Angee Noel Is Using Gaming To Uplift Indigenous Communities

For Angee Noel, gaming has always been about more than just fun — it’s about community. Noel, who is Chickasaw, Choctaw, Mississippi Choctaw, and Mexican, has always had a close connection with games of all kinds, whether it was watching her nieces and nephews play together or connecting with college students in her tribal community over Twitch streams. “As indigenous people, we’ve always gamed,” Noel tells Her Campus, referencing not just traditional pastimes but also modern-day video games. “We have stickball, chunkey, lacrosse — it makes sense. Just because it’s in a modern format, doesn’t mean we aren’t good at it.” 

Noel has turned that sense of culture and connection into a career as an educator and content creator. With a bachelor’s degree in family life education, specializing in child development, and a master’s in educational leadership, focusing on college student development, Noel works at the intersection of learning and playing. Much of her work is focused on uplifting Indigenous communities.

“Whenever I worked with our college students for my tribal nation, a lot of the rapport that I had with them was around video games,” Noel says. As she continued to build connections with students, she noticed a gap. While gaming brought people together, few recognized its potential to support Indigenous students beyond entertainment. It led her to ask the question, “Why aren’t we utilizing these benefits from gaming to support our students?” 

Angee Noel

This revelation stuck with her. Noel began thinking about how gaming could exist beyond screens, and more how it can become a place for Indigenous students to feel seen and supported. The more she reflected on her own experiences and education, the clearer it became that this was something worth building on.

This is what led to her founding Gaming is Rezilience, an organization dedicated to supporting Indigenous individuals and communities through gaming in physical and virtual spaces. Since its founding in 2024, Gaming is Rezilience has worked to bring together education, culture, and community through workshops, tournaments, and community events — such as the Rez Summer Games, where players come together to game and celebrate what Noel calls “Native joy.” “It was a really cool experience of highlighting our indigeneity and gaming,” Noel says. “Seeing everybody enjoy the humor that we had, and the Native joy.”

Noel’s career hasn’t stopped there. She also works as an adjunct professor and esports consultant. Alongside her gaming initiatives, she also collaborates with Rewriting the Code, a community of over 38,000 women in tech. There, she helps support affinity groups like Black Wings, Latinas de RTC, and Tech Natives, which provide spaces for mentorship and belonging. “It’s just a great space to have representation,” she says. “It’s something that I didn’t have.” 

Angee Noel

To that point, Noel reflects on what her career might have looked like if she’d had more institutional support when she was younger. “I would probably be in Silicon Valley doing some coding, because my interest was designing MySpace layouts — but I didn’t have a mentor, I didn’t have a connection to what this field looks like,” she says. But through her work, she’s become the mentor she never had, creating the representation and resources she once needed — now for a new generation of underserved communities.

For Noel, the dream doesn’t stop at virtual spaces. She hopes to one day create a community center that offers everything from tutoring and esports to study lounges and basketball courts — ”a safe place to be a kid,” Noel says of her plan.

Her advice to young Indigenous gamers and students trying to find their path? Keep going, even when it’s slow. “Obviously, it’s a slow process, but it’s all about work,” Noel says. “And that’s something that I’ve done, my ancestors have done, so I’m not afraid of it. My time will come.”