Sector(s)
The Our Stories Our Medicine Archive (OSOMA) is a dynamic, community-owned digital archive built on Drupal for the University of Denver. The platform preserves and shares Indigenous knowledge and cultural teachings, offering a safe, accessible, and engaging digital space for storytelling, health, wellness, and ceremony. Drupal enabled the creation of a highly customized site architecture that respects the values of Indigenous data sovereignty, allows fine-grained access control, and empowers community participation.
The archive supports multiple content types including oral histories, digital artifacts, and personal narratives, each connected through a thematic browsing experience. Using the latest version of Drupal, OSOMA benefits from an intuitive editorial experience powered by the Gin admin theme, flexible taxonomy systems for tagging and filtering, and user group permissions that protect sensitive materials. This robust and adaptable platform provides a future-ready foundation for ongoing collaboration, learning, and cultural preservation.
About the project
OSOMA set out to create a digital archive that could preserve and share Indigenous knowledge related to health, wellness, land, identity, ceremony, and food. The platform needed to support multiple forms of storytelling—from oral histories to digital artifacts—while ensuring that culturally sensitive knowledge could be shared respectfully and securely within the community.
Initially built on Mukurtu, an Indigenous-focused platform based on Drupal 7, the archive faced technical limitations due to the outdated framework. The project required a modern Drupal solution that could provide long-term sustainability, flexible content organization, and strong access control for community-managed knowledge.
Using the latest version of Drupal, the new platform enables OSOMA to organize and explore knowledge through themes such as Plants, Food, Ceremony, Identity, and Land. Drupal’s flexible content architecture supports rich storytelling through profiles, multimedia content, and digital artifacts, while advanced search and filtering tools help users navigate the archive. The implementation also includes the Group module to manage communities and protect culturally sensitive materials, ensuring that certain knowledge remains accessible only to designated members.
The result is a scalable Drupal-based digital archive that supports cultural preservation, storytelling, and collaboration. Community members can contribute knowledge and access protected resources, while visitors can explore Indigenous teachings in a structured, accessible, and visually engaging environment.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen for OSOMA because of its flexibility, scalability, and deep customization potential—essential qualities for building a culturally respectful and participatory archive. As a project rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, the platform required complex access control, secure content contribution tools, and theme-based exploration of diverse media.
Drupal’s Group module allowed for the creation of secure spaces for specific community groups, enabling OSOMA to share certain content only with designated members. Taxonomy and Views modules supported a rich filtering system to surface knowledge by themes such as food, identity, ceremony, and land. The Gin admin theme modernized the editorial workflow, making it easier for contributors to manage content intuitively.
With its open-source foundation and previous use in Mukurtu, Drupal aligned with OSOMA’s goals of digital sovereignty, transparency, and cultural safety. Its ability to evolve with community needs ensures the archive will continue to grow as a living digital resource.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Group Module
The Group module was implemented to support community-based access control within the digital archive. OSOMA needed a way to allow Indigenous community members to collaborate and share knowledge while ensuring that certain cultural materials remain accessible only to specific groups. Using Drupal’s Group module made it possible to create community spaces with controlled permissions, allowing members to log in, contribute content, and access protected resources while keeping sensitive cultural knowledge restricted to appropriate audiences.
Gin Theme
The Gin admin theme was selected to provide a modern, accessible editing interface for contributors managing the archive. Because community members would be adding stories, profiles, and cultural resources, the platform needed an intuitive and user-friendly backend. Gin improves the Drupal administrative experience with clearer navigation, improved usability, and a streamlined layout, making it easier for contributors with varying levels of technical experience to create and manage content
