Indigenous Collaborations on Digital Public Memory Work in the Classroom

Communities across the United States and beyond are facing difficult decisions about how to represent the uglier sides of their histories. One place where this question has become prominent in recent years is on college campuses. In this paper, we argue that digital media embedded within collaborative pedagogical practices can be an effective way to intervene in public memory and historical representation. We specifically analyze our experiences working with local Native American communities in the development of curricular materials about Indigenous persistence on the campus of Santa Clara University during Spanish missionization. We show that (1) buy-in from the broader student body is a central ingredient in institutional change and (2) curricular interventions, using public-facing digital media projects, provide both a means of fronting Native voices and engaging a large student audience, in order to drive cultural transformations on campus.