Students at high schools in the Battlefords have had some exposure to a game about First Nation culture and values.
It is called Neeched Up Games and its founder and creator is Janelle Pewapsconias, who was in North Battleford last week to facilitate workshops at local high schools.
One of those was at Sakewew High School where she held games for the students there.
Sakewew teacher Reid Stewart invited Pewapsconias to bring her games to their high school through Sakewew’s recent involvement in the Aboriginal Youth Idea Challenge in Saskatoon.
“Through that event and networking, he wanted to bring our company’s workshops to the school,” Pewapsconias says.
Pewapsconias finished second in that challenge with her idea Neeched Up Games, winning $3,000.
The Neeched Up board game itself is designed to empower First Nation people. Pewapsconias describes it as “very similar to The Game of LIFE, but it has a very indigenous spin to it.”
In that game, players roll dice and land on different squares where questions are posed to them, and they earn “resiliency points” along the way.
During the games at Sakewew, students played traditional board games where they drew cards. Later they played a game where large squares were placed on the floor while participants took turns moving from square to square.
The games are centred on Indigenous culture.
“We talk about history, a little bit about cultural knowledge,” Pewapsconias said.
The games also featured “Neechie Life” cards “which are really funny and hilarious and real instances of people who are indigenous.”
“And they kind of poke fun at who we are, and that’s part of our culture as well, to poke fun at ourselves.”
There are also the “resilience” cards, which are “more serious life situations but based on fact.”
At the end of each game she promoted the idea “that to be successful in life as well as in the games you have to have a strong character, you have to have a strong personality or to be a strong person, and that truly would make you a success in life. And so we do that throughout our games – sort of a moral of the story type game.”
It’s your “resilience points” and your strength of character that make you the true winner of that game, she said.
The point of the sessions at the Sakewew high school was to “get people thinking about culture – why having your identity is important, (it) doesn’t matter who you are.”
Pewapsconias lives in Saskatoon, but has roots in the Northwest region. She was born and raised on Little Pine First Nation outside the Battlefords.
The game concepts developed over time. She said it was around 2010 when she was searching for games that reflected First Nations’ unique sense of humor.
But while there were Monopoly games and other generic games out there, “there was nothing there that made us laugh at our own selves or promoted our culture and identity. So there’s a need there, and I wanted to fill it.”
Through volunteer activities over the years, Pewapsconias was encouraged to develop workshops to help empower young people, and she’s been conducting those at schools and various locations.
“That social enterprise aspect is really what I’ve been doing and that’s an important piece of my company.”
Right now Pewapsconias is a full-time business administration student and also a full-time mother. When she can, she takes days off to do workshops out in the community.
Winning $3,000 from the Aboriginal Youth Idea Challenge has gone a long way towards getting her business registered, developing a logo and getting a website up and running, called NeechedUpGames.com.
As for the future, she’s created the prototype for Neeched Up Games. The plan is to launch the card game in October and a full board game next year.
Beyond that are plans to develop a game app in the next couple of years. Pewapsconias intends to work with a Saskatoon app development company to make that happen and said there have already been preliminary discussions.
The challenge now for Pewapsconias is getting all the finances in place for that to happen.
“I need a ‘dragon’ – one of the dragons from Dragon’s Den to believe in me, or something like that, and I could make it a reality,” said Pewapsconias.
