Category — Module 3

So, it is over this year (October 20-24, 2010) and it was in Toronto, however, the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival is annual. In fact it just celebrated its 11th year.  AND there is still lots to look at and discover on their website. Check out the short clip on the Best Dramatic Feature festival winner “Boy” – guaranteed to make you want to see the film!

http://www.imaginenative.org/schedule.php?y=2010

http://www.etcgroup.org/en/issues/biopiracy

Database of best practices on indigenous knowledge

http://www.unesco.org/most/bpikreg.htm

The site is part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is a database of articles that highlight indigenous knowledge.

The majority of the articles is from Africa. There are only two from North America, both from Canada. One of these discusses environmental issues surrounding Hudson’s Bay. From the article:

Indigenous knowledge is at the core of the practice and its value is immense. It was both the premise for and basis of the study: an historic, empowering and rewarding experience for many of the IK contributors. It was historic in that the IK contributors were cognisant of putting their orally communicated traditional ecological knowledge into writing for the first time in history. It was empowering in that they shared this mission with peers from many communities sharing the same environmental outlook, and they believed it would make a difference in the way decisions affecting the environment and communities of the Hudson Bay bioregion would be made.

It would be nice to see more articles from North America. Perhaps the lack of American participation is a reflection of the attitudes of government.

http://www.unep.org/IK/default.asp?id=Home
United Nations Environment Programme

The site is similar to the World Bank site discussed in Module three in that it explores using indigenous knowledge as a source to deal with problems being faced in the world today. The UN, partnered with the University of Swaziland, and Climate Prediction and Applications Centre have teamed up to create the site.

The purpose of the site is stated as:

“The website aims to ensure that
* This IK and its various applications are documented before it is lost forever.
* This information is made accessible to as many people as possible.
* Awareness of the importance of this knowledge is created amongst governments and policy makers so that they may begin to incorporate it in policy creation and various development programs.
* Custodians of this knowledge may have a forum through which they can share it with others. “

This site has links to a number of different knowledge areas, including nature conservation, natural disaster management, traditional medical practices, and poverty alleviation. While it focuses on Africa, this could be a model for applying indigenous knowledge around the world. The site also offers 118 page pdf file that contains a wealth of information. (http://www.unep.org/IK/PDF/IndigenousBooklet.pdf)

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the site is a searchable database of knowledge.

I think the First Nations Program at UBC is one of the best, if not the most cutting edge in terms of its use of educational pedagogies and especially technology. Each year, the First Nations Studies Program is involved in a number of special projects and initiatives in addition to the student projects that occur within our course work.

For example, Political Science 406, Aboriginal Politics in Canada, was one of the first programs to use this an interactive video technology called IVT. The UBC First Nations Studies IVT Viewer gives you a whole new way to view and work with the videos and transcripts of the 2005 Internet Speakers Series.

This innovative prototype program has been developed by FNSP to allow you to see both the videos and transcripts of the sessions simultaneously and move in them easily. It also allows you to search the transcripts for words or phrases and go directly to the video segment of the passages you have found, allowing you to search through hours of video in minutes to find relevant information, as well as providing you with text for reference and citation. The IVT Viewer is a useful multimedia tool for assisting educators, academics, students, and the public alike in research and accessing information.

Website about IVT uses in the Landclaims project series:  http://fnsp.arts.ubc.ca/landclaims/

http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/

Indigenous Peoples Issues & Resources is a online web resource that concentrates information, news, articles, videos, and resources for those concerned about, and for, indigenous peoples around the world.  As the website reveals, as globalization affects indigenous peoples in all parts of the world with such consequences as water diversion and hydroelectric energy projects, militarization, global and national events, consolidation of natural resource access, the website attempts to rectify with a call for social justice through information technologies, using Google Maps and RSS feeds to update and alert us about indigenous news and resources.

Through cross-cultural communication, cooperation, and understanding – as well as easily accessible information and resources – the website maintains that it can be one of the keys to helping indigenous peoples maintain their language, culture, and identity.

As a History Buff, what I enjoy about this website is its “On This Day in Indigenous History”

On This Day on October 7, 1763 – the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King George III following Great Britain’s acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War. The purpose of the proclamation was to organize Great Britain’s new North American empire and to stabilize relations with Native North Americans through regulation of trade, settlement, and land purchases on the western frontier. The proclamation created a boundary line (often called the proclamation line) between the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and American Indian lands (called the Indian Reserve) west of the Appalachian Mountains. The proclamation line was not intended to be a permanent boundary between white and American Indian lands, but rather a temporary boundary which could be extended further west in an orderly, lawful manner. The Royal Proclamation continues to be of legal importance to First Nations in Canada.

http://www.pygmies.org/

A website dedicated to the hunter-gatherer peoples living in Central African rainforests, commonly called Pygmies, this is an excellent resource about an often mysterious and little understood indigenous peoples of Africa.

Presenting hundreds of photos and other material collected during his fieldwork among the Baka of Cameroon and Gabon and among other pygmy groups in Central Africa, this website reveals life and traditional activities of these peoples, the Central African rainforest biodiversity, and the increasingly rapid disappearance of this world.

I think this is an important general resource for indigenous peoples research, especially in a time when migration to Africa has endangered its indigenous peoples, very similar in nature to indigenous peoples all over the world.  This website presents ethnographic descriptions serving as introduction to pygmy cultures and commentary on the photos.   Impressively, the technology translates into an excellent multimedia-rich experience that each internal page also includes sound or music recordings relative to the soundscape of the rainforest and pygmy camps.

The purpose of this web resource is to “ultimately provide an introduction to the cultures of pygmy peoples and to promote their protection, documenting their richness and showing some of the factors that increasingly threaten their survival.” In a way, the methodologies presented by this website almost reverses the colonial paradigms of “research” so prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Luis Devin, an ethnomusicologist, lives among the Pygmy in Central Africa, conducting anthropological and ethnomusicological fieldwork in Central Africa, studying in particular the music and rituals of the Baka and other pygmy groups.

What strikes me the most is that during an expedition in the rainforest of Cameroon, he took part into the male initiation rite that marks the transition to adulthood of the young Baka boys, a secret rite conducted by the Spirit of the Forest and by elderly members of the group. After a week of rituals he was accepted in a Baka patrilinear clan.   Since Baka male initiation is an almost completely secret rite (occurring in secret places of the African rainforest), Devin respected the Pygmy peoples, and only published only those images and sounds concerning the “public” ceremonies.  In fact, as he puts it, it is

“essential to respect the Baka traditions and cultural secrets. After all, they let me be part of a rite which has always been forbidden to foreigners. Even the other African peoples can seldom assist to these ceremonies. Besides, they did not want anything in exchange.”

Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation (CMCC) as a national institution responsible for preserving and promoting the heritage of Canada, and contributing to the collective memory and sense of identity of all Canadians. I think what impressed me is that the The Canadian Museum of Civilization has an online exhibition component as well that explores the thousands of objects, papers and other items in its collections representing Aboriginal heritage, immigration history and French Canadian culture. Yet, there seems to be quite a heavy component of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada.

In particular, the First Peoples of Canada page is an interesting resource.    As a virtual exhibition that looks at different perspectives of the history of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, “underlining their fight for cultural survival and indicating the wealth of their modern-day contributions,” the website draws on information and artifacts presented in the First Peoples Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.   It doesn’t try to be a comprehensive presentation of the history of all the Native groups in Canada; instead, aspects of cultural identity are explored through four themes: (a) the diversity of Aboriginal cultural expression; (b) how the Aboriginal presence manifests itself within present-day Canada; (c) the adaptation of traditional lifestyles to different environments across Canada; and (d) the impact of the arrival and settlement of Europeans over the last 500 years.

I think this website provides an important “national” recognition of aboriginal peoples of Canada.   Certainly, there is still a colonial theme to the history presented, but it does try to balance this out with important historical artefacts from an Aboriginal peoples’ perspective.

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/archeo/hnpc/npint00e.shtml

http://www.isuma.tv/hi/en/testimony-isuma/clara-quassa-testimony

This is a website which excited me a lot.  Perhaps the most interesting of the links I’ve provided so far. This particular video is a video very much in theme with “March Point.” IsumaTV is an independent interactive network of Inuit and Indigenous multimedia. IsumaTV uses the power and immediacy of the Web to bring people together to tell stories and support change.

In particular, the tools of this web portal allows Indigenous peoples to express reality in their own voices: views of the past, anxieties about the present and hopes for a more decent and honorable future.  The goal is simply to assist people to listen to one another, “to recognize and respect diverse ways of experiencing our world, and honor those differences as a human strength.”  As this module 3’s goal is decolonization and indigenous intellectual property rights, I think IsumaTV’s uses of new networking technology to build a new era of communication and exchange among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and communities around the globe is one way to break down the brick and mortar approach of Western imperialist research methodologies of researchers “invading” territories of indigenous peoples’ and gathering and categorizing information for their own needs and leaving abruptly.