Tuesday Oct 18, 2022

Indigenous Storytelling Meets Virtual Reality with Mikaela Jade (Inspiring Stories)

 

 

Indigenous Storytelling Meets Virtual Reality
with Mikaela Jade

The Ampliseed Podcast: Inspiring Stories, Episode 1

 

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This is the first episode in Ampliseed’s Inspiring Stories series— interviews with leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future, who share with us what brought them to this space, which opportunities inspired them, and what challenges they had to overcome. 

Jump to: On this episode | About the guests | Show notes | Transcript

ON THIS EPISODE OF INSPIRING STORIES

Augmented reality. It’s a technology that can superimpose a computer-generated image over someone’s actual view of the real world, creating a composite picture. And not long after Mikaela Jade, a First Nations Cabrogal woman of the Dharug-speaking nation of Sydney, was first exposed to augmented reality, she had a daring idea. She wondered, "What if we could go to our cultural places and people could hold their phones up and ... our old people appeared in holographic format, so they can tell the right stories in the right place, at the right time?"

 

ABOUT TODAY'S GUESTS

Mikaela Jade

Mikaela Jade (Invited Guest)

Mikaela is the CEO and Founder of Indigital. As a proud Cabrogal woman of the Dharug-speaking nations of Sydney, Australia, Mikaela comes from the world’s oldest storytellers. She loves technology and is a strong proponent of working together, in person, with communities. Named on The Australian’s 100 Top Innovators List and recognised as the 2021 Indigenous Leader of the Year at the Women in Digital awards, Mikaela has been widely recognised as a leader in the technology space, and her company Indigital has received numerous awards. Mikaela is based on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra. 
Ariadne Gorring

Ariadne Gorring (co-Host)

Ariadne is the co-CEO of Pollination Foundation. Ariadne is passionate about Indigenous-led cultural conservation, working with the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) for over 20 years on native title and cultural and natural resource management. She is a former Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity at Melbourne University, and recipient of the Barbara Thomas Fellowship in Conservation Financing via The Nature Conservancy Australia. Ariadne is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.
Kirsty Galloway-McLean

Kirsty Galloway McLean (co-Host)

Kirsty leads Ampliseed, a global network connecting practitioners with a rights-based, human-centered approach to building environmental resilience. Her background includes over a decade with the United Nations working in Canada and Japan, and 15 years as CEO of a management and communications consulting firm in Australia. As Executive Director at Pollination Foundation, she works to connect and support international organisations, philanthropists, business, Indigenous and community leaders, and other corporate foundations to drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Kirsty is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.

 

SHOW NOTES

  • This interview was originally recorded in 2020. 
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following program contains a reference to an Elder who is sadly no longer with us. 
Additional resources

 

TRANSCRIPT

Mikaela: Something that really stuck with me was one of the Aunties from Torres Strait Islands had been very quiet during the week. And I was like, are you okay Auntie? And she said, yes, I'm thinking about that blockchain. And I wanna use that blockchain to help manage our fisheries.

Ariadne: From Ampliseed and the Pollination Foundation, welcome to our inspiring story series. This series makes space for conversations with leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future. I'm Ariadne Gorring, co-CEO of Pollination Foundation, and we bring community to the heart of nature-based climate solutions.

Kirsty: And I'm your co-host today, Kirsty Galloway McLean. I lead Ampliseed, which is a peer-to-peer learning network of landscape scale conservation projects around the world.

Ariadne: Today's very first episode comes from a zoom recorded in Naarm, Melbourne on Boonwurrung country in August, 2020 and it's with a dear friend and founder of award winning company Indigital. Mikaela Jade's work centers around new ways to translate indigenous knowledge and culture whilst creating opportunities for people living on country to enter the digital economy.

Mikaela contributes to global knowledge as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Virtual and Augmented Reality, and as an Indigenous delegate to the UN's Permanent Forum. Very few people work with remote communities and indigenous peoples in the way that Mikaela does. And this is a really wonderful story to commence our series.

Kirsty: A quick housekeeping note: as this recording was originally a zoom presentation with slides, for podcast purposes we have edited the story to make it standalone for you to listen to wherever and whenever suits best. During this session, Mikaela also shared a fantastic video that showcases her work with traditional owners in Kakadu National Park, where you'll get to see Namande - and you'll hear more about him soon. This video and other resources are in the episode notes. Now, please sit back in this space and enjoy Mikaela's inspiring story. Over to you, Mikaela.

Mikaela: Thanks for having me today. I'd like to acknowledge the elders who walked before us and for me, I draw a lot of strength from my ancestors, the Cabrogal people of the Georges River and Liverpool areas of Sydney.

And I also draw a lot of strength from the elders who walk with us today. And today I'm coming to you from the freezing cold Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra, Australia. I also would like to acknowledge the elders who are walking our footsteps and who I feel very privileged to work with, today, while they're children.

So who am I? I am just a person like everybody else who had an idea in the shower, back in 2012 to get our people involved in creating future technologies. Aside from that, I grew up as a kid in Sydney, and was always running into the Bush with my brothers and sisters and doing lots of, I guess, culturally based things like we used to grind up sandstones and paint our bodies with that.

And we used to pull paper back off the trees and weave. And do things that we didn't know that we were born to do because my family grew up not knowing our connection to our tribe and our country, even though we grew up on our country. So it wasn't until I was working in the national park service when I was 18, that I was identified as an Aboriginal woman by the Nura tribe.

 And every park that I went and worked with around Australia, following that the traditional owners asked me what my country was. So I started with my sister looking into where we came from, and eventually we discovered who we are. And, the last 13 years I've been working very closely with my tribe to see how I can best contribute to the future of the Cabrogal people, the Darug speaking nation. My partner and my stepson, Dom, and my children, Amy and Jasmine , we spend a lot of time exploring places all around the world and going bushwalking and we feel the most connected to each other when we're doing fun things outside. So we're quite an adventurous family.

Some of the other things I love doing, I mentioned I love adventures. I also love flying drones - I'm a commercial drone pilot. I became a commercial drone pilot because we needed to work with large cultural sites to create photogrammetry, which is a 3d photo of a place.

But also just love seeing our country from the sky. There's something really special about being able to go to 120 meters and hover over our country and see it in new ways. Um, do love boating and all things, water based including diving. So, Pete and I spend a lot of time around Montague Island on the south coast and New South Wales diving.

We like diving with stingrays and seals and all the beautiful habitat that we have down at Narouma. Also love going out on country and learning from our old people. Ah, so I had the amazing experience of living in Kakadu for two years. And this is Aunty Patsy Raglah she's the most incredible Bush woman I've ever met, and was privileged to spend time with Patsy on country learning how to process ducks and magpie geese.

So if we're, if we're ever hungry out there, and desperate, I'm pretty good at processing ducks. Also we spend a lot of time just exploring the wild coast of the south coast with the kids. And everything I'm about to tell you today happened while I have been a park ranger. So, Indigital for seven years was my side hustle. And it was only this year in February where I stepped aside from my parks career to invest more time into growing Indigital, which is my company.

So what do we do at Indigital? You saw a little in the video, we create augmented and mixed reality through a cultural lens. We also do a lot of research and development around cutting edge technologies including machine language learning and making digital twins and a lot of other tech terms that probably a lot of people haven't heard yet. We're quite lucky because of our partnerships with Microsoft and Telstra, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. We get to see a lot of future technologies and I guess I see our company playing a bit of a role of the guinea pig in those technologies and really picking them apart and exploring what it means for a cultural context to work in the technologies and to help shape them through a cultural lens.

So we know that technologies are just another way to capture and share traditional knowledge. But we also are acutely aware that there's more than 4 hundred million First Peoples in the world that are excluded from these digital futures. So we exist to help proliferate and preserve and share and grow economies for indigenous communities in the digital economy.

And we've positioned ourselves as an edutech company, so education technology company to work with First Peoples in Australia and around the world to upskill people in digital technologies. I'm really committed to this. And as someone said to me, years ago, this will be your life's work and it will never be finished within your lifetime. And you need to be okay with that.

So , I'm okay with that now. Where, oh, you know, hopefully we're just a stepping stone for the next seven generations of people to be involved in, not just using technology, but shaping technology to do whatever communities would like to do with that. So, I guess the philosophy is like we either get involved in shaping the technologies or we're shaped by the technologies, so we'd rather be involved in shaping them.

We have to have a business model wrapped around that otherwise no one can be employed doing what we are doing. So our target is to reach 26,500 kids in Australia through our digital schools program called Indigital Schools. And we've had to pivot quite a lot during COVID. So originally our business model was to work face to face in schools and working with communities to teach all kids digital skills through a cultural lens.

We now have pivoted that to online delivery, which seems to be working quite well. And we've worked to work with teachers primarily and educators within the community, so they can become the teachers of the children. So we don't directly work with kids anymore. We work with adults that influence kids' lives to teach them how to be proficient in teaching digital skills.

And we've got a really exciting program coming up which I'll share a bit later on, which is working with Minecraft and the IDX community through the Telstra Foundation to challenge 500 kids to create their town, city or community in 2030 using just indigenous knowledge. So that should be really fun.

So where did all this start? This started in a really weird place. I was a public servant as you know, working in parks. And I had the opportunity. I went to an event one night at the University of Canberra in 2012, and this device was on the table. This is a very early version of Google glass.

And I put it on my head and saw augmented and mixed reality for the first time. And my mind was very much bent and blown by this technology, even though if you can imagine augmented reality in 2012 was pretty crappy. It was literally you put this device over a picture of a doctor, I think it was, and the picture just hovered one centimeter off the page. And I was like, how do you do that? And I went home and had a shower and this idea came to me like, what if we could go to our cultural places and people could hold their phones up and eventually they'll be wearing head one devices like this one.

And our old people appeared in holographic format and they could tell the right story at the right time, at the right place for the right reasons. And they could earn money from that from country while not needing to be there. I set about building this technology which was very, very hard because I wasn't a technologist

So I was a ranger and I managed to scramble a really tiny amount of money together. And I went out to expressions of interest, 'cause I thought the whole world would wanna work with me on this program. And I put a tender out saying, we're looking for developers to work with us on this really amazing program and no one applied to the tender.

And basically, I almost gave up at that point because I could not find a developer that would work with us to help us bring this to life. So I ended up cold calling augmented reality companies around the world with the worst pitch ever, which was "Hi. I am an Aboriginal woman from Australia. I wanna use augmented reality without the internet in remote communities with Aboriginal people" and everyone thought that was pretty much the dumbest idea they'd ever heard. So one guy did say yes, and I ended up working with him for two years on Skype to learn how to do augmented reality. And Jason was the most amazing person to help me on this journey.

Around that time, I was also invited to the World Indigenous Conference that was happening in Darwin. And we created this paddle project. We had 50 paddles and we invited people to just come and sit and paint their story on the paddles. And at the end of the conference, the paddles were gifted all around the world. And through that process, I met an amazing Wiradjuri artist, De Greer Yindimincarlie. And we thought, woah, what if we put augmented reality on the paddle and De agreed to work with us? So we put a video of De - kind of when you put your phone over the paddle, her video pops out of her paddle and it's her telling the story of the paddle. And through that, we were invited to speak at TEDx Canberra and share this concept of telling stories in augmented reality.

Then my partner was offered the role of park manager at Kakadu National Park. And we had to basically just pick up our life and move to Kakadu really quickly within two weeks. So I packed up my life and we went up to Kakadu and I started exploring this concept of augmented reality on country with Neville Namarnyilk and four other traditional owners, who really got behind the project.

 I went into an art center one day in Jabiru and put a architectural drawing down on the table and said, Hey, see what happens when you put the phone over this piece of paper. And this house popped up in augmented reality and traditional owners were able to move it around and see the house in three dimensions.

And then it sparked this concept of them wanting to try this technology on bark paintings that they did. So Neville then started talking to me about this Namande character from Kakadu. And that Neville was one of the custodians of the stories of the Namande there. And he said, could we bring Namande to life?

This was a profound moment in my journey doing augmented reality because when we created the AR we realized we weren't just sharing the story. We were also teaching kids how to do cultural dance. We were teaching them how to paint their bodies up for Namande dancing. We were teaching them how to sing, and how to sing in language.

Now, when I made that, I realized that we were doing a lot of stuff with data and went, oh my gosh, we're gonna be custodians of this cultural data. Like, what are the intellectual property and moral rights laws or like things around that we had to consider. And I ended up being invited to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to work with a group called Tribal Link who run this incredible program, Project Access.

And we did interventions to the UN on three occasions about protecting indigenous cultural knowledge, law and language in digital environments. And I'm actually doing a master of applied cybernetics at the 3A Institute at the moment to explore deeply what this really means for our people, when we put our cultural knowledge, language and law into things like artificial intelligence, augmented and mixed reality.

I got involved and still am involved heavily with this incredible group of people who have been an, an amazing support network over the last five years of our work and who also provide international perspectives into the work that we are doing. Because we all realize that indigenous peoples around the world have the same challenges, have the same barriers to technology, we have the same dreams of what we want to be able to create in using digital technologies, in terms of cultural knowledge sharing and economies.

After that moment I met this fantastic woman, Tianji Dickens from Microsoft, and she's been an incredible champion within the Microsoft network for the work that we've been doing. So we met three years ago. I joined the Microsoft Reconciliation Action Plan advisory board. And we started working on some projects together. They gave me a challenge when I first met Microsoft. They asked me, could I put the application that we developed in Kakadu into a holo-lens? And I was like, sure, what's a holo-lens?

 It's been a really big challenge. They said, if you can get your content from the application into this three dimensional head wand holographic machine in three weeks, we'll put you on the stage at Microsoft Summit in Sydney, which is one of their massive conferences. And I was like, wow, that's a pretty good opportunity to talk about what we're doing.

So I jumped on a plane to India and ended up working with this phenomenal group of people in Bangalore for six days getting our content out of our application environment from phones and reshaping that into fully three dimensional, holographic content. And I did get to go on the stage at Microsoft Summit, and from there we were able to get some support to build out some more programs. We then looked at how do we amplify this work? Because it was really expensive. So my first application cost $150,000. I had to take out a bank loan to do that. I was trying to support that bank loan on a park ranger salary, which if anyone has been a ranger you'll know, that's a pretty tall order to try and do that.

 It was really hard. We ate lentils for a really long time and didn't go on holidays and things. So, we were able to do that, but then we looked at, could we take this concept of creating augmented reality and work with school students and teach them how to make augmented reality?

So we had a program with Microsoft and the Department of Education in NSW to work with 20 amazing kids from five primary schools to teach them how to make a augmented reality. And it was such an amazing program. And I really saw the impact of teaching other people how to work in this technology.

And that's where I wanted to focus my attention, but it was still really expensive. Like every piece of content that we developed with the kids cost $8,000 a piece to make because it was a very labor intensive process to create three dimensional characters, animate them and do all the coding parts that make augmented reality.

So that was the third time I was about to quit doing what I was doing because it was just financially unviable and it was unsustainable and it was definitely unscalable 'cause there was only a handful of people in the team that could actually do this work to bring it all together. At the same time, I wanted to see if we could work with First Peoples from regional and remote communities, particularly women to help them gain digital skills so they could use the digital skills in their community.

And these incredible women and Ari was involved in this program. We brought them from around Australia to Microsoft for a week in Sydney. We gave everybody a laptop and we worked with them over the next nine months to help them apply tech technologies in different ways that they wanted to.

And this was a pretty incredible moment as well. It was just an amazing week, but something that really stuck with me was one of the aunties from Torres Strait Islands had been very quiet during the week. And I was like, are you okay, Auntie? And she said, yes, I'm thinking about that blockchain. And I wanna use that blockchain to help manage our fisheries.

And I was like, whoa, that blew my mind. She, she really wanted to cut out the middle man through this new technology that would enable the community to go straight from them being harvesters of fish, to selling directly to markets. So that inspired me further to think about how do we scale this kind of program where it wasn't so necessary to bring everyone to a place, and work intensely and take everyone out of their lives. So we thought about how we could deliver that in a more sustainable way that could also scale.

And that's where I met Telstra. So Microsoft made an introduction to Telstra Purple, which is a development arm of our national telco. And we worked together on creating this platform that Indigital Schools sits on now, which uses artificial intelligence to do all the coding and all the complicated technical expensive parts. So we can now create augmented reality instantaneously and kids and communities can do it themselves, which is a huge achievement.

During that process, we were invited back to UN last year for the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples to come and share our work. And we wanted to take something to the UN that really represented where we think the technology is going.

So my Uncle Lex and Auntie Corrina and Auntie Julie worked with me on a program where they created this traditional message stick. And we worked with Brett Leavy from Bilbie Studios to create them in holographic format. So when you put the device over the message stick, my aunties appear as representations of themselves.

And when you talk to the app or you talk to the message stick, you can say, hello, aunties, and they wave to you. You can say, tell me about the message stick. And they talk to you in Dharug language and English. And you can ask them anything about any of the markings that are on the message stick and the machine language learning picks up what the user is saying and responds appropriately in language and in English. That is now living in the powerhouse museum in Sydney as part of the Linear exhibition. And it's been a phenomenal tool to help people think and place First Peoples in very cutting edge technologies because the general population hasn't seen a lot of this technology and we're already building in it. Which is something that I find really exciting because it means we get to set the social license about this particular technology in our own culture first.

 This year we were also really lucky because we were invested in by a network called She-E-O. So there's five companies in Australia this year that have been selected by 700 women who have microinvested in our enterprises. And we also have a support network of 6,000 women around the world who are helping us really grow our business.

Also Telstra has really got behind the program that we are doing, and there's a national marketing campaign out at the moment really advertising in digital schools and helping us seed the concept across Australia which is really exciting. We've just partnered also with the National Center for Indigenous Excellence and Microsoft and Minecraft to run a national competition in NAIDOC Week this year, which will happen in November where we're inspiring and teaching kids and teachers, how to use tools like Minecraft to learn coding, how to use Paint 3D and other softwares to create three dimensional characters and how to use our platform to push their concepts out into augmented reality through our application.

So in the end as I mentioned before, this is my life's work and won't be over in my lifetime. And I think it's really important to acknowledge the role that our old people have played in shaping this technology and this concept, and the role they still play. And I see myself as a 40 year old woman now holding the hands of our old people, but I also get to hold the hands of our young people.

And I feel like this age or this time in my life, I'm kind of the conduit between the two in our community. And it's a really privileged place to be able to stand where I acknowledge the wisdom that's being shared by older generations, and I'm able to play a role in passing that on to younger generations.

Ariadne: Wow. What an inspiring story. And thanks so much, Mik, for sharing so generously with us. I think one of the key takeaways for me was just that moment in the shower when you had this inspiration and it came to you in a moment of insight. And just the grit and resilience and the persistence that it takes to have an idea and then see it through, into what is now a flourishing social enterprise.

The other piece that really resonated for me was this 'we're either going to shape or be shaped by the technology' and the importance of having the right story, and the right people, in the right place, at the right time, all coming together and the importance of that alignment being really critical to the projects that we work on and how we shape them.

What about you Kirsty?

Kirsty: Yeah, that line about being shaped by or shaping technology really resonated with me too. It's so critical to really think about how we engage with the potential and possibilities of our future. And this sort of technology, and the way you are applying it Mik, is just so inspirational. I mean, I just love the ideas of the things that you're doing. And I love that you had such a vision that you were going to people saying that I want to see augmented reality in places, remote communities without internet. And you managed to find people to make that vision a reality.

And I guess that's one of the other things that I really took away from it. The importance of those partnerships, like the connections that you made with Microsoft and with Telstra and people in those organizations who are willing to work with you to explore imaginative ideas, like education, technology, and indigenous knowledge and how you can marry that and make something out of it.

That to me is so important that we nurture those connections and partnerships because each of us have a small part of an idea. And when we come together, we can make something so much greater out of it. That's part of the really inspiring future that I think that you share.

I think that's probably going to bring us to the end of today. So thanks so much to all of you listeners, who tuned into our first podcast. We hope you've been inspired and entertained and a quick reminder that Mik's video and the other resources are available in the episode notes. If you're interested in hearing more nature positive inspiring stories, we'd love to have you again.

So please do subscribe to the Ampliseed podcast series, and head over to our website to learn more about what we do. We'd like to close with a special thanks to the BHP Foundation whose support makes this work possible. And Ari, do you want to give a couple of words about our next episode?

Ariadne: Yeah. In our next episode, we will feature an inspiring story from a woman who is leading systems change and human flourishing. So look forward to having you all join us then.

Kirsty: Fantastic. Till next time. Bye.

 

 

 

 

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