Cornell University’s Indigenous Computing event to explore culturally supportive technologies

Cornell’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and the Redistributive Computing Systems Group (RCSG) will present a series of talks this Friday exploring the intersection of Indigenous worldviews and computational technologies.

“Indigenous Computing” will be held 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, in Gates Hall 114, with a virtual attendance option via Zoom. The event includes talks from Indigenous people working in computer science, information science and genetics. Registration is encouraged.

“Indigenous people need technologies designed with, by and in support of our unique lived experiences, identities, knowledge, beliefs and politics,” said Marina Johnson-Zafiris, a member of the Mohawk Nation and a doctoral student in the field of information science. “As we will see through the speakers, this materializes in different ways – through our interventions, as models, as apps, as protocols – each of them representing our own understandings of Native sovereignty and Indigenous futures.”

Johnson-Zafiris will present “Computing Along the Two Row,” a reference to the treaty between the Haudenosaunee and European colonial settlers recorded in a purple and white beaded belt called the Two Row wampum belt.