http://www.aboriginalartonline.com

Aboriginal Art Online is a website which introduces and sells contemporary Aboriginal art all over the world. They work directly with Aboriginal community art centres, so people visiting this website can select from authetic works at very decent prices.

If you click Resources and Links section, it also discusses copyright and IP protection for Indigenous heritage. As the issue of whether there is adequate protection for indigenous arts and IP is an on-going topic among the First Nations artists and communities, this section helps both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people to gain some information on IP and how to protect indigenous IP.

The First Nations Technology Council of BC is a comprehensive website that provides many resources and support for First Nations communities to incorporate and integrate technology into their lives.

In this course we have had many discussions about how technology can be beneficial to First Nations communities if that technology is selected, used and decided upon by the First Nations community that opts to use it.

This site is almost like a one-stop shop for everything related to Technology and First Nations. There are a series of links to blogs, a Youth Cafe and a link to the Council’s Youtube channel, among many other useful technical, historical and social resources.

This site reflects how BC First Nations communities are organizing themselves and determining where technology fits in to their respective communities.

Interested in First Nations traditional learning methods and all the First Nations engagement literature I have seen here at UBC in Vancouver, I searched First Nations programs at UBC and came up with this list of programs at UBC that are “Aboriginal-specific or Aboriginal-focused”: http://www.longhouse.ubc.ca/program.htm

I find the First Nations Forestry Initiative particularly interesting since it aims to include traditional knowledge into the forestry curriculum. Additionally, the roster of faculty for this program is dominated by people of First Nations decent.

I have come across a few initiatives and projects on the web through various searches and find it admirable that there are initiatives out there (many publicly funded) that are grounded in collaborative efforts between Western and First Nations methods.

For example, the Canadian Boreal Initiative’s mandate is to “support effective land use planning exercises using science and traditional ecological knowledge and participating with governments and Aboriginal people.”

Initiatives like these are critical for society as a whole. Collaboration is both effective and inclusive. Working together to solve serious issues should be performed wherever possible.