Tech Refactored S2E1 - Culturally Rerouting the Oregon Trail

Tue, 08/10/2021

This post is a summary of Season 2, Episode 1 of The Nebraska Governance & Technology Center’s (NGTC) Podcast Series, Tech Refactored. In this episode, host NGTC Director Gus Hurwitz was joined by historians Margaret Huettl and Katrina (Katie) Phillips, who drew on their expertise with Native American history and culture in consulting on the popular reboot of The Oregon Trail computer game.

            The 1995 version of the Oregon Trail computer game captured the imaginations of a generation of gamers, with jokes about pixelated buffalo hunts and fording the river resonating with a certain generation to this day. But like so many cultural products with a historical bent, the Oregon Trail relied on a depiction of westward expansion that, while earnest, doesn’t hold up to contemporary scrutiny. In particular, the absence of native peoples in the story of american westward expansion is almost totally absent from the 1995 version of the game. When developers sought to reboot the franchise for modern audiences, they wanted to correct that mistake by giving native peoples a more prominent, historically-grounded role in the story of the Oregon Trail. To do that they turned to scholars in Native American history, including Huettl and Phillips.

            Both Phillips and Huettl were part of that generation that played the 1995 iteration of the Oregon Trail. Playing it as a kid with a native background, Huettl experienced it like any other child; it wasn’t until she was older that she reflected back on the game and realized the almost total absence of native people. When the developers of the reboot of the game approached her asking her to help consult in making a new Oregon Trail with native characters that not only were more accurate, but also played a meaningful role in the story, she was excited to participate.

            One important area on which Huettl and Phillips wanted to correct the record was on the issue of the use of technology among Native American tribes. Not only were native peoples familiar with and actively using many western technologies, including firearms, by the time of the Oregon Trail, they also had a number of technologies of their own, including time-tested medical knowledge that drew on the plant resources and the environment that were prevalent on the high plains and in the mountain west.

            Both Huettl and Phillips teach courses on pop culture and the ways in which it interacts with popular understandings of history. That is particularly true in the area of video games, where popular games like Red Dead Redemption have shaped Americans' ideas about American expansion into the southwest. But where those narratives are inaccurate, they risk “getting told over and over and continue to erase native perspectives and tell a more celebratory version of the American path.” That doesn’t mean inaccurate depictions don’t have a role in education - both Huettl and Phillips use the original Oregon Trail game in their classes, placing them in the context of how they depict a mythic story of American expansionism and a set of understandings that depict Americans not only as central, but as the exclusive relevant actors in the story of westward expansion.

            And while telling these historical stories of westward expansion, especially when they include native peoples, are important, they also risk consigning native peoples to history, when in fact native peoples have a dynamic culture that is alive today. But if developers depict the full story of a phenomenon like westward expansion, than that history of dispossession and loss can be brought to more fully contextualize the current circumstances of many native communities, which suffer enormous economic and health disparities as a direct result of the colonial policies to which they were subjected for centuries. And for my part, I would add that the recent revelations about the conditions at Canadian and Native American boarding schools show just how far into the present those “historical” realities of cultural erasure and trauma extend.

           In depicting native peoples in the game, it was also important to Huettl and Phillips that the native characters not be a part of a monolithic “native” background, but instead reflect the diversity of cultures that existed throughout the great plains, through the rocky mountains and out to the west coast. As Phillips explained of the game, “there are specific Pawnee stories, there will be Shoshone stories; because that is such an essential part of understanding Native American experiences.”

           Phillips and Huettl hope their contributions get players interested in history and realize that there is much more nuance and many more sides to some of the conventional historical narratives that have been encoded in popular culture. And for native kids, they hope that seeing their culture depicted in an authentic way is an affirming experience in a way that they themselves didn’t experience in playing the original game back in ‘95. And that, at a minimum, is significant progress.

Tags: Tech Refactored Review

Tech Refactored Text Logo underlined with the words Episode Review underneath