[First in a series] – 1 2 3 4

As Indigenous communities endeavor to maintain their traditional ways of knowing, many are turning to information and communication technologies (ICTs) to sustain and stimulate their Indigenous knowledge. They are using analog and digital video and audio recording devices as well as a constellation of computer and Internet-related technologies, to capture, store, and make available to future generations important aspects of their languages, arts and understanding. Throughout this essay, I refer to these as memory technologies to distinguish their use in this manner from, say, plain recreation. The use of ICTs as memory technologies presents a contentious socio-technical problem. In many ways, the nature of digital technology is antithetical to Indigenous ways of knowing. This essay argues that the use of present ICTs to meet the needs of Indigenous communities will create persistent forms of “computer-mediated neo-colonialism” and that a new way of approaching the design of memory technologies is necessary to avoid that outcome – one that explores traditional Indigenous memory technologies as starting points for ICT design.

Defining the Problem

Western culture has its ways of remembering. Among them, we use books, film, and audio recordings to help us store information. We construct libraries, databases, and collections that house this information for future generations. Our schools and universities draw on these resources for teaching and research. When faced with preserving Indigenous ways of knowing, it seems logical to use similar techniques. And this is where the problems begin. Pacey considers technology “not only as comprising machines, techniques and crisply precise knowledge, but also as involving characteristic patterns of organization and imprecise values” (4). Memory technologies, like any cultural artifact, are imbued with the memes of the society that creates them. They are laden with cultural assumptions about what information is, what knowledge is, how they are transferred, and so on.

In general, the design of ICTs does not accommodate Indigenous knowledge, the nature of which is cast in terms not typically associated with Western knowledge: local, holistic, and agrapha (Kincheloe & Semali, 63); relational, conscious, animate and interactive (von Thater-Braan, 4); non-formal, undocumented, dynamic and adaptive (UNESCO, Best Practices); empirical rather than theoretical, negotiated, shared, distributed in fragments, situated within broader cultural traditions (Ellen & Harris, 5); and so on. Where Indigenous knowledge is situated within a human community, orally and experientially shared, and subject to change, the opposite is the case for preservation: “the prime strategy for conserving indigenous knowledge is ex situ conservation, i.e., isolation, documentation and storage in international, regional and national archives” (Agrawal, 4).

The use of video and audio recordings on magnetic data have been the bread and butter of efforts to “capture” forms of Indigenous knowledge for many years. Archivists have long struggled with the problems associated with storage and retrieval of this information: difficulties of cataloging data, guarding against media deterioration, protection of intellectual property rights, etc. With the advent of digital technologies, these issues persist and are compounded by other concerns resulting from the technology itself. Digital technologies at first seem to answer some of the problems such as cataloging (metadata can be attached to information in new ways), storage (a warehouse of magnetic data can fit onto a hard drive), and protection (passwords allow data to be secured for specific audiences).

While the move from analog to digital technologies seems a logical step to take, the new technologies still present opportunities for the same cultural dissonance: “new media reflect Western values of individualism, the privileging of texts and the commodification of knowledge – trends that run counter to and likely threaten many indigenous traditions (cf. Bowers et al. 2000)” (Landzelius, 294). Charles Ess calls the process by which Western cultural values embedded within the ICTs overshadow the values and communicative preferences of Indigenous peoples “computer-mediated colonialism.” The question of technology’s cultural neutrality or non-neutrality is critical: “specifically, the extent to which ICTs (and their attendant praxes and idioms) are assimilable into local values and lifeways; or conversely the extent to which dominant modes of thinking and doing are embedded in their very matrix, luring users into an inescapable ICT hegemony” (Landzelius, 294).

Specifically, we should question the assumption that technologies which serve to help Westernized people remember will do the same for Indigenous Peoples whose ways of knowing and remembering are far different from our own. This is true whether the technology is being used to record storytelling, oral histories or the nomenclature of medicinal plants. Barbara Johnstone notes, “It is easy to lose sight of how ideology enters into the process by which new media are incorporated into human life in the excitement about the potential of “global” technologies such as television and computers: the fact that a technology is available everywhere does not mean it will everywhere play the same roles” (Johnstone, 209).