“HEY, THERE’S WI-FI AT CAMP!”: REMEDIATING MATERIALITY, LANGUAGE LEARNING, AND DIGITAL IDENTITY WITHIN THE APSÁALOOKE LANGUAGE APP

Abstract

In August of 2015, the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe of Montana joined a growing new media movement across Indian Country and released its own mobile phone software: the Apsáalooke Language App. Aimed at Crow language revitalization, this multimedia platform integrates quizzes, games, oral histories, ethnographic descriptions, and archival visual imagery in a free downloadable format for Apple and Android software. This project follows this app over its initial design, roll-out and appropriation in order to craft a collaborative ethnographic exploration of how Indigenous new media is reinventing the basic terms of political advocacy, material culture, and language revitalization. Specifically, this research examines the emergent idioms of inclusion, forms of sovereign action, and projects of material culture digital returns being organized through not only the initial Apsáalooke Language App, but also other forms of new digital media. In doing so, it aims to illuminate new developments in Native America: the ways that the unique properties of decentralized, democratic digital interfaces are quickly expanding the stakes and terms of sovereignty, memory, and engaged anthropological research.