Peris Jones - Reflecting on Indigenous Storytelling in the Digital Space

 One example of Indigenous digital storytelling is the intergenerational digital storytelling workshop described by Hausknecht et al., where Elders and youth co-create digital stories combining oral narratives with images, sound, and video. This project both incorporates and challenges traditional storytelling practices. On one hand, it maintains core Indigenous principles — storytelling as relational, oral, and community-centred, led by Elders as knowledge holders. On the other hand, it transforms storytelling by layering multimedia elements and shifting from exclusively oral transmission to digital production. As Cunsolo Willox et al. (2013) argue, digital storytelling can preserve Indigenous oral wisdom while adapting it to contemporary contexts. Similarly, Tekobbe emphasizes that Indigenous storytelling is inherently fluid, relational, and rooted in cultural meaning-making rather than fixed narratives — a quality that translates well into digital formats that allow for multiple voices and evolving interpretations. 

The digital medium plays a crucial role in both preserving and transforming these narratives. By recording stories and embedding them with visuals and sound, digital storytelling helps safeguard knowledge that might otherwise be lost, particularly as Elders pass on. At the same time, it transforms storytelling into a multimodal, accessible form that reaches broader audiences and engages younger generations through digital literacy. This aligns with concepts of digital sovereignty and decolonization, as communities retain control over their stories, deciding how they are created, shared, and archived within the community rather than extracted by outside researchers. Strengths of this approach include amplifying marginalized voices, fostering intergenerational relationships, and resisting dominant Western knowledge systems by centring Indigenous ways of knowing. However, limitations remain: digital platforms can still reproduce power imbalances, and translating oral, relational knowledge into fixed digital forms risks oversimplifying culturally embedded meanings. Overall, digital storytelling is a powerful but complex tool — one that supports cultural continuity while also reshaping how Indigenous stories are told and experienced.