Engaging remembrance and the imagination through virtual reality

Se’Si’Le is creating a unique XR Cultural Experience to be used in physical installations, schools, and educational environments. Virtual and Augmented Reality, or XR, allows for new and more immersive modes of storytelling and avenues for a radical re- imagining of our relationship with nature and each other.

This medium allows people to teleport their awareness and travel through time, space, and the umwelt of sensory experience. This allows indigenous storytellers to weave together in new and impactful ways what was, is, and what could be, dramatically increasing empathy, and engagement through an immersion in deep-storying. Se’Si’Le will share the tools used in creating the experience, and the best practices it develops along the way, with other indigenous and socially conscious storytellers.

The Cultural Experience encompasses a series of exhibits that utilize XR to create a new and truer understanding about indigenous culture and history and their connection to the ancestral icons of Salmon Nations of the Salish Sea: the orca and the salmon. The inaugural XR Cultural Experience will have a physical installation on the main pier (the Clocktower Building) in the Port of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. It will open in the summer of 2024.

We are also working on a Heritage Center and Living Museum. It will occupy up to 10 acres on San Juan Island. The majority of this cultural and historical landscape will offer Native and non-Native participants an unencumbered experience of a culturally significant setting dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of indigenous ancestral knowledge. The 5,000-square foot facility will include a Living Heritage Museum and a XR theater for a fully immersive experiential environment. The XR experience will add a unique dimension to the Living Museum and place-based educational activities by stimulating through cinematic XR all the senses—taste, sound, touch, vision and kinesthetic—to teleport the participants back to an indigenous before-time as well as into a future of hope, promise and possibilities.