by Ashley Carnes

With the grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective has partnered with Film Unbound and Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki People to create an augmented reality app called Homelands. The app developers worked with three local partner sites: Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH, the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, NH, and Star Island. After a year of hard work, Homelands has finally come to life. The app is free and the walking trails where the Monuments are placed are also free, making it a great activity for anyone who wants to learn. The app has multiple Monuments that are scanned through your phone camera. These Monuments show beautiful art pieces of Abenaki life both past and present created by Jordan Schmolka. These art pieces are accompanied by informational paragraphs describing each scene. When you use the app and see the images you walk up to them – the closer you get to bigger the image, the more detail you can see – and an Abenaki wisdom curl icon will pop up in the top corner of your screen. By clicking the wisdom curl you’ll get a blurb of information associated with the picture. The pictures below are examples of the images and narrative. 

Here’s an example of the Caribou hide scraping landmark at Strawbery Banke. 

Strawbery Banke contains four Monuments depicting caribou hide scraping, family life, a mother and child, arrival of colonial settlers, and the present day of Abenaki community. Each Illustration shows and describes an aspect of Abenaki life starting from 13,000 years ago to the present day.

This is a map of each location on the Strawbery Banke campus. 

At the Seacoast Science Center and Odiorne State Park visitors get to see and learn about even more! People get to see mammoths and a mammoth hunt. Dugout canoe construction as well as present day fishnet weaving can also be discovered here. There’s also information on the various animals like heath hens and other critters within the ecosystem. Odiorne State Park Monuments can go back 13,000 years. 

This is a map of each location at Odiorne State Park. 

Additionally, Homelands will be available at Star Island, although we were unable to visit this spring.

Map of each location on Star Island.

I had the pleasure of testing the app with INHCC cofounder, Svetlana Peshkova. It was a really enjoyable experience seeing and finding each of the art pieces and learning about them. Besides the bitter cold winds the day when we went to the sites, it was a lot of fun! There were some bugs with the app. Functionality of the app on Androids and iPhones depends on the age of the device. It is more effective when using upgraded, or updated, technology. I managed to get the app on my Android phone working for the most part. Overall, it’s an amazing progression into the future of education that hasn’t been done before. I hope to see more apps like this one applied to different places all around the country! It’s such an easy, fun, and accessible way to teach the public about Native American heritage. 

This illustration depicts an educational fish net weaving demonstration.

 The Homelands app offers users an opportunity to incorporate Indigenous perspective and history into their everyday surroundings. Spreading awareness and understanding of Indigenous history is extremely important so people understand that there was local Indigenous history before colonialism. And this history continues. As a society we must work toward decolonizing all aspects of our society. We can start this process by adding Indigenous perspectives into everyday life. 

I’d like to thank Svetlana Peshkova, Denise Pouliot, Paul Pouliot, Kathleen Blake, Anne Jennison, Catherine Stewart, Jordan Schmolka, and Michael Rodríguez Torrent for making this app possible. This project is funded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and generous donations from individuals. This educational resource is brought to you by the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki People, Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective, Film Unbound, and the UNH Center for the Humanities.

If you’d like to try out the app yourself, use the links below! 

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/app/homelands-augmented-reality/id6445826482

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.unh.homelands

For more information visit the University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities Homelands website: https://cola.unh.edu/center-humanities/public-humanities/homelands-augmented-reality-app 

The site has a link to an  important resource guide: https://bit.ly/HomelandsGuide

Enjoy discovering Homelands!