During her time as a Co-Creation Studio Fellow, Amelia Winger-Bearskin will develop a new project, entitled Wampum.code, that brings greater accountability to tech with a new model for values-based dependencies in software projects. Her model is founded in Indigenous values and practices, specifically Hodenoshounee, or Iroquois, a Confederacy of six Indigenous Nations. To develop the project, Winger-Bearskin will co-create with her community as well as other Indigenous Nations to shape the concept through workshops, and partnerships.
The Great Law of Peace Wampum belt, a key inspiration for American democracy, had encoded principles of democracy of the Iroquois Confederacy directly in the beading. Amelia Winger-Bearskin suggests that like the wampum, our contemporary systems of computer coding have embedded directly in them, our social values. Rather than just “correcting for bias” in the algorithms, we need to rewrite and rewire the actual code, founded on ethical principles.