SCRIBE: A Tool for Indigenous Knowledge Conservation

SCRIBE is a digital vessel I built during my master’s at MIT, an instrument to gather, protect, and return Indigenous knowledge into the care of the communities who hold it. It arises from a critical conservation ethic, one that privileges self-representation, reciprocity, and the sovereignty of memory.

With SCRIBE, communities can record and map oral histories, ecological memory, and ancestral practices of ecosystem management. These stories and practices can be placed alongside Earth observation data and scientific studies from the same landscapes, creating a field of resonance between distinct ways of knowing. Myths, folklore, language, and heritage are taken here as animate phenomena, mediating matter, threading connections across human and other-than-human, life and more-than-life.

The project is as much method as technology. Its design principles emerge from co-creation, learning humbly from Indigenous ontologies, devising structures of encounter that conserve knowledge in-situ while safeguarding the rights of those who carry it.

SCRIBE is an offering to the ethnosphere, a way to honour its weave within the biosphere, to keep alive the stories and practices that shape our collective stewardship of Earth.