Indigenous Storytelling through Play: A Roundtable with Game Designers Luke Parnell, Maize Longboat, and Josh McKenna

This roundtable brings together three Indigenous game designers and consultants—Luke Parnell, Maize Longboat, and Josh McKenna—to explore how Indigenous storytelling traditions find new life through games and play. Working across video games and tabletop design, each speaker engages with Indigenous worldviews, narrative forms, and community-based practices to challenge conventional storytelling structures and expand what games can do. Together, they will discuss how games serve as living stories—sites of relation, learning, and cultural continuity—inviting players to experience Indigenous knowledge systems in interactive and embodied ways.

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). It will be followed by a reception in the Piano Lounge, Graham House.

Optionally, beginning at 4:00 pm in the Coach House, panelists will host a game modification workshop 

Maize Longboat is Kanien'kehá:ka with family at Six Nations of the Grand River and was raised on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation near Vancouver, BC. He is a Manager on the Partner Relations team at Unity Technologies and served as Skins Workshops Associate Director with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) from 2019 to 2021. He holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University. His Master’s research examined Indigenous videogame development through the production of his own game Terra Nova, an award-winning cooperative platformer with an interactive narrative.

Luke Parnell is Guxw Gahlgan (meaning “always carving“) and Laxgiik (“eagle“) from Wilps Kwa’kaans. He has been a carver for over 20 years. While his primary medium is wood, his materiality is determined on a project-by-project basis. His practice explores the relationship between Northwest Coast Indigenous oral histories and Northwest Coast Indigenous art, centering on narrative. Luke creates artworks in order to understand these histories and concepts and their relationship to contemporary events. He has been designing board games for 5 years, and tries to infuse all his teachings in his designs, while maintaining an awareness of the board game as a product.

Josh McKenna is Métis with Cree and Anishinaabe ancestry. His family comes from Treaty One territory of the Red River Valley in Manitoba. Josh lives on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh peoples in Vancouver, BC. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree at the University of British Columbia in Media Studies with a Minor in First Nations & Indigenous Studies in 2022, and is currently working on his Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (focusing on the intersection of Indigenous Studies and Media Studies) under the supervision of Dr. David Gaertner and Dr. Billy-Ray Belcourt. During his undergrad, Josh developed his 8-bit game Sage Plains, which grappled with themes of displacement and re-imagining aspects of land-based learning. Recently, Josh worked on two projects that engage directly with his ancestors’ archival documents attempting to imagine them out of erasure—a poetry collection and a visual media project experimenting with closely directed and creative use of generative AI, respectively. Outside of his academic work, Josh produces Sickle & Sash—which has featured a number of prominent Métis figures as guests— and writes, performs, and records music with his band, Witiko. Josh works as the Indigenous Collegium Coordinator at the First Nations Longhouse at UBC.