CAMP 1872 : Progress Report #2

Toníktuha he?  (“How are you?” in Lakota)  

As 2020 finally comes to an end and we enter, hopefully, a better new year, I wanted to share our second monthly progress report, the first of which I published last November 21st.  

Permit me to start with the 250-word description of the CAMP 1872 project that Josh Fisher, one of our digital technology advisors, asked me to draft. He wants to use it to reach out to some of his professional colleagues, especially a couple here in Nebraska at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.

CAMP 1872 PROJECT

2022 will mark the sesquicentennial of the “Royal Buffalo Hunt” that took place in Nebraska in 1872. In what would prove a unique confluence of history, the 3-day outing not only brought together several ‘icons’ of the “Old West” but proved a rare moment of trust, cooperation, and collaboration between the Red man and the White.

Based principally in Nebraska, the CAMP 1872 Project seeks to not only recreate the original encampment in 3D through the application of Extended Reality (AR/VR/MR) technology but to develop interactive agents of the principle protagonists of the hunt: Russian Grand Duke Alexis, Brulé Lakota Chief Spotted Tail, General Philip Sheridan, Lt. Col. George A. Custer, and a 26-year old Army civilian scout named William F. Cody.

The project has already attracted the advisory participation of noted period historians and archeologists Douglas Scott and Peter Bleed, Tsarist Russian scholar Dr. Lee Farrow, and NY Times best selling novelists Michael and Kathleen Gear. Our digital technology advisors are Joshua Fisher of Columbia College, Chicago and Digital Domain executive producer John Canning. We are working on enlisting the active engagement of the Lakota community, as well as other indigenous Nebraska tribes.

Beyond showcasing these cutting-edge immersive educational tools, we propose to use it as a key to opening very important public dialogue about resource conservation, environmental sustainability, culture understanding, and societal cooperation. Our guiding principle is…

..lessons best learned are those that are lived. The next best is immersively.

Josh and I teleconferenced just before Christmas, during which he informed me that due to COVID-19, Columbia College, where he teaches, will not be holding in-room classes until 2022 as a precautionary measure. However, that also means that he may be able to recruits some of his students to help out with the digital arts aspect of the project.

He also had a couple recommendations for me. I am start to wind down my initial dive into the history of the Royal Buffalo Hunt of 1872 and the circumstances and people around it, though I still need to get up to speed on Grand Duke Alexis. At the moment, I am about two-thirds the way through George Hyde’s “Spotted Tail’s Folk.”  

Josh encouraged me to start taking a closer look at chatbot technology. It will provide the basis by which we humans will “converse” with our digital avatars of Chief Spotted Tail, Bill Cody, George Custer, Alexis, and others. This means my taking an admittedly shallow dive into the very, very deep waters of Google Colab’s Dialogflow, Python programming, and understanding TensorFlow and neural networks and a pantheon of other arcane technologies that make it possible to “converse” with a machine: in this case one that has been “trained” on the history of these 19th century individuals.  

So, I’ve sat through maybe a dozen or more Youtube videos, including three online classes from MIT, as well as the Ai musings of Rob Miles in the UK, Mosh Hamedani on machine learning and Python, and others. Of course, I have no intention of doing any of this programming myself, but both Josh and I figure I need to be familiar with it, especially so we can begin to assemble a training database for our agents [more on this below]. Towards that end, he suggested I look at USC’s Shoah Foundation as a model, and coincidentally, earlier today I heard from Sandra Joy Aguilar with the Foundation who accepted my LinkedIn request and wrote me the following after I shared with her the PDF summary of the project:

“Thanks for sharing this fascinating project. While I work with metadata for the (2D linear) Visual History Archive your project seems like it would be better directed another area of the Shoah Foundation. Please let me do a little checking and get back to you in a few weeks as we are off for a little while for the holidays.”

Other people I have reached out to and heard back from include Julia Bricklin, the author of ‘The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline.” It was Buntline, in reality Edward Judson, who popularized Cody in a series of dime novels and put him on the stage. Judson’s life was even more fantastic and way more scandalous than Cody’s. Yesterday, Julia replied on LinkedIn if I was familiar with her father-in-law: Malcolm Bricklin. Familiar? I’ve interviewed him twice and we still occasionally correspond on our respective birthdays. Malcolm is the automotive entrepreneur that brought Subaru to America and then the little, ill-fated Yugo. He’s had a long-standing interest in electric vehicles, hence my desire to interview him for EVWorld.com, the webzine I started in 1998 and still contribute to..

Since Progress Report #1, I have had some correspondence with several Native American representatives: Lance Foster, the vice chairman of the Iowa tribe of Nebraska and Kansas, and Judi gaiashkibos, the Executive Director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs. Ms. gaiashkibos kindly provided me with contacts for the chairmen and chairwoman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Winnebago Tribe, Omaha and Santee Sioux Nation. I reached out to all of them via email and did hear back from Chairman Trudell of the Santee Sioux. I sent him a copy of 12-page PDF proposal. I will follow up after the new year.

Last week, I came across a website that provides audio of various Lakota phrases, several of which I have now integrated into Camp1872.Toonstech.com. It really is a musical language, but like French, how it’s spelled phonetically doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how it’s pronounced. 

Finally, with respect to “training” a deep learning machine, I’d like your help. We need to assemble a list of QUESTIONS we would like to ask our avatars: Spotted Tail, George Custer, Grand Duke Alexis, William Cody, Phil Sheridan. Here are some that I wrote down for Spotted Tail:

• Where were you born?
• Where are you now?
• How old are you?
• What does a chief do?
• What language do you speak?
• Do you enjoy hunting buffalo?
• Do you prefer to use a gun or a bow?
• Do you like riding a horse?
• What is your favorite horse?
• Do you have any children?
• What do you like about the Sioux way of life?
• What’s it like to live in a tepee? 
• How is your clothing made?
• What games do your children play?
• Do they go to school?
• Why do you dislike the Pawnee?
• What do you think of Custer, of Sheridan, the young Grand Duke?
• Indians call US soldiers ‘long knives’, why?
• What do you think of Washington, DC?
• What do you think of President Grant?
• Did you like riding on the “iron horse” and its rolling “lodges”?

Of course, many, many more questions can be asked, especially Spotted Tail’s record as a warrior, peacemaker, politician, father, his time in Army custody at Fort Leavenworth, the Whetstone Agency, the government annuities, war with the White man, death of his daughter, his relations with Red Cloud and other Sioux leaders. 

What questions would you want to ask him and the others? Please give some thought to this and share your list. You can email them to me at [email protected].

Here’s wishing us all a safe and prosperous New Year.