Grant: CCI Applied Research and Development Grants

The Malahat Nation is an Indigenous Coast Salish community located on the western shore of the Saanich Inlet on Vancouver Island. As part of their work to retain their traditional practices, stories, and knowledge in the face of intergenerational traumas created by attempts to strip the people of their languages and cultures, the Malahat Nation is building a series of immersive VR experiences which aim to support youth education, knowledge preservation, and language revitalization, and to serve as a communication tool for land governance and restoration. Accomplishing this requires highly accurate 3D models of plants natively found in their indigenous ecosystems. Each plant species within their territory must be characterized, including the generation of a wide range of ecosystem-specific metadata. Camosun Innovates (CI) is Camosun College’s applied research centre, housing one of the first Technology Access Centres in Canada, focused on advanced manufacturing. After consulting with Camosun Innovates, the Malahat Nation assigned its Land Guardians, an organization of volunteers committed to building and shared knowledge in a responsible and innovate way, to a year-long data acquisition process to document each of the identified plants and trees, providing detailed photographic reference materials including scale references for seasonal changes and growth over time. With these data, CI will work with the Nation to develop a Flora Articulation Tool capable of rendering and displaying Indigenous flora in their natural habitat across a full range of seasons and conditions. When complete, this tool will serve as a scalable system that can accommodate the Malahat Nation’s project and those of other Indigenous communities. This innovative technology will also serve as a tool that can create a framework to be taken up by other Indigenous communities across Canada, changing the way that they encounter, protect, and share knowledge of their traditional territories. Building on years of research and development, the flora acquisition tool serves as the foundation of a platform which will retain and improve traditional knowledge, provide economic and social benefits for the region, and engage the public with a new and innovative approach to ecological conservation and restoration.