Creatotech+

In the beginning, as one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was only water and sky. According to oral tradition, when the Sky Woman became pregnant, she dropped through a hole in the clouds. While many animals guided her descent as she fell, she eventually found a place on the turtle’s back. They worked together, with the aid of other water creatures, to lift the land from the depths of these primordial waters to create what we now know as our earth.

The new immersive experience, “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” is a vivid retelling of this creation story by multimedia artist Jackson 2bears, also known as Tékeniyáhsen Ohkwá:ri (Kanien’kehà:ka), the 2022–24 Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. “A lot of what drives my work is finding new ways to keep Haudenosaunee teachings and stories alive in our communities, finding new ways to tell them, but also helping with the transmission and transformation of those stories as they are for us, a living part of our cultural practice,” he says.