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  • Illustration from the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Workshops

Hello! Shé:kon! Aloha! Waciye! Tunnagasugitsi!

The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) is a partnership of universities and community organizations dedicated to developing multiple visions of Indigenous peoples tomorrow in order to better understand where we need to go today. Through its four main components –workshops, residencies, symposia, and archive– IIF encourages and enable artists, academics, youth and elders to imagine how our communities will look in the future. IIF is anchored by Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University, and includes Partners from across Canada.

Workshops

Bringing Aboriginal Storytelling to Experimental Digital Media

The Skins Workshops teach Indigenous youth how to adapt stories from their community into experimental digital media, such as video games, machinima, 3d modeling and animation, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

Residencies

Enabling the Future Imagaries of  Indigenous Makers and Thinkers

The IIF residency program invites an array of Indigenous artists, writers, activists, thinkers or other makers to envision Indigenous futures. They are asked to consider the question: where would you like to see our people in seven generations?

Symposia

Exchanging Visions of Indigenous Futures

The Symposia on the Future Imaginary bring together artists, scholars, community members, knowledge-keepers and technologists from across Canada and internationally to exchange ideas on how Indigenous people imagine themselves in the future. The Symposia are intensely interdisciplinary, and include lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and land-based learning.

Archive

Archiving Indigenous Digital Media Art

The Indigenous Digital Art Archive (IDAA) is a project in its early formations and developed by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) to organize, care for, and make accessible the records of Indigenous digital artists.

Other

All the Other Stuff We Do

We conduct a number of other projects that don’t fall neatly into the four main categories above. This is where you will find information about our speaker series, interviews, work related to the Indigenous Protocol and AI research, a timeline of all of IIF’s activities since 2013, and various other probes from the future.