Living Lands, a free, modifiable, and accessible ecology board game, promotes diversity in ways of knowing and legitimizes alternative knowledge systems. Playing as different animals in the Salt River Valley, players are encouraged to work together to adapt to different changes in the environment, human-made and natural. Exploring themes such as urbanization, natural weather events, and more, players navigate their relationship with their local ecology. Players must work together to adapt and survive in an ever-changing environment.
Living Lands empowers youth as knowledge holders and land stewards, encouraging the use of gameplay and storytelling to reflect on and reimagine their relationship with the Salt River. Living Lands focuses on the Salt River as it is a vital source of water in the Phoenix metropolitan area and of great cultural significance to the indigenous communities native to the valley. Aiming to make ecology knowledge more accessible and to counter dominant, oftentimes harmful, narratives, Living Lands was created.
During the development of this game, we collaborated with a cultural advisory board to co-create a more place-based and culturally-relevant version of Living Lands. This co-
creation involved applying interdisciplinary and diverse approaches to broadening our
understanding of river systems. Moreover, it involved completing ethics training, reviewing
literature, applying ‘CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics)
Principles of Indigenous Data Governance’ to our research, discussing data sovereignty,
reaching out to cultural resources within the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian
Community, developing data protocols/non-binding Memorandums of Understanding, and
relationship building.
The most recent iteration of Living Lands is completely modifiable. Players are encouraged
to modify the game to reflect their own local ecology so that they may find creative ways to
teach and learn about their environment. This allows for more relevant, localized knowledge to
be shared and maintained within a community and for youth to challenge knowledge
hierarchies, fostering more equitable learning.