Author Archives: nahid mohammad taheri

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I was looking at the website of ImagiNATIVE, the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content, just to find out that they had a film and media art festival in October. “The Festival celebrates Indigenous storytelling in film + video, audio, and digital + interactive art through screenings, exhibitions, special events, and more.”

In their screening schedule, I saw they showed the “Bones of Crows” movie, which is a drama about a residential school survivor. The following movie is a brief interview with the director of the movie.

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All My Relation podcast is a shared project by Matika Wilbur, a visual storyteller from the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington and Adrienne Keene is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In their podcast series, they explore different topics about being native and the relationship of Indigenous people with their lands and cultural values.

I believe this is a very good example of using technology to make the world hear the voice of Indigenous communities.

“Canadians don’t always think of Indigenous peoples as technologists and entrepreneurs, but we’re reclaiming those identities”. ––Jeff Ward, Animikii

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Another use of technology that I found is the mapping and recording place-based oral histories initiated by the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). They try to map real places and locations that oral histories and stories refer to.

In their methodology, they explain that: “ACT has actually long been aware of the importance of storytelling for maintaining communities’ cultural identity and their relationship to ancestral landscapes. As an organization with decades of experience working with communities to map their territories, we realized very early on the need to capture some of the histories attached to specific places in the community’s real-world geography to supplement the map.” ACT_OralHistories_Guide_2019_ENGLISH

“For many communities across the world, like the indigenous communities of the Americas, oral history storytelling is a cultural tradition imbued with traditional knowledge and associated with practices and values essential to developing personal identity.In many cases expressed primarily in oral form, oral histories are passed down from generation to generation, and can be essential to the development of the worldview of young members of a community. In ACT’s experience working with indigenous and other traditional communities in South America, oral histories are very often place-based, referencing important or sacred sites in the community’s territory.” (p. 9)

Their work resulted in an interactive map associated with stories (in different formats, video, audio, and text) connected to a particular place on the map.

The following video is a bit long, showing how this works and is worth watching.

 

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I was interested in learning more about how Indigenous people feel and think about using and being involved in developing digital technologies. We all have citizenship to a world, even if it is unwanted and the modern digital world. So, how can we use the wisdom and traditional knowledge of Indigenous communities all around the planet to enhance this world? How can we combine that knowledge with this technology?

For the last part of this blog, I decided to look at some of the ongoing and done projects (including the creation of media)and research studies around the topic of technology and Indigenous people.

I found many projects with the main focus on climate change. One of the very interesting projects is using artificial intelligence and Indigenous knowledge to save baby turtles on their journey from the shore to the water.

 

Indigenous knowledge and AI help protect baby turtles from predators on Australia’s remote Cape York

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In my research on how technology and digital media are used by Indigenous people, I found the following articles:

Oppenneer, M. (2009). Using ICTs for indigenous cultural preservation: Challenges and strategies. Ethnos Project. (Link)

The importance of Indigenous knowledge and its contribution to our global society has been recognized recently.  We now know that we need to acknowledge the value and significance of Indigenous knowledge to protect it and use it in our global problem-solving plan. In our modern world, however, the most accessible method to do so is to use digital technology and multimedia. That, as Oppeneer (2009) discusses, would impose challenges for Indigenous communities, which can result in the digital divide and inequity.

“Challenges can arise when there is disharmony between the design of the technology and the knowledge traditions of the Indigenous communities using the technology.”

One challenge is the fact that these technologies have been designed with western values and are not associated with the traditional values of Indigenous people.

“Indigenous people are a poor match for technologies that “reflect Western values of individualism, the privileging of texts and the commodification of knowledge, trends that run counter to and likely many indigenous traditions.”

That’s what is mostly known as “computer-mediated colonization”. Ess and Sudweeks (2012) discuss that many computer-based technologies were built based on the cultural values and beliefs of their builders. They will carry their original properties with them when we integrate them into new environments. They wouldn’t probably fit in a community with different cultural backgrounds, so we are faced with digital colonization.

Oppeneer (2009) explains three different projects tested in Australia “to show how the disharmony between the technology and tradition can be addressed.”

One of these projects is organizing digital materials reflecting the cultural identities of the Warumungu Aboriginal community. This project was supposed to “provide a free and open source community archive platform that provides international standards-based content management tools adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property systems of indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums.” You can find more information about it here.

I think these types of projects would help the Indigenous communities to find and share their voice and preserve their culture in the digital world.

“For Indigenous communities willing to embrace ICTs, change is part of the new reality. Change means new technologies, new formats, and new expectations. For such communities, embracing this change will be vital to maintaining tradition in the modern age. It can become a critical aspect for the reintegration of knowledge back into the community.” (Oppeneer, 2009)

Reference

Ess, C., & Sudweeks, F. (2012). Foreword. In P. H. Cheong, J. N. Martin & L. P. Macfadyen (Eds.), New media and intercultural communication. Identity, community and politics (pp. xi –xx). New York: Peter Lang.

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I found the following article on digital equity and intercultural education are related to each other:

 

Resta, P., & Laferrière, T. (2015). Digital equity and intercultural education. Education and Information Technologies, 20(4), 743-756.

DOI 10.1007/s10639-015-9419-z

 

I would like to share some of the quotes which I found interesting:

“Digital equity and intercultural education both share the goal of promoting opportunity for all people.” (p. 744)

“Traditional intercultural education, with its focus on educational issues concerning communities and their diversities, does not refer explicitly to technology, let alone digital technologies. However, as individual and classrooms get access to the Internet and its tools and resources, opportunities for intercultural education arise.” (p. 744)

“Both digital equity and intercultural education are social reconstructionist in nature, and represent a movement to identify and eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our schools, societies, and world.” (p. 744)

Authors believe that “The lack of access to the Internet is here considered not only a challenge to digital equity but a lack of opportunity to support intercultural education.” (p. 749).

And digital equity is especially needed for Indigenous communities to empower them through intercultural education:

“Information and communication technologies may be used to empower indigenous communities to learn about other cultures, to share their own culture with others and to create their own cultural content and curriculum resources. For technology to be a tool for empowerment, there are a number of conditions that must be met: native peoples must have access to digital devices, connectivity to the Internet, teachers who are skilled in using the new technologies, technical support, ongoing professional development, and high quality, culturally relevant digital content. Under these conditions, the digital technologies offer the potential for Native peoples to create
their own cultural content and curriculum resources Bat their own speed, in their time, under their own conditions, using their own knowledge and judgment that defines equity/equality” (Delgado 2003: 98).” (p. 750)

 

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As it was discussed earlier, limited access to high-speed internet and its proper infrastructure is one of the elements in the digital divide. Overcoming Digital Divides workshop series is looking at this issue to invite policymakers from the education and industry sectors to look more closely at these issues and how they would lead to digital inequities in Canada. According to their report, “the groups impacted and disadvantaged most by Canada’s digital divides include Indigenous peoples, people with lower incomes, older adults, people with disabilities, and rural and remote Canadians.”

 

Source: Overcoming Digital Divides Workshop Series

That impact was more obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic as many people (according to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.4 million Canadians) were working remotely, and those who did not have a reliable internet connection at home had lower chances of working from their homes safely. In addition, almost all k-12 and post-secondary classes were switched to an online or hybrid mode which again caused problems for students without or with limited interact connectivity.

“With the possibility that remote work and learning may play a larger role going forward and even past the pandemic, digital inclusion has become increasingly imperative — a necessity that a large number of working families cannot afford to forgo.”

Based on this report, many Indigenous communities feel digitally isolated and excluded. The report asks two important guiding questions:

  1. Are recent public investments and policies sufficient to achieve digital inclusion of Indigenous, rural and remote communities?
  2. What Indigenous-specific needs must be addressed to secure digital inclusion?

Federal and provincial governments must get in touch with Indigenous people to properly answer these questions. “Moreover, First Nations communities have cited barriers to building and independently owning their own digital infrastructure, including the federal government’s tendency to overlook Indigenous-specific concerns and self-determination during infrastructure development negotiations.Indigenous communities have also called for greater data sovereignty over information collected from internet infrastructure networks.”

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MediaSmarts, a Canadian non-profit organization focusing on digital and media literacy, named October 26 as the first-ever national Digital Citizen Day.

“Whether it’s checking the information we see online, thinking critically about the media we’re consuming or being aware on how we interact with others online, digital media literacy touches every aspect of our digital lives. Media Literacy Week and Digital Citizen Day are a chance for us to think about the role we each play in our online spaces and to focus on how we can all make those environments more positive for everyone.” – Kathryn Ann Hill, Executive Director at MediaSmarts

But, What is Digital Citizenship?

According to MediaSamrts, being a digital citizen refers to the safe and responsible use of digital tools and media. For me, that mostly means being respectful, following ethical rules, and being sensitive to others’ privacy and security.

Being a digital citizen, on the other hand, is meaningless if we don’t have the infrastructure for accessing the digital world. According to this report, in 2017, “only 24 percent of households in Indigenous communities have access to quality, high-speed internet.” And that’s the case when the UN has declared access to the internet as a human right.