Manuelito, B. K. (2015). Creating Space for an Indigenous Approach to Digital Storytelling:” Living Breath” of Survivance Within an Anishinaabe Community in Northern Michigan (Doctoral dissertation, Antioch University).

Abstract

As Indigenous peoples, we have a responsibility to our global community to share our collective truths and experiences, but we also deserve the respect to not be objectified, essentialized, and reified. Today, we are in a period of continual Native resurgence as many of us (re)member our prayers, songs, languages, histories, teachings, everyday stories and our deepest wisdom and understanding as Indigenous peoples–we are all “living breath” and we are “all related.” For eight years, Carmella Rodriguez and I have been nDigiStorytelling across the United States and have co-created over 1,200 digital stories with over 80 tribes for Native survivance, healing, hope, and liberation. By the making and sharing of nDigiStories, our training and consulting company called nDigiDreams is Healing Our Communities One Story at a Time.® This dissertation is a phenomenological study about nDigiStorytelling in an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) community in Northern Michigan; it explores two four-day digital storytelling workshops during November 2013 and May 2014. Using an emergent research design called “Three Sisters,” I combine Indigenous methodologies, community-based participatory research, and portraiture to explore the “lived experiences” of our nDigiStorytellers who are thriving and flourishing in their families and communities and who are widely sharing their nDigiStories to help others. An Indigenous approach to digital storytelling is much needed and provides a new avenue for understanding how we can use nDigiStorytellingand our visceral bodies to release ourselves from traumatic experiences and how we can utilize technology and media-making for healing ourselves and others. The electronic version of this Dissertation is available in open access at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd This dissertation is accompanied by a PDF that contains links to 24 media files on the nDigiStoryMaking YouTube Channel that are referenced in this document.