[Fourth in a series] – 1 2 3 4

Another major concern for indigenous communities adopting ICT for cultural revitalization projects is the fear that the knowledge they seek to save – some of which is sacred, proprietary, or meant for particular audiences – will be misappropriated or decontextualized. The prevalence of biopiracy worldwide illustrates that the fear of exploitation is justified. Several of the suggestions above offer solutions to this concern: ensuring that the indigenous community has authority over the governance of the cultural material, storing the information in the language of the community, and establishing an ideology that guides the project implementation. Other solutions involve proper resource crediting and securing the database with passwords, digital signatures, watermarks, etc.

Proper crediting of knowledge will vary among indigenous peoples depending on their traditions and often will not fit within the structures of international copyright law. For example, some knowledge may be the provision of special keepers (women, Shaman, a clan or moeity, etc.). A particular telling of a story may have been handed down through an identifiable lineage. A process for curing food for a specific celebration may belong to an entire community. The crediting schema for the ICT employed for the project should be constructed to reflect the needs of each group being served.

Resistance to ICT can be reduced by assuring the community that their knowledge will be respected and protected from misuse. The simplest means for protecting information stored in a database is to created a password system that allows insertion and retrieval access only to certain individuals who hold the appropriate key. The password system can be built around the social structures in place within the community “so that only women can access women’s business, men access men’s business, etc.” (Dyson and Underwood, 70). Other distinctions that might affect level of access to the database include membership, status, role, gender, and the relationship of the user to people, animals or objects depicted in the resource (Sen, 375). The Wangka Maya Pilbara Language Centre in Western Australia doesn’t use passwords, but has implemented a security protocol by which users can search a database via web, but must order copies of the material on CD-ROM from the head office (Dyson and Underwood, 70). Information cannot be downloaded directly from the site.

Conclusion

Successful ICT-based cultural revitalization programs ultimately must do more than classify, catalog, and store information, they must aid in what Fishman calls re-vernacularization – the reintegration of the knowledge into community: “Vernacularization is the opposite of institutionalization. Re-vernacularization requires not only inter-generational language transmission, but societal change” (171). It is that change that represents the greatest challenge for indigenous communities, especially when ICT are involved. Community resistance to ICT is natural, justified, and to be expected. Cultural change is difficult to bear even when one’s traditions are not at risk of disappearing. The addition of technology to the process of change can compound the concerns of indigenous people and raise questions that are difficult to answer. The solutions outlined in this essay are not exhaustive and are meant to suggest starting points by which indigenous communities might begin to address the complex challenges they face in their cultural revitalization efforts.

Works Cited

Agrawal, Arun. “Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge” Unpublished essay, 1994.
Bowker, G. C., and S. L. Star, S. L., “Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences.” Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.
Czermak, Karen, Philippe Delanghe, and Wei Weng, “Preserving intangible cultural heritage in Indonesia A pilot project on oral tradition and language preservation .” UNESCO Jakarta, Indonesia. SIL International, 2003. SIL International. 4 Dec. 2008 <http://www.sil.org/asia/ldc/parallel_papers/ unesco_jakarta.pdf>.
Dyson, Laurel E., “Cultural Issues in the Adoption of Information and Communication Technologies by Indigenous Australians.” Sudweeks, F., and C. Ess, eds. Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Communication and Technology (CATaC). Karlstad, Sweden, 27 June – 1 July 2004. Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA. pp. 58-71. Available at: http://www.staff.it.uts.edu.au/~laurel.
Dyson, Laurel E., and Jim Underwood. “Indigenous People on the Web.” Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2006).
Ess, Charles. “Questioning the Obvious? Ethical and Cultural Dimensions of CMC and ICTS.” Unpublished essay, 2004.
Fishman, Joshua, “Maintaining Languages: What Works? What Doesn’t?” Cantoni, Gina, ed. Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Flagstaff: A Center for Excellence in Education Monograph, Northern Arizona University, 2007.
Holland, et al., “Using information technology to preserve and sustain cultural heritage: the digital collective.” World Culture Report 2000: Cultural diversity, conflict and pluralism. France: UNESCO, 2000.
Moore, Patrick, and Kate Hennessy. “New Technologies and Contested Ideologies: The Tagish FirstVoices Project.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 30, Nos. 1 & 2 (2006).
Olson, Hope A. “Mapping Beyond Dewey’s Boundaries: Constructing Classificatory Space for Marginalized Knowledge Domains.” Library Trends 47, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 233-255.
Ranganathan, Arvind. “Using ICT to place Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the heart of Education for Sustainable Development.” Paper presented at the Education for a Sustainable Future – International Conference, Ahmedabad, India, January 18-20, 2005.
Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. United Nations. The Report of the Global Forum of Indigenous Peoples and the Information Society. Geneva, Switzerland: World Summit on the Information Society, 2003.
Sen, Bharati. “Indigenous knowledge for development: Bringing research and practice together.” The International Information & Library Review 37 (2005): 375-82.
“Communication for Development and Poverty Reduction.” Weigel, G. and D. Waldburger, eds. ICT4D – Connecting People for a Better World: Lessons, Innovations and Perspectives of Information and Communication Technologies in Development. Berne, Switzerland: Swiss Agency of Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), 2003.

[Third in a series] – 1 2 3 4

In any kind of media translation, there is a loss of nuance. For example, consider the four ICT typically used to populate a digital archive: an audio recorded conversation resides out of context, a photograph lacks motion, text lacks nonverbal cues, and video – which addresses some of the deficiencies of the last three examples – lacks spacial dimension. Even though the technologies used for collecting these forms of media has improved in quality over time, they are still imperfect cataloging tools, especially in regard to capturing sophisticated social experiences such as a storytelling performance comprised of songs, anecdotes, aphorisms, nonce words, and so on. One may possess a high definition digital video recording of a performance, but much of what makes the performance culturally valuable is lost in translation from live action to digital media. For example, unless special instructions are given to the camera operator to record the reaction of the audience, viewers may miss out on important social cues (what is surprising, disdainful, humorous, etc.). Also, without a knowledge of present affairs, community history, the local environment, social status of the storyteller, circumstances under which the story is being performed, and other factors, a recording of an oral performance – even if it is in high definition – may look good, but won’t be particularly useful as part of a functional digital archive used for passing on a full range of cultural knowledge.

The argument above identifies one of the shortcomings of employing ICT in cultural revitalization efforts and begs the question of their efficacy. Add to this argument the problem of interfacing the database (ICT are often text based and written in a language that is foreign to the indigenous end user). Supposing these obstacles could be overcome, the effectiveness of ICT is still hampered by the nature of the hardware used to access the information. How does one access information stored in a digital archive when the keyboard employs a foreign alphanumeric system.
Indigenous communities and their program partners can minimize obstacles by implementing carefully considered systemic safeguards. The first order of consideration is the nature of the technology and to what degree it will interact with the knowledge system to be cataloged. To continue with the example of a storytelling performance, one might begin by conducting an assessment of the complex relationships visible in the cultural infrastructure surrounding the performance of a story and of the suitability of the technology chosen to record it. This involves “recognising the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production on the other” (Bowker and Star, 34). For instance, a database that uses Western-style metadata tags such as author, title, and copyright may not be the most suitable for documenting oral performances. A system that allows for flexibility depending on the cultural and informational needs of the community would be more appropriate. Doing so recognizes that “classification remakes and alters information by constructing a particular context for it — gathering, scattering, and juxtaposing topics in relation to each other,” (Olsen, 233) and puts the indigenous community in charge of how that new knowledge gets constructed. One such system is the Text, Audio, Movies, and Images (TAMI) fluid file management and database system, “which bears with it no western assumptions about knowledge or the ecology, and which maximises the possibility for the user to creatively relate and annotate assemblages of resources for their own purposes.”

Although TAMI puts the indigenous community in control of classification, the database is still text driven which, as noted above, can cause access problems. A possible solution involves using a Unicode font substitution and key layout replacement.

One final example of how to reduce the impact of implicit Western values embedded within ICT is to shift emphasis from digitally archiving cultural resources to creating what Ranganathan calls “circles of knowledge.”  A circle of knowledge is “a relevant and expanding body of knowledge identified by the members of the circle”  (Ranganathan, 6). Similar to the TAMI, existing knowledge would be gathered using text, audio, videos, and still images. The indigenous community would select the manner of collection depending on the nature of the knowledge to be acquired. Instead of simply archiving data, however, what distinguishes this concept from the TAMI is that it assumes that “not all aspects of living traditions of indigenous knowledge can be captured as ‘artefacts’ using digital technology” (Ranganathan, 7). The shortcomings of a digital archive are overcome by building into the process a layer of social networking that allows a user to seek not only information, but living human knowledge resources.  As Gerolf Weigel states: “It can be more effective to link people with relevant knowledge directly rather than accumulating knowledge in ‘stores’” (22). A user might for example query the database to find out which local village has the relevant knowledgeable person to assist with a water purification system.

[First in a series] – 1 2 3 4

“Esdunèna keh kudoge dahkwandēʼ tedètsʼet. Neni dahtsʼadi netʼē dahkwandē tsʼèn keniden. Dahtsʼadi etʼē dahkwandēʼ. Dahkwandēʼ niʼushdèn shį̀. Dahkwandēʼ tsʼèn keniden. Dahkwandēʼ tsʼèn keniden.”

[“To all my children, we are losing our language. You are our future leaders; you must learn our language. It is the root and heart of our culture. I pass you our language. You must learn our language.” Lucy Wren, aged 91, the last remaining fluent speaker of the Tagish language (from the FirstVoices project website at www.firstvoices.ca).]

Among the obstacles indigenous peoples face when implementing technology-based language and culture preservation and revitalization programs – such as remoteness, poverty, access to training, lack of basic infrastructure, low levels of literacy, and the uncertainty of project sustainability (14-16; Khalid et al) – community resistance ranks high. Resistance results from a variety of factors that share a common source, the fear of change and cultural impact. One form of resistance comes in the form of rejecting the Western values embodied in the technology – often as a result of the lack of programatic autonomy and governance. Indigenous communities may also share the concern that the introduction of new technology is antithetical to the restoration of their traditional systems. Another fear is that sacred or protected knowledge will be misappropriated, decontextualized, and exploited by others outside of the community. Indigenous communities and their program partners can work together to reduce these forms of resistance and resolve the issues that create them by acknowledging the validity of such concerns and implementing systemic protocols that address them.