This is Native Land
Overview
This is Native Land is a permanent exhibition at the Washington State Historical Museum that explores Washington's history through Indigenous perspectives. Developed in collaboration with Native experts, Trivium created interactives that focus on Tribal sovereignty, resilience, and the lasting impacts of treaties and land loss.
As visitors enter the gallery, they are confronted by two towering treaty documents that are brought to life by custom animation in an installation that challenges assumptions about the settlement of Native land. An interactive map illustrates the transition from pre-contact landscapes to reservations and allotments, showing how Native land has been impacted by settlement over the generations.
Life-sized digital portraits share personal stories and memories connected to the land, while projections animate ancestral placenames on a tactile topographic map. An interactive timeline highlights Indigenous resistance in conflicts, and a digital archive allows visitors to explore the primary texts of historic documents and treaties that have impacted Tribal lands today.
Blending film, interactive media, projections, and tactile elements, the exhibition presents Native history as a living, evolving story.
Challenges
One of the primary challenges for this project involved Treaty Introductions, where our team needed to find a way to play custom animations on large monitors while hiding the hardware itself, fooling the eye into thinking the content is appearing on the surface of the treaty documents. After testing, we identified a scrim material we could use to mask the monitors and achieve this effect. Our team also needed to thoughtfully represent Indigenous perspectives by incorporating the voices of federally and non-federally recognized Tribes in meaningful and inclusive ways, like avoiding reliance on western map boundaries in interpretation.
Approach
Our approach emphasized iterative design, collaboration, and user testing to create an accessible and culturally responsive experience. Content development prioritized first-person Native narratives and Indigenous geographic perspectives. The experience was also tested with Indigenous children from local Native communities during the alpha phase of the project, followed by extensive quality assurance prior to installation.
DELIVERABLES
- 5 Media Experiences
Outcomes and Impacts
Through careful inclusion and representation of various Native communities, this experience equips visitors who may have not been familiar with Washington's rich Native history with a new understanding and appreciation of these stories and their continued significance.
BY THE NUMBERS
COLLABORATORS
- North Shore Productions
- AldrichPears Associates
- CRĒO
- EOS Light Media
- Morgan Veregge
