In the beginning, according to one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story, there was only water and sky. According to oral tradition, when the Celestial Woman became pregnant, she fell through a hole in the clouds. While many animals guided her descent as she fell, she eventually found a place on the turtle’s back. They worked together, with the help of other aquatic creatures, to raise the earth from the depths of these primordial waters to form what we now know as our Earth.
The 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 known as Tékeniyáhsen Ohkwá:ri (Kanien’kehà:ka). 2022–24 Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. “A lot of what drives my work is finding new ways to keep Haudenosaunee teachings and stories alive in our communities, finding new ways to tell them, but also helping to transmit and transform those stories as they are for us, living part. our cultural practice,” he says.
A virtual recreation of a traditional longhouse
2bears was first inspired to create a virtual reality version of the longhouse, a traditional Haudenosaunee structure, in collaboration with Thru the RedDoor, a Native-owned media company in the Six Nations of the Grand River that 2bears calls home. The longhouse is not only a “functional dwelling,” says 2bears, but also an important spiritual and cultural center where creation myths are shared. “When we were developing the project, one of our knowledge managers in the community told us that longhouses are not structures, they are not the materials they are made of,” 2bears recalls: “They are about people, the Haudenosaunee people. And it’s about our creative cultural practices in that space that make it a sacred place.”
A virtual recreation of a longhouse connects storytelling with the physical landscape while offering a shared space for community members to meet. In the Haudenosaunee worldview, says 2bears, “stories are both enduring but also dimensional.” With “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” the longhouse was brought to life through drumming, dancing, knowledge sharing, and storytelling . The immersive experience was designed to be shared. “We wanted to develop a story that we could work with a lot of other people instead of just having a writer or a director,” says 2bears, “We didn’t want to do headphones. We wanted to do something where we could be together, which is part of the longhouse mentality,” he says.
The power of collaboration
2bears produced the project with support from the Co-Creation Studio at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. “We think of co-creation as a dance, as a way of working that challenges the notion of a singular author, a single point of view,” says documentary filmmaker Kat Cizek, artistic director and co-founder of the studio, who began her work at MIT as a CAST visiting artist. “And Jackson does. He does it within the community in Six Nations, but also with other communities and other indigenous artists.’
In an individualistic society that is so often focused on the idea of the unique author, the 2bears practice offers a powerful example of what it means to work as a collective, says Cizek. “I think it’s very hard to function in any discipline without some level of collaboration,” he says. “What’s different about co-creation for us is that people walk into a room without a set plan. You come into the room with questions and curiosity about what you could do together.”
2 bears 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 rich community at MIT, a place where he explored broader philosophical questions about technology, indigenous knowledge, and artificial intelligence. “We think very often not only about human intelligence, but also about animal intelligence and the spirit of the sky and the trees and the grass and the living earth,” says 2bears, “and I see that reflected here at school. “
In 2023, 2bears participated in the Co-Creation Studio Indigenous Immersive Incubator at MIT, a historic gathering of 10 Indigenous artists who visited MIT labs and met with Indigenous leaders from MIT and beyond. As part of the summit, he shared “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe” as a work in progress. This spring, he presented the latest iteration of the work at MIT in smaller settings with groups of students and in a large public lecture presented by CAST and the Art, Culture and Technology program. His “experimental method of storytelling and communication really conveys the power of what it means to be a community as a Native person and the unique beauty of all of our people,” says Nicole McGaa, Oglala Lakota, co-chair of MIT’s Native American Association.
360-degree storytelling
2bear’s virtual recreation became even more important after the community’s longhouse unexpectedly burned down midway through the process after the team created 3D scans of the structure. Without a building to project onto, they used ingenuity and creativity to focus on the current iteration of the project.
The immersive experience was remarkable for its sheer size: 8-foot-tall images projected onto a 34-foot-diameter screen. With video mapping using multiple projectors and 14-channel surround sound, the story of Sky Woman coming to Turtle Island took on a huge form. It premiered at the 2RO MEDIA festival and met with enthusiastic response from the Six Nations community. “It was so beautiful. You can look in any direction and something has happened,” says Gary Joseph, director of Thru the RedDoor. “It affects you in ways you didn’t think you could because you see things that are sacred to you being expressed in ways you never imagined.”
In the future, 2bears hopes to make the installation more interactive, so participants can engage in the experience in their own way and create multiple versions of the creation story. “I thought of it as creating a live installation,” he says. “It was truly a community-created project and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. And I’m really excited about where I see this project going in the future.”