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Dosbox oregon trail1/6/2024 “I remembered playing Oregon Trail as a kid and the Natives were side characters, they really had no weight in the storyline. “I knew stance, and I was really excited to work on a project with her leading,” Alvitre said. The idea of updating Oregon Trail instantly appealed to Alvitre, who based some of the California Native characters on her own relatives. She works beautifully both by hand and digitally and I’ve always admired her work.” “It was an incredible amount of work and Weshoyot was fully dedicated,” LaPensée said. Those impactful images of Indigenous people are the work of Tongva artist and activist Weshoyot Alvitre, a longtime colleague of LaPensée who created all but a handful of the game’s illustrations. I imagine this is what white people must feel when they play… most video games, right?” “It was just so touching to see all this Native representation in a piece of media, over and over again, I mean, this is a game made by Native people. Perhaps on an intellectual level it might not seem like a big deal, but I got hit super hard in the feels by the time I made it to ‘Northern California,’” the reviewer wrote. “Most characters I met through When Rivers Were Trails were Native. When Rivers Were Trails is having a profound effect on some gamers, evidenced by a raving review from the blog Indian Playing. The game won the Adaptation Award at IndieCade 2019, a festival celebrating independent video games and was featured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Annual SAAM Arcade last weekend, prompting The Washington Post to prominently feature it in a weekend to-do list. Judging by the buzz and positive reviews of When Rivers Were Trails, it’s clear that LaPensée and company are changing the video game landscape for good. LaPensée added that the project was funded by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which sought to develop a sovereign video game in conjunction with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “I pitched him the Oregon Trail remix angle and he supported it fully,” she said. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation developed the curriculum to include Native American stories, lessons and values in standard classroom instruction. The project was born when Nichlas Emmons from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation approached LaPensée about working on a video game based on the Lessons of Our Land curriculum. On the journey, the Anishinaabeg character gathers medicines, hunts for food, dodges incorrigible Indian Agents and meets dozens of compelling Indigenous characters. The settler family making their way from Missouri to Oregon is now an Anishinaabeg person trekking from Minnesota to California after being forced from their land. In When Rivers Were Trails it’s 1890, instead of 1848. Some stories are based on truths and some are directly true.” We included over thirty Indigenous writers in over 100 character scenarios. “I saw issues with how Indigenous people were being treated and viewed and wanted games to do better. “The hope was to get a game in schools that shares Indigenous perspectives,” LaPensée said. Oregon Trail’s pixelated pioneers and generic storyline have been replaced by artistic, emotionally evocative depictions of Native Americans and historically accurate scenarios. When Rivers Were Trails Trailer from Elizabeth LaPensée on Vimeo. “The game is all about colonization.”įast forward about 40 years, and LaPensée and a team of writers and artists have remixed the tired old Oregon Trail into the Indigenous-focused “ When Rivers Were Trails.” The issue I had with Oregon Trail is that it always put Native people in relation to settlers,” said Anishinaabe, Métis video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée, who teaches at Michigan State University. “They were either traders, guides, or would circle wagons and attack. In Oregon Trail, which has been reduced to a retro pop culture punchline, the Indigenous characters were peripheral and predictable. Along the way, they trade for food and supplies, navigate some challenging topography, and try their darndest to avoid dying from dysentery. In the iconic point-and-click 2D adventure game, the player attempted to lead a settler family traveling with covered wagons and oxen on a trip from Missouri to Oregon. Back in the 1980s, when video games were young and unwoke, Gen X elementary school students were fed a very one-sided view of westward expansion via the era’s trendy learning game “Oregon Trail.”
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