�ʹ�����

A unique partnership in the Faculty of Arts and Science has led to a new platform for Indigenous beadworkers to display their work and network with other Indigenous artists.

�ʹ�����'s National Scholar; Chair in Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives Danielle Lussier (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) worked with four students from the School of Computing to create , a website that aims to bridge traditional Indigenous knowledge systems with contemporary digital access methods, specifically focusing on Indigenous beadwork. It provides an inclusive space for artists to showcase, preserve, and share their artwork, empowering them to maintain ownership of their cultural creations while educating users about the significance embedded within the beadwork.

“Last summer there was a call for proposals by the School of Computing,” Dr. Lussier, a Red River Métis beadwork artist, explains. “As part of the four-year honours program, the students must complete an honours project which involves creating something including a website or app. My original request was for the creation of a mechanism for virtual knowledge translation. I was looking for a program that would facilitate the translation of information held in my beadwork. During in-person interactions, I call this process ‘reading the beads.’”

The result was something much better than she was ever imagining as the students involved were thinking much bigger than she was and really dove headfirst into the project. The four students involved in the project included Nicholas Jano, Jasper Lim, Keaton Tom, and Ryan Pleava.

Dr. Lussier wanted the entire project to be governed by OCAP, the First Nations principles of ownership, control, access, and possession that asserts that First Nations have control over data collection processes, and that they own and control how this information can be used. This was another learning opportunity for the students.

“These students are not Indigenous, and I’m not sure they knew exactly what they were getting into when they took me on as a client, but they seized the opportunity to take part in this project,” she says. “We worked from September to April, and just recently launched the new site. They did all this work on their own and they worked really hard. They started with the work of setting up a technical database, but they went so far beyond that. I demanded greatness of them.”

She adds she also threw them for a loop by bringing in community members and asking the students to explain the project to them and rationalize the choices they had made. The students also got a sense of what beads mean, and they are more than just artwork.

“They learned about the layered meaning behind the beads and why it’s important for the members to safeguard their intellectual property while also sharing their work with a wider audience. I hope I have also planted the seed of curiosity and created an awareness of something they might not have had an opportunity to learn in their other Computer Science classes. In the end, I hope that the experience of building the Bead Hive has equipped these four new �ʹ�����’s graduates with some knowledge and new vocabulary about Indigenous Peoples.”

Professor Juergen Dingel (School of Computing) says when he first heard about the project, he was reminded of a that uses the ancient art of hair braiding to teach kids how to code. He says just like braiding, bead work can focus on patterns and thus combine art, mathematics, and algorithms in intriguing ways, but there's really a lot more to it than that.

“The Bead Hive project was an ideal computing capstone project: an engaged customer with a real software need in a non-technical domain, creating lots of opportunities for a rich, diverse, mutually beneficial learning experience,” says Dr. Dingel. “The students learned a lot about what it takes to develop a modern web application from scratch, but also about Indigenous art and how to allow artists to leverage the internet to showcase their work on their terms by adhering to the First Nations Principles of OCAP (ownership, control, access, and possession).”