‘What a nation or society chooses to remember and forget speaks to its contemporary priorities and sense of identity. Understanding how that process works enables us to better imagine a future with a different, or wider, set of priorities.’ History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how and what they choose to remember and forget. In this BWB Text addressing ‘difficult histories’, a team of five researchers, several from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, reflect on these questions of memory and loss locally. Combining first-hand fieldnotes from their journeys to sites of conflict and contestation with innovative archival and oral research exploring the gaps and silences in the ways we engage with the past, this group investigates how these events are remembered – or not – and how this has shaped the modern New Zealand nation.

Indigenous creators are currently using virtual reality (VR) tools, techniques and workflows in wide-ranging geographical locations and across multiple VR formats. Their radical adaptation of this new technology folds together cultural traditions and VR’s unique audiovisual configurations to resist dominant, particularly colonial, frameworks. Within this context, we ask how VR is being used to create space and capacity for Indigenous creatives to tell their stories and how do Indigenous creatives negotiate Eurocentric modes of production and distribution? To answer these questions, our Fourth VR database provides a snapshot of Indigenous VR works. By drawing on three case studies drawn from the database – The Hunt (2018), Future Dreaming (2019) and Crow: The Legend (2018) – as well as the wider patterns emerging across the database, it is possible to see an Indigenous-centred VR production framework. This framework is diverse but also contains repeated trends such as the ability to use VR to express and realize Indigenous Futurism; foreground native languages in virtual worlds; provide new articulations of Indigenous activism; embody connections between the past, present and future and demonstrate the interconnectivity of all living things. In turn, this growing body of work, engaging with the full spectrum of VR formats and tools, provides a rich contribution to the wider arena of VR practice.

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