The Oregon Trail game was created in 1971 to help students learn American history. The game has been played by kids all over the United States. Now it’s been reimagined in a project led by more than 30 indigenous people called When Rivers Where Trails. We listen back to a conversation from April 2020 with Nichlas Emmons, the co-creative director of the game, and Kris Knigge, a contributing writer.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon Trail video game has proved as durable as some of the ruts from the trail itself. There have been many versions of the game since it was first released in 1971. But those games focused on one specific and limited slice of the experience, the European American perspective. Now there is a very different take. It’s called When Rivers Were Trails, and it centers Native American experiences and lives. Nichlas Emmons was the co-creative director of When Rivers Were Trails and a development officer with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. Kris Knigge worked on it as well. He’s a video game and anime localization specialist. I talked to them both in April of 2020. I started with Knigge. He had said that the game is not a Native American version of the Oregon Trail, instead it’s an act of reclamation. I asked him what that means.
Kris Knigge: The thing about the Oregon Trail is, it’s a game that deliberately or not, really celebrates manifest destiny and the idea that land is just out there for settlers to claim. And obviously for native people, that is a description that rankles. When you look at the way that the Oregon Trail – the original games and even the current games – represent native people, you see that [they] were represented as basically props … there to represent a trading post, or were there to sort of help you realize you’re going westward, you’re in savage country, or something terrible like that. So what When Rivers Were Trails does, is it takes some of those mechanics, takes the adventure of traveling across the nation, and it looks at it through a native lens. It gives players a chance to see what things were like for the people who are displaced, and the people who are basically crushed underfoot on the Oregon Trail.
Miller: Nicholas Emmons, if the idea behind traveling, in the original game, was this manifesto, European settlers colonizing this land that was already peopled with native peoples, what is the reason for travel, for movement, in your game?
Nichlas Emmons: Well, the idea behind the video game was to better inform players about various land histories and land allotment policies that began in the late 1800s. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation works quite a bit on various land reclamation issues. And that’s what this game is really supposed to be about originally. It came to be this development that exposed a lot of people [to] a lot of different issues related to land histories and tribal nations across the United States. And so what the game actually turned out to be is really about those relationships that you experience with people from various tribal cultures undergoing what they’re experiencing through land allotment policies.
Miller: Can you explain – I know we could spend hours and hours on this – for people who are unfamiliar with this part of our collective history, what are the basics of the land allotment policies that you think people should be aware of?
Emmons: Well, in 1887, the US Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which divided reservation lands up and gave heads of households and other adults a certain number of acres out of that original reservation boundary. Whatever surplus land that came up in that reservation was then sold to non-native interests and individuals. About 66% of all native lands through these policies left Indian hands. And so that’s actually why the Foundation exists, is to deal with some of those issues and to mitigate some of those issues that we’re now facing. Some of those issues are related to fractionated heirship, which means that an undivided interest, which means that when you do pass on land to your descendants, they own an interest or a percent of the land itself and not maybe specific tracts or have any other legal rights outside of that.
Miller: What’s the challenge, Kris Knigge, to take part of this history and to and to turn it into a video game that’s going to attract a player’s attention, to teach them as they’re also having fun?
Knigge: For me, one of the appeals is … I grew up in the 90s. So most of the time, even when there were native characters in the game, which felt kind of like a blessing, the way that they were represented was terrible. You might have like … in the fighting game killer instinct, there’s a character named Chief Thunder who is, his skin is literally bright red, or you have these characters who are basically a mishmash of cultures. They might have a coastal style [pole house] or something like that, but also where sort of like plains regalia. You basically just had this mess of cultures mashed together. And one of the things about When Rivers Were Trails, and it ties into what I mentioned about it being a reclamation, is this is native writers being able to tell their own stories and working with native artists and creators to create characters who are honest and a good representation, which is definitely a draw for young native people. So it is that, with that draw, [and] chance to bring in young native people and hopefully, young non-native people too. Once you’re sort of pulled in by the story, you actually go from place to place, learning about how allotment affected each place individually. All of the writers, myself included, did research and/or wrote about their tribe and their homelands basically. It sort of took what you might see in a history book and brought it to life through the characters, to the art and through the stories that we all chose to tell.
Miller: Nichlas Emmons, what are some of the possible outcomes for the character that players inhabit? I mean I’m thinking about [what] might be the most famous line from the original game: “you have died of dysentery”. I imagine there’s nothing humorous about the idea of dying from disease. When this is a game, in this case, it’s focused on Native American lives in the history of broken promises or genocide. What can happen to the characters in your game?
Emmons: Well, we really tried to give this video game some realistic aspects of what life might have been like in the late 1800s, being forced from your home, traveling across the Northern United States and meeting with all sorts of different people. You can in fact die now in this game. We may not call it die directly, but we refer to it as returning to your ancestors. This is not a pretty history. This is not positive. This is dark. This is a story that hasn’t been told or a story that’s been erased from history books. And so we’re not trying to paint this in a pretty way, although the game is quite beautiful. However, we’re trying to give this understanding that, you know, this is really rough for the player. And in a lot of ways we’ve seen that in people who have played the games. When I’ve watched children play this game on an iPad, I see their facial expressions change. They’re confused. They’re kind of bothered. They’re hurt. They’re sad. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes it’s kind of fun, but mostly it’s also this new information that they’ve never actually seen or heard of. And it bothers kids.
Miller: But the way you’re describing it seems like even if it’s painful, that response means that you have succeeded.
Emmons: Yes. A lot of times when we look at educational work like this video game, it’s about an academic outcome. And while those are important in some ways, the other outcomes are about how this has contributed to the development of this student or this player. And with these children and with these students that we’ve seen, there’s been some emotional social change or maturity that occurs. And that is sometimes even more important, than scoring very well on a test.
Miller: Kris Knigge, I’ve read that more than 30 indigenous creators, designers, writers, musicians, historians, together worked on this game, and they came from a whole bunch of different sovereign nations. Had you worked on a project like that before?
Knigge: This was a special project to me because not only was it great to be able to meet a bunch of other native creatives, the idea that something I’m doing is going to have an effect on, at some native kid in school who goes, “oh I’m finally playing a game that’s for me and made by people like me”. That means a lot to me.
Miller: Kris Knigge and Nichlas Emmons, thanks very much.
Knigge & Emmons: Thank you. Thank you.
Miller: That was Kris Knigge, one of the people who worked on the video game When Rivers Were Trails. He’s a video game and anime localization specialist. Nichlas Emmons was the co-creative director of the game. We talked in April of last year.
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