We made great progress with Nathan Fairchild as our 2022 summer intern! He wrote a fantastic summary of his summer working with Eric Hanson on our Virtual Reality project. See below… Dear ONWARD Project community,I’m Nathan Fairchild, a graduate student at USC and a student of ONWARD’s VR Specialist and Developer Eric Hanson. This summer […]

This Graphic Narrative takes place during the RBMVE, in the 1930’s, where groups of students, scientific specialists, and artists worked collaboratively to study the region. They relied heavily on the guidance of local Native American people, primarily Navajo and San Juan Paiute, to safely exist in and move through the landscape. We focus on Ray […]

What an inspiring and stimulating summer for The ONWARD Project as we conclude our Intern Program 2021!  We collaborated remotely with our three participants: Carter Smallcanyon, a high school student in Utah; Ethan Kim, a high school student in Northern California; and Leon Cruz, a USC Masters candidate in Southern California. During our first three […]

Oral Histories to Virtual Reality Zoom Event & AuctionWe had a very successful Zoom event in March. The event featured speakers from different backgrounds telling stories as they relate to personal and community memory, 2D and 3D technology. Our featured speaker was Eric Hanson of BluePlanet VR/USC, who talked about incorporating different types of storytelling into […]

“So I encourage you all to really focus on collecting those family histories, talk to your parents, grandparents, to your aunts, to your uncles, collect those histories that may go away some day unexpectedly. Because without knowing where you came from, you can’t know where you are going.”– Ron Maldonado Recently CEO and Director of […]

We are very excited to share with all of you, the Max Littlesalt: A Graphic Biography. This wonderful piece of family history is a combination of oral histories from Charles Littlesalt, son of Max, and Lithuania Denetso, granddaughter of Max.  The watercolors chronicling the stories were created by Shea Hueston and the text conceived by Samantha Hasani, […]

Utilizing movie technology for documentation, education, and advertising was an innovative and ambitious idea for the RBMVE to undertake. Keeping 1930’s era film equipment safe and functioning in rugged conditions posed many challenges, but RBMVE Director, Ansel Hall, knew that the value was worth the risk. Hall supported the cinematographers with patience and encouragement when […]

For the entirety of The ONWARD Project, we have been in contact and collaborating with the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College. Their archive includes a tremendous amount of Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition photographs, letters, documents, film reels and more. In 2018, the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College received grants from […]

In this ONWARD @ Home, multi-media and interdisciplinary artist Lili Flores Raygoza  takes us through her personal experiences and collaborations with The ONWARD Project including animation, film making and more. Lili is a researcher with a B.A. in Anthropology from UCLA, her interests include critical curatorial practices and the negotiation of identity through language and the […]

In this ONWARD @ Home, Ailish Ullmann, an environmental scientist and conservationist, speaks about her work as a research consultant and photographer for The ONWARD Project.  Ailish has traveled to the Southwest multiple times to work on her own VR project, centered in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and with The ONWARD Project, to assist […]