[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.

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