of the Oneida migrated to Wisconsin in the early 1820s, where they bought land from the Winnebago and Menominee tribes. A treaty signed in 1838 established the 65,400-acre Oneida Indian Reservation along Duck Creek.

Sierra, who grew up neither speaking nor reading Oneida, is teaching herself the language of her ancestors.

“One of the challenges with wanting to do something like learn Oneida is that there aren’t many resources,” she said, adding that if she wanted to learn French, she could listen to music, watch videos, buy kids’ books in French and the like.

Not so with Oneida. Nearly everything related to the language and culture is centered on the reservation.

Given the paucity of information on her ancestral tribe, Sierra made several trips to the reservation in advance of developing the game. As part of its Oneida Shines Scholar Series, the tribe brought Sierra to Wisconsin to talk about her experiences as a first-generation college student.

Sierra also connected with tribe members who helped her brainstorm a concept for the game. One theme became clear from these conversations: Language revitalization was of paramount importance to the community.

Despite a major effort to revitalize the Oneida language in the 1970s, many of today’s 17,000 Oneida people can neither speak nor read their traditional tribal tongue.

“It always came back to the language,” Sierra said.

The Art of the Game

Sierra’s chief pedagogical aim in teaching the Oneida language and culture was to make learning fun. That meant creating a visually enticing game with an appealing soundtrack.

The professor designed the game in a way that encourages players to linger and return. She worked with language consultants and cultural advisers to make sure the content was accurate.

Carol Cornelius, one of Sierra’s advisers, is an instructor of indigenous pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She has worked for the last half-century on preserving the Oneida language. “This game is a way to open a new door in language instruction in a way that will interest children,” she said.

Many of today’s 17,000 Oneida people can neither speak nor read their traditional tribal tongue. Photo by Mark Graham

“Kids respond to what they know,” Cornelius added. “And kids these days know video games.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities grant, which Sierra received in early 2020, enabled her to hire visual artists, musicians and programmers to execute her vision.

Dawn Dark Mountain declined the job at first. The longtime fine artist and member of the Oneida Nation had never considered working on a video game. Sierra convinced her of the concept — and of the potential impact on players seeking to learn about their shared heritage.

For months, Dark Mountain, who grew up in Green Bay and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, met online with Lexandria Metoxen, an artist in her early 20s who resides in Oneida, Wisconsin.

During their weekly sessions, Dark Mountain would share her “experiences of being an artist” while coaching her protégé on ways of working in watercolor, her preferred medium.

The ensuing visuals are nothing short of stunning. Dark Mountain describes her watercolor style, which some have mistaken for airbrush, as “magic realism.” She attributes this in part to her subject matter, which often focuses on Native Americans and wildlife. Her use of soft colors heightens the dreamy quality of her work.

The results of the group effort delighted her. Dark Mountain said she plays the game alongside her grandson, who was 7 when A Strong Fire debuted.

He “was familiar with the story, of course,” she said, “but he really loved seeing it and being a part of it through the game.”

Much in the same way the artwork transpired, composer Brent Michael Davids mentored a music apprentice, Christina Shupla, to create the haunting score.

Play Time

A 3D artist at Second Avenue Learning mapped out, then drew every page of the app.

“We wanted to maintain Dawn’s style, which is so beautiful and so tangible, in a way that didn’t necessarily look like a video game,” said Ginda Sun, who tailored the app to work on a smartphone.

Sun took cues from Dark Mountain’s visuals to highlight key elements of Oneida culture through animation. She used curved arches, which symbolize the sky world, as a framing mechanism; some form of arch appears on nearly every page of the game to unify the visuals.

“Native culture has had a history of being suppressed, so we are really glad to have something Oneida children can go back to over and over again,” said Sun, who emphasized that all parts of the app amplify the tribe’s worldview of helping others, giving thanks and living in harmony and peace.

A planned phased rollout of the project will mirror popular video games that see periodic additions or updates to the story or modules of play.

Sierra said she hopes to increase the vocabulary in the memory game, which currently features eight words including luk·we (man) and Yotsitsya’ahs (Sky Woman). Additional grant money will fund the game’s next phase, expected to expand to as many as 10 more stories.

Wendi Sierra, Rhiannon and Sierra’s mother, Cheri Burgoon, are members of the Oneida Nation’s turtle clan. Photo by Mark Graham

“There is a huge myth in American culture that Indigenous people are either gone or stuck in the past,” said Sierra, who studied rhetoric and composition at North Carolina State University, where she earned a PhD.

Sun said the app has already achieved its expressed intention of expanding players’ ideas of the tribe, whether it’s an introduction to the Oneida for someone who knows nothing about the culture and heritage or reinforcing treasured myths and stories for a member of that community.

“Something like this is even more important when a population has been marginalized,” Sun said. “It’s exciting to be a part of something that Oneida children in particular will take pride in and enjoy.”

Play the Game

astrongfire.com

Button Label