Digital Smoke Signals (DSS)

Formed by professor, filmmaker, journalist, digital storyteller trainer, and activist Myron Dewey (Piaute/Shoshone), Digital Smoke Signals (DSS) is dedicated to indigenizing new media technologies such as mobile and wireless in order to counter corporate media bias in reporting on indigenous people. DSS walks in the footsteps of their Ancestors, educating the world through Indigenous eyes, stories, and films. DSS mobilizes cellphones, drones, mobile editing studios, and social media to provide counterevidence to commercial media coverage and law enforcement documentation of indigenous people’s struggles to protect sacred sites and water from climate destruction, pollution, and devastation from overharvesting, which are viewed as human rights violations. DSS blends citizen monitoring, drones, and social networking to ensure environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights. It pioneered the use of drones for social justice at the confrontation at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipepline (#NODAPL) in 2016-2017. Dewey directed one of the three sections of the feature-length documentary Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock (2017) which features DSS footage.