Northern Cheyenne Tribe

The Northern Cheyenne Tribe will partner with San Jose State University to develop a model and toolkit to showcase the use of virtual reality (VR) technology to preserve and share the tribe’s cultural heritage. The VR platform will host recordings of Native language speakers and digitized artifacts. The project team will conduct user interviews, focus groups, and surveys with community members. They will disseminate a toolkit with procedures and practices for designing VR archives focused on preserving language and cultural heritage traditions. This project will benefit more than 12,000 tribal citizens, in addition to serving as a model for other communities and the library field. As a subrecipient, San Jose State University will lead the implementation of the research design, data collection, analysis, and scholarly dissemination; oversee the archival process; and lead the digitization and VR development process.