Indigenous Peoples Bridging the Digital Divide.

Media and Digital Tech Empowering Indigenous SurvivalThe Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies

Here on Worldchanging, we've tracked projects that use new technologies to empower indigenous cultural survival -- from digital applications using Inuktitut, the Inuit native language, to the Aboriginal Mapping Project, which harnesses the power of GIS to help indigenous peoples manage their lands and resources, to the networked reindeer tracking of Saami Networked Connectivity Project.

Happily, these mentions only scratch the surface of the intersections of new -- and some older -- technologies with indigenous determination to both endure and prosper. The latest volume of Cultural Survival Quarterly is devoted to Indigenous Peoples Bridging the Digital Divide. While uniformly optimistic, the articles trade the breathless technophilia one sometimes encounters on the activist tech scene for clear-eyed assesments of both barriers and progress, and reporting on-the-ground results.

Indigenous peoples are using both digital and narrative media to preserve and express their cultures and beliefs. Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace recounts the history of a near decade-long project, the CyberPowWow, to carve a native space out of the supposedly neutral online world:

Continue reading "Media and Digital Tech Empowering Indigenous Survival"
Posted by Emily Gertz at 11:16 AM on August 5, 2005 | | TrackBack (1) |