A week ago I traveled to Devils Tower in Wyoming to meet with Dorothy FireCloud (Rosebud Sioux), superintendent of Devils Tower National Monument, and park ranger Caryn Hacker (Rosebud Sioux) to develop our collaborative project Finding Sacred Ground. This site is the first of several locations where we will explore the “hidden history” of a sacred place.

If you haven’t heard about Finding Sacred Ground yet, it’s essentially a mobile phone app much like a podcast tour you’d take at a museum, except we’re offering video, interactivity and augmented reality, along with an hour-long documentary and a Google Earth tour on the Internet as one package. It’s a true transmedia project, but unique because in this case technology serves as a bridge connecting you — the mobile-device user — to the land. The story is told through Native American voices, and by the end of it you should have a good idea why 24 of the surrounding tribes consider Devils Tower to be sacred.

I went out there to put heads together with the team, to gather our favorite GPS points and locations where a story will be triggered (and thanks to Hugh Hawthorne for getting us rolling with that). As always, we had a camera in tow and both Dorothy and Caryn shared their knowledge on tape as did Angela Wetz, the monument’s chief of resource management. We then traveled to see Duane Hollow Horne Bear at Sinte Gleska University, who shared Lakota star knowledge as it relates to the tower, and Donovin Sprague, who talked about family and community structure and what it was like for the surrounding tribes to live near the tower during specific seasons.

Caryn casually mentioned in a car ride that uranium production is likely to start just west of the tower. It has given a new urgency to this project. We might not save the world with this mobile phone app and its augmented reality assets, as we hinted at when we spoke at the augmented reality event in Santa Clara this past spring, but we do aspire to it. And what’s more, we hope to inspire a younger generation who grew up with portable tech to discover themselves and something worth protecting in this land.