GoKawiilMotorola announced the unveiling of its new Indigenous Collections app. This mobile app was created in conjunction with members of the Rainy Lake Ojibwe community as a means of chronicling and preserving the Ojibwe language as well as their "stories, landmarks and family knowledge." Ojibwe language instructor Jason Jones and Dr. Anton Treuer, an author and Professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University in Minnesota were two of the primary collaborators for the app. The app is available for free through the Google Play Store. Since it is available for anyone to download, only publicly shared cultural knowledge will be distributed via the Indigenous Collections App.
"The app's focus on preserving and sharing Ojibwe stories is particularly valuable," Dr. Treuer said. "Storytelling remains one of the most effective ways to transmit language, cultural knowledge, worldview, and community history. The current collection already represents a meaningful archive, and the planned addition of further stories will increase the long-term significance of the project."
The effort is part of the broader Indigenous Languages Initiative undertaken by Motorola in partnership with the Lenovo Foundation. The two parties have collaborated with indigenous communities to digitize and preserve their languages, while at the same time applying those languages to make modern smartphone tech more broadly available to indigenous speakers.