Chemins Aliernatif Where the Forest meets the Highway 1 Mike Patterson Introduction How something as elemental as music and cerebral as computers can be combined was part of the focus of my MA thesis on Native music in Canada (the coming together of "two worlds" for Native people, and the weaving together of two worldviews on many levels [Patterson, 1996]). Now I am extending that and making it more personal: how to reconcile what we see and feel in these Canadian spaces (Our Home, and Native Land) with Information Technology (IT). In June, 1998 a show arrived at Ottawa's SAW Gallery, created by Iroquois artists exploring and using IT. The show visited those areas "At the Edge of the Woods: Along the Highway" and also "the notion of four states of awareness in Iroquoian culture, representing the progression from the edge of the woods, to the clearing around a village, the village itself and the inside of a longhouse" (Marple, 1998: 14). Two exhibits struck me: One, an installation consisting of lodgepoles forming a tipi, with a computer where the fire would be, displaying a video of a fire; and the other an interactive Web project that allowed people to remotely and virtually contribute beads toward the making of an Electronic Wam- pum Belt (www.albany.net/~printup). Both suggested cultural interac- tion alive on many levels, reaching into the past and future, trying to find ways of reconciling the meeting of two distinct worldviews that, in Iro- quoian culture at least, were supposed to stay apart (the Two-Row Wam- pum belt, presented by the Iroquois to the English over three hundred years ago, shows two canoes going parallel, on the river, together but not to meet). I wanted to explore these convergences in the field myself. I traveled across Canada two summers ago, from Ottawa through the southern Prairies to Medicine Hat, then back through the northern Yellowhead Highway through Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. Across the top of Volume 16, 2000 9 Alternate Routes Superior twice, in an 82 Corolla wagon with a canoe, tent, clog, laptop and cellphone. I wanted to be where the forest meets the highway. I was traveling and living in the bush, campgrounds, provincial parks, reserves and near towns, under the stars for over four months. Being a webmaster at the time, posting stories daily to a high tech trade paper (Silicon Valley NORTH; www.silvan.com), I also had to be up on the Net at least once a day. Some of my notes from these travels are presented below {in italics) with the other components of this essay; I take my model from Latour's ARAMIS, or the Love of Technology, my token companion across Can- ada as I tried to go to the place where two worlds meet: And I'd actually like to do a book in which there's no meta- language, no master discourse, where you wouldn't know which is strongest, the sociological theory or the documents or the interviews or the literature or the fiction, where all these genres or regimes would be at the same level, each one interpreting the others without anybody being able to say which is judging what (Latour, 1996: 298). This paper will look primarily at two things: Theory and discourse on the global implications of Information Technology, and ethnographic and other local data related to peoples' use of computers, the Internet and so on, particularly as related to Native (and First Nations) people in Can- ada. 2 It is located in major theoretical traditions at two levels: The macro, which is largely supported by thoughts and philosophies of French writers such as Baudrillard, Bordieu, Foucault, Latour, Scrres et. al. and the work of futurists such as Giddens, McLuhan, Beck, David Hlkins and William Gibson; and a micro approach involving diverse qualitative methods including ethnography, autocthnography, participant observation and other techniques (Adler, Albas and Albas, Castaneda, Denzin, Glasei and Strauss, Grills, Kirby and McKenna). My journal notes and narrative arc in italics. It) Volume 10. 2000 Chemins Altematif Cybertribalism and the powers that be Graburn's theory of assimilation and accommodation (1989, one of many theories on Native survival still under debate) shows that Native people are most likely to survive culturally by finding "traditional" ways of using new technology and countering larger social forces; it could be that with IT and Native people, electronic assimilation coexists with eth- nic separation and distinct worldviews. This is a subject of this explora- tion, the two-edged sword. Today in Canada an era of limited political autonomy has occurred and there is strong movement toward self-determination, healing and expression of Native perspectives. The colonial assimilation and exter- mination policies carried out against Natives of North America for the last 500 years have not worked. To the contrary, Natives in Canada and elsewhere are surviving and thriving,3 and a strong movement toward self-determination has begun (Fleras and Elliott, 1992; Frideres, 1998; Mercredi, 1993). This is also part of the trend toward distinct and free cybercommuni- ties on the Internet. First Nations and other users of the Net have at least two out of three of Foucault's "three great variables," there being "terri- tory, communication and speed" (1984: 244). It was the technology of the horse that enabled the Plains Indians to become the finest survivors, and light cavalry, of their day and place. Vattimo sees that the present possible "end of colonialism, freeing ethnic voices, and the emergence of mass media, stimulating cultural relativity, has created an irreversibly pluralist situation" (Lyon, 1994: 76). An example is Natives in Chiapas, Mexico who used the Net to publicize their plight several years ago. Like the horse, IT may be the tool to allow Native expression; but like a Trojan Horse, it also suggests assimilation. Jon Pierce tells a story from the Keewatin, of the white men (kual- lunik) who were camped in a raging snowstorm, a whiteout, in the mid- dle of the tundra: You couldn't see two feet in front of your face. Then out of nowhere, these Inuit pulled into camp on their skidoos. They just wanted to check to see the visitors were OK. 'How did you find us in this storm,' they asked, marveling at the Inuit abilities on the land. One guy grinned and pulled a Volume 16, 2000 II Alternate Routes GPS (satellite-driven global positioning system) from inside his parka. But the skidoo has contributed to the erosion of traditional ways (for instance, the use and socialization of sled dogs, dependence on gasoline and attendant kuallunik values) and the GPS does away with the need to read the sky and the land for directions, that is part of a relationship with the land. It could also be that the monopolization of IT by giants like Microsoft will lead to even further stratification between the rich and poor, between the white upper class and the Native third world, and between urban and "res" Natives, and young and old. The new stratification sys- tem of the Knowledge Economy shows that information manipulation skills (IT savvy) is what counts, not far removed from the point, made by many including Foucault and Bordieu, that knowledge equals power in any social formation. The Knowledge Economy means that knowledge is increasingly commodified within a market-led world, managerial solutions are sought to contemporary dilemmas. Traditional knowledge no longer works as such; it is an object now digitized. In Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano of 1952, the third industrial revolu- tion is presented in an anti-utopian portrait. The first industrial revolu- tion devalued physical labor, the second devalued routine and menial work, and the third has devalued human thinking through the use of computers. Perhaps Zbignieuw Brzezinski's term "techtronic society" is more applicable than post-industrial; the computer is the central symbol and analytical engine of change described by Daniel Bell, change in which we have moved to a service society dominated by the rapid growth of professional and technical employment and the explosive con- vergence of the computer with telecommunications. Most recently Bill Joy, a pioneer at Sun Microsystems, worries that technologies may collectively create "self-replicating" machines and processes (nanotechnology, genetic technology) by the time computers are "a million more times more powerful" in 2030 (Pugliese, 2000). Bully Sainte-Marie says that "real Indian people are rising to the potential of the (computer) technology, in school and out. We were born foi tins moment and we are solidly behind our pathfinders" (1998 see Appendix A). Can cultures survive when the hegemonic power of the /: Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Alternatif computer also extends to language, as an English linear (binary) medium in an increasingly English world? For example, with only 3,000 Mohawk speakers left in a population of 10.000,4 the challenge is to find ways to preserve the language in an increasingly intrusive computer cul- ture. I will explore some good and bad potentials in the following sec- tions. Time and Space on the Net Information Technology has increasing power over the future of groups such as First Nations divorced from the institutions and agencies of gov- ernment. Information Technology in and of itself is an agent of change. Foucault's description of hegemony in terms of seemingly normal prac- tices (such as patriarchy) could be applied to IT, and his argument that these phenomena are beyond the capacity of the dominant group (state, multinational corporation) to manage certainly held true in cyberspace, until recently. The Net grew from military to academic communicatons, from free discourse via freenets and lists to wild west gambling and porn shows, a real free-for-all, but now corporate phenomena such as Knowl- edge Economy, e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) and dot-com commercial culture are prevailing. Space and time and are being rearranged by globalization and tech- nology, leaving behind those who traditionally take their time from the natural world (place). With IT and the Net, place and its historicity has largely been surpassed by the real-time time of telecom. At the same time, new cybercommunities of interest groups, institutions, corpora- tions like Disney and MSNBC are all creating a new space for people: cyberspace. How does this new space relate to natural locales? / moved inside from the camp just before Thanksgiving, with some friends and their kids who live in southern Ontario. It is a huge draughty old house near (practically on) the train tracks, with a TV constantly running in every room, tied together by the satellite selector on the roof. MSNBC (and its website www.msnbc.com) floored me with the sheer power of its functionality. In early November I watched as the viewers' votes came in via the Net, deciding (in part at least) whether the Republicans should impeach Willie the Twister. This is TV with feedback at last. The set is designed Volume 16, 2000 13 Alternate Routes to look like a virtual room; as the camera pans, it looks as if the talking heads are in a holodeck in cyberspace. As we sat by the fire that winter, they started polling people by the mil- lions ... Today with globalization and telecom, this new space is prevailing, and "traffics in the contemporaneous and the simultaneous, in synchro- nic rather than diachronic time ... we are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed" (Kumar, 1995: 146-147). This world is on the Net, and it has just arrived: Mosaic, the first suc- cessful graphic browser, was introduced in January, 1993, and there were some 50 Web servers at the time. 5 A year later, there were 5,000 and 100,000 the year after that. Today, experts are predicting a billion users on the Net by 2005. On the Net, "the separate stories which are displayed along side one another express orderings of consequentially typical of a time-space environment from which the hold of place has largely evaporated." This doesn't take us toward global unity; postmodern accounts of communi- cations technologies frequently focus on "dispersal and fragmentation," for Baudrillard this new world of the "pure simulacra, of models, codes and digitality" means the passing of modernity "when history can no longer be seen as unilinear; it is just the past from a series of different viewpoints" (Lyon, 1994: 48-49). As we are locked into time together on the Net (the "tyranny of the here and now" [Fulford, 1998|), the IT conventions of measuring and meeting digital time globally become that much more different than that of Native people, who traditionally reckon time from the space around them, the earth and the stars. The unnatural and arbitrary timing systems of high tech and infotech arc removed from the thirteen moons of twenty-eight days each, with twelve months of ii regular lengths, and nat- ural observable phenomena like the seasons'' are contrasted by the artifi- cial idea of hours, minutes and weeks (and now down to seconds and fractions thereof on the Net). Native identity, knowledge and time is also centered on place. Gid- dens observes that "all pre-modern societies always linked time with place," and "no one could tell the time of day without reference to other 14 Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Altematif socio-spatial markers" and a world where 'when' was almost universally connected with 'where' or identified by regular natural occurrences" (1990: 17). Odawa elder Wilf Peltier said: My people never knew or had any position in life except the face of the earth — stretching away from them in all direc- tions forever. And they lived there laterally — on one level with each other and all things. They looked up only to trees and eagles ... By reading our own footprints we could always tell where we had come from. In fact, we had no future. In our language, the closest word we had to future was sort of an arc or circle. Our going was part of the arc of a circle. So was our coming (Pelletier (Wawashkesh): 11). The use of clocks and now the Net have introduced and reified the idea of "empty time" (a time without reference to the natural world or place), and the "uniformity of measurement by the mechanical clock" has led to "the social organization of time" and also space (Giddens, 1990: 18). Again, a conflict with "Indian time" which emphasizes the seasons, family and community7 (see Table 1). Giddens discusses how "coordination across time (through time zones) is the basis of the control of space," that space today is being dis- associated from actual "place" by relations fostered "locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction. In conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social instances quite distant from them" (1990: 18-19). Soon after setting up my camp at the powwow grounds neat- Ottawa in the early summer, I was sitting by the fire watch- ing the stars when my cell phone rang (or rather buzzed, or rumbled). I was reminded of that TV show where there was a fancy dancer talking to his broker on his cellphone stand- ing outside the circle at the powwow, when he suddenly broke off "Gotta go, they're playing my song." Volume 16, 2000 15 Alternate Routes It is a reflexive modernization, knowledge tumbling together at a rapid rate. Or almost at the same time and place: If history was an obses- sion of the nineteenth century and time and traditions predominated, now the focus is on space, meaning the entire planet together, evolving, changing and problcmatizing exponentially as the globalization ot risk described by Beck and Giddens continues with "the expanding number of contingent events which affect everyone or at least large numbers of people on the planet" is made possible through cybercommunications (1990: 124). Due to instant media and dot-com convergences and expan- sion of the Internet, "a large part of North American society now lives exclusively in the present tense — (and) the vast expansion of the arts (and information) has made consensus much harder to achieve. It's not that we know so much more; it's that what each of us knows is different" (Fulford, 1998: D8, D10). / was two days west of Ottawa, north of Lake Superior, when I managed to get through to the Net. In the long stretch past Wawa and Marathon, I found a campground at Upsala that would let me plug in my laptop. "But it won't work, " the lady in the store said, "because we don't have any Internet here. " It worked long distance all right, and I got my work done, sitting behind the ice cream counter in a lawn chair with my laptop on my lap. The farmers coming into the cafe looked at me like some new kind of threatening animal. "The school is talking about getting the Internet for the kids," she later told me, "but a lot ofpeople don't like it. " The two most significant elements producing the erratic character of today's IT world are the "unintended consequences and the reflexivity or circularity of social knowledge" (Giddens 1990: 152-53) that we see in the Knowledge Economy. I think the people of Upsala know that. Gid- dens goes en to say that: In conditions of modernity, the social world can never form a stable environment in terms of the input of new knowl- edge about its character and functioning. New knowledge (concepts, theories, findings) does nol simply render the 16 Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Alternut if social world more transparent, but alters its nature, spinning it off in novel directions. The impact of this phenomena is fundamental to the juggernaut-like quality of modernity and affects socialized nature as well as social institutions them- selves. For although knowledge about the natural world does not affect the world in a direct way, the circularity of social knowledge incorporates elements of nature via the technological components of abstract systems (IT) (1990: 152-53). This is part of the phenomenon of globalization. It is more than a dif- fusion of Western institutions across the world, in which other cultures are crushed. "Globalization, which is a process of uneven development that fragments as it coordinates, introduces new forms of world interde- pendence, in which, once again, there are no others. These create novel forms of risk and danger at the same time as they promote far-reaching possibilities of global security (beyond the nation-state) — we are speak- ing here of emergent forms of world interdependence and planetary con- sciousness" (Giddens, 1990: 175). David Elkins also argues that IT and the globalized world will not foster homogeneity, but rather that "technology is empowering. We're not forced to be what we were before in terms of our identities because we're no longer bound by the restrictions of distance in the way we once were." Elkins sees an "unbundling" of the power of nation-states in favor of "non-territorial organizations and identities" through the Net, creating "a century of individualism in which multiple loyalties and identities enhance personal freedom because they are based on membership in communities of your own choosing." He goes on to say that "the more extensive the globalization, and by definition the wider the awareness of diverse communities available, the greater the support an individual's community of choice can offer to that uniqueness" (Sibley, 1998: D8- D9). These last two views seem to bode well for First Nations, but Gid- dens also admits that "communities" and "traditions" are themselves at risk here: He argues that technology and "time-space distanciation" operate to divorce us from our traditions as writing (and the Internet) "expands the level of time-space distanciation and creates a perspective of past, present and future in which the reflexive appropriation of knowl- Volume 16, 2000 17 Alternate Routes edge can be set off from designated tradition," or knowledge is becom- ing "disimbedded" from traditions of locale (1990: 37). IT, the new Knowledge Economy and the Internet are all children of what Giddens calls the three "dominant sources of the dynamism of modernity:" 1) Time-space distanciation, which allows for "precise temporal and spatial zoning" and the creation of new groups such as cybercommunities;" 2) "discmbedding mechanisms" that "lift out social activity from localized contexts, reorganizing social relations across large space-time distances" (and I would argue that Microsoft is doing that); and "the reflexive appropriation of knowledge," where "the production of systematic knowledge about social life becomes integral to system reproduction (the Knowledge Economy and IT), rolling social life away from the fixi- ties of tradition" (1990: 53). At Kin Coulee Park in Medicine flat, after pulling off the highway and visiting the "world's largest teepee," a huge steel tubular construction beckoning across the plain on the way into the Hat, I arrived from the flats of Saskatchewan, parked my car and lookedfor power. I had been on the road across the country for two weeks. Cellphone and laptop powered through electrical inversion from the cigarette lighter all through southern Saskatchewan and before that over the Great Lakes north of Superior. Looking for ranger stations, parks, campgrounds, gas stations, anyplace to plug in and do the day's work. Technology VS Tradition The information highway is criss-crossing the earth, and I am roadkill by the ditch (Iroquois artist William Powless in Marple 1998). In the consumer age, in a splintered world bereft of organized opposition to corporate control (rather legions of special interest groups), we are as modern as ever. From Fordism to IT and its post-Fordist implications, we are still bathed in rationalism. And the Net may be a new "superpan- opticon" of consumerism and social control, "more insidious to the IS Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Attentatif extent that it is not understood" (Lyon 1994: 47). The "rationalized bureaucracy" (Weber) that manipulates media and culture can be identi- fied (at least by its components such as Microsoft, Nortel, government, IBM or Pepsi), and as long as technocratic rationality rules as a systemic feature of IT (and how could it not), any exchange among communities is filtered through the IT bureaucracy, and through the nature of the tools themselves. Native awareness (and fear) of nature is transformed by IT to threats and dangers emanating from the reflexivity of technology and the Web. This is more assimilationist than accommodating. On the one hand we have the monopolist agenda of multinational big business, creators of the technology. On the other hand we have what an advisor at the Assembly of First Nations called "cyberpeasants," anticipating the day when every- one will have the technology — but not the control of it. First Nations are in search of survival through Net alliances; as are new interest and lobby groups. The promising anarchy of the Internet is inviting to these communities, but we have to remember that the infra- structure and tools supporting it are in the hands of monopolists. If everyone has a watch capable of computing like a Pentium and commu- nicating via satellite, how might the balance of power change, if at all? Won't a kid on the reserve still be living near a communal outhouse at the corner? / found Rabbit Blanket Lake by the top of Superior on the way back. No cell phones, no phones, just radio phones. Rabbit Blanket Lake, provincial campground. Petroglyphs nearby. Buy a photo, go hiking, see the scary spirit of the water. "How big are they?" one camper asked at the office. "About this big" I said, indicating a big whitefish. "Hmtnh, " he said, nodding. "Wow. " He then looked at me suspiciously and the girl behind the counter got uncomfortable as I explained that the people who put those pictures there were still around. Next morning a camp ranger let me get through on his radio phone, miles to the local transmitter, to a satel- lite station, and I posted the Daily. They said it wasn't possible; You had to dial and then pop the nobs on the phone; can't get through with your digital codes; but we made it work, between the digital codes and the hammering Volume 16, 2000 19 Alter utile Routes an the knobs. His father was a developer at Northern Tele- com, he told me, hut he had been taken up by the woods as a youth and followed the road offorestry, forest management, the forest. He was the most welcoming of all the trouble- some logins I had had so far... he liked my Toshiba, and the woods, and the place we were at... No problem making them work together... Half the Native population in Canada today is youth under the age of 25 (Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, Frideres); IT is important in terms of both economic survival (in the Knowledge Economy) and communications and cultural support (SchoolNet, language and cultural chat groups and resources, the Native Web [see www.carleton.ca/~mpat- ters/moccasin.htm for a gateway], academic resources and authors). In 1998, National Chief of the AFN Phil Fontaine remarked that our future is very much tied to the computer and the youth are making the adjustment —they're also creating content that expresses their culture and future. We're really leapfrog- ging decades of development (by) putting these services into communities that in the past have only had one phone. (IT) opens opportunities for expression and communication among groups across the country and outside the country (in S/ick, 1998). "Leapfrogging decades" is an interesting phrase, and quite true. Who, and what, will be left behind in this rapid game? In July 2000, at a con- vention in Lansdowne Park, Matthew Coon-Come succeeded Fontaine as leader. At the three-day gathering, the Cattle Castle housed a handful of traditional vendors beside a trade show with some fifty booths, including 20 dot-com, Wcb-driven Native businesses and services, from banking (www.manynations.com) to communications (indbusiness.net) to promotional caps and t-shirts (www.mohawkpromotions.com). Two people were selling hand-made moccasins, dozens of young Natives were selling their websites. Donald Tapscott says that "for the first time in history, children arc more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents about an innovation (IT) central to society" ( 1998: 1 ). This must be even more 20 Volume 16. 2000 Chemins Attentat if so in Native communities. Particularly as those communities are built on family and extended family, and the computer has already begun to show its downside in terms of family and socialization. Experts are noticing that toddlers with computers are becoming hooked on the quick reaction time of the machines, that the "instant gratification" of children's soft- ware is creating aggressive behavior with a low threshold for frustration (Black 1998). Children are being born with the technology and thus assimilate it; adults can only hope to accommodate. Since the kids are the authority, family members must begin to "respect each other for what their author- ities actually are. This creates more of a peer dynamic within families" (Tapscott, 1998: 37). How does it erode the youths' respect for traditional ways however, when given the power of the Net over youth (and vice versa)? Innovations such as the printing press, radio and TV are "unidi- rectional and controlled by adults" whereas the "new media is interac- tive, malleable, and distributed in control ... (and) children are taking control of critical elements of a communications revolution" (1998: 26). The youth-elder power base is shifting. As I walked around the Wikwemikong Powwow in late July, kids from toddlers to youth filled the circle, dancing in out- fits tied to generations of knowledge. Just that week, Chief Peggy Pitawanakwat opened the Wassa Abin Youth Centre, equipped with 24 new computers and satellite Internet access. MP Mike Brown declared that the community now had ready access to "Wall Street or Harvard University" through the new site (www.wiky.net) (DenEngelsman 1998). Years later, when I checked the website, it was gone. "N-Geners ... find power on the Internet because it depends on a dis- tributed, or shared, delivery system" (unlike the media), and "this dis- tributed, or shared power is at the heart of the culture of interaction" (Tapscott, 1998: 79). Foucault presciently talked about the "Web of power," stemming from the "incitement to discourse" about a subject, leading to "increased knowledge on that subject, which leads to power. Power comes from any person who starts a discussion, the discussion forms a web outward to the discussion group, weaves its way out from there to other conversations, and sometimes even returns along the same Volume 16, 2000 21 Alternate Homes or new paths to where it started" (1998: 79). Usenet e-mail groups, web- sites, and chat groups all have these qualities. Global change is scouring the face of the planet, but we have lived with it long enough to know that it is not going to scrub away the 5,000 languages on the globe. The particular is just as tenacious and resourceful as the global. We seem to be retribalizing: the more globalism makes our consump- tion patterns converge, the more insistently we defend the particularities of national differences which remain. And sometimes we defend our differences and our identity with global tools on the Internet, using software provided by such avatars of globalism as Bill Gates (Ignatieff, 1998: D10). Now that we have seen some of the ways in which the forest meets the highway, it is time to look at methods for further research. Methods Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint — it is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements — it is linked in a circular relation (reflexive) with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it. A "regime" of truth (Foucault, 1984: 72,74). This document is a "messy text" involving "hypermedia" — in its Web form (Denzin, 1994), with non-sequential, non-linear sidctrips, perspec- tives and voices. This is a mode oirs, and the endless 900 mile road carved through the empty bush, ending at "an 1800s frontier town" he exulted. He likened his experience to being an J 800s British explorer going into the jungle ("not that it was really like a jungle"); he wanted to ride the highway on a motorcy- cle as a challenge akin to that taken on by British mountain- eers. Where the highway beats the forest . . . Or in the case of James Bay II, where the forest flees the highway... No a guy you want to bring to the powwow, for sure . . . In my 1996 thesis regarding Native music and the Seventh Fire prophecy, I tried to show how an Anishnabe prophecy showed the des- tiny of the four races coming together rapidly, and now that can be seen in the collision of Natives and IT. My work was a critical history, thick description and ethnography lauded at the School of Canadian Studies and at the School for Studies in Arts and Culture at Carleton; I thought at the time that my job was to "get the word out." I was later accused of Volume 16, 2000 29 Alternate Routes being a messianic millenialist by my peers in Sociology who saw no sci- ence in what I was doing. Today I have gone to the critical, fuzzy front-end of thesis develop- ment; Foucault describes "work (taking) place between unfinished abut- ments and anticipatory strings of dots... open up a space of research, try it out, and then if it doesn't work, try again somewhere else" (1991: 73- 74). Mills says that: The classic social analyst has avoided any rigid set of proce- dures; he has sought to develop and to use in his work the sociological imagination. Repelled by the association and disassociation of Concepts, he has used more elaborated terms only when he has good reason to believe that by their use he enlarges the scope of his sensibilities, the precision of his references, the depth of his reasoning. He has not been inhibited by method and technique; the classic way has been the way of an intellectual craftsman (1959: 120) Most importantly, "if a reader becomes sufficiently caught up in the description so that he feels vicariously that he is also in the field, then it is more likely to be kindly disposed toward the researcher's theory than if the description seems flat or unconvincing" (1967: 230-231). I have used some descriptions to show the reader, I hope, some places where the forest meets the highway, and where theory might meet method, where groups such as Natives on the rez and dairy farmers on the (Native) land, city dwellers and country dwellers, Baby Boomers and N-Cienrs, the near and the distanced, become potentially comparable in the face of IT. Like Mills, Howard Becker talks about using tricks in per- spective, such as imagining the impossible to be true, then looking for examples in the field; pail of a bag of tricks for "expanding and compli- cating your theory of the world" such as: "The opposite is true, too" and "You don't have to prove anything" (1989: 489). It is true, as an advisor admonished me, that this is not so much a the- sis as it is a quest. «> Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Alternalif U '3 £ x: c u S u & ^~ a p r~" 3 1) a o _ N h - 3 3 C u £> o M•n ° o 71 3 c TD .5 > a. 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Rise of Cybernation Lomar) u on J! E o 19 c n E Va o E o a. '3 00 13 e o u 3 o o 5 .c' i 1 .c u 5 C PL, "3 3 'C 5. J > oh si u 3 •a JU s o 1 o •5 a o o a c vi "3 = 9- i § 3 1) 55 b e u Q 0JJ c o 13 T3 e XI U o u 3 >, V 3 1 8 u 1 c -a c o 13 <2 •- XI 4> O Si B 1 2 c g 5 a 1 o > o o o QJ •5 o >, o c E on r) o c u E on V 9 .s O T3 U 5 3 V o c o > o 1 § c o— 3 n T3 2 -C u C u 3 IS N 5 TJ > 5c a. W) •d y 3 OJ ex 1 > o 3 Q e o U 13 a: 3 s si u u < c (J o on B _o yi u XI 8 1> o. 3 5 "H o U 3 — u | £ V E " .3 o U X' > ="3 c o .c' n '5 S 9o a •a o u 13 >> O 3 o 2 S ; -i s o 55 Cl o 73 2 ;c a. 2 % i; x> 2 o c <2 x:' ^J e T O o 3 g S« a. II a o 1 3 -56 S 3 XI 4J Q. 8 IJ C 5< s SI u o Q o 7 5 1 13 £ =1 -• -J n 5 l^/«ffie /6. 2000 Chemins Attentat if Appendix A: Buffy Sainte-Marie On an airplane, my Powerbook is singing to me in Lakota, while the words to the song appear onscreen in both Lakota and English. In the Canadian Rockies, Indians carrying portable computers trudge through a herd of elk and into the Banff Center for the Arts where the "Drumbeats to Drumbytes" thinktank confronts the reality of online life as it affects Native artists. A week later in Bismarck, North Dakota, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium votes "yes" to V-SAT technology that will facilitate distance learning in and out of various Indian communi- ties and 30 Indian colleges. Across Canada, thousands of First Nations children network their observations and life experiences into mainstream education, as the Cradleboard Teaching Project/Kids From Kanata partnership provides both Native content and connectivity to schools as far away as Hawaii and Baffin Island. I make a commercial record in a tipi on the Saskatchewan plains, and CBC television films the event for international broadcast. Navajo E-mail markets crafts to 40 foreign countries. A six-foot high painting of Indian elders graces the front office of the American Indian College Fund in Washington, D.C.: it's digital and it's Indian made. The digital scene in Indian country at the moment is a microcosm of the way it is most everywhere else, with people at various stages of expertise and enthusiasm going through the big shift. Issues of sover- eignty are often the first to come up among Native intellectuals, and the spectre of digital colonialism frightens some and challenges others. Questions of control and ownership arise of course, as they do in the mainstream, but with perhaps a sharper edge, given the facts of Native American history. Indian educators, artists, elders, women, tribal lead- ers and business people have plenty on our minds when it comes to counterbalancing past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that we're not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dino- saurs: we are Here in this digital age. We have led the pack in a couple of areas (digital music and online art). Although our potential at the moment exceeds the extensiveness of our community computer usage, our projects are already bearing fruit, we expect to prosper and to con- tribute, and we will defend our data. Volume 16, 2000 33 Alternate Routes Among Indian people online as elsewhere, we continue to observe the usual gangs of unknowledgcable non-Indian and/or "I-was-an- Indian-in-my-last-life" opportunists and exploiters, who now are upgrad- ing their acts, trying to take advantage of rumored tax breaks and other scams in the cyber-sector of Indian country; but we are pretty much used to this "vapor-speak" phenomenon, having lived with it lo these past 500 years. "Beware of White man bearing good ideas and grant proposals" is a tacet refrain we laugh about over the phone. However, I am glad to report that usually this observation does not interfere with honest deals among knowledgeable people of different races; and personally I do believe that we're smart enough to know who our friends are; and they come in all colors. Sometimes I am asked, where did all the brain and fire of the sixties American Indian activism go? In my observation, in Canada we went into every field; but in the United States, where things were far more dangerous, those of us who were not killed, imprisoned, put out of busi- ness or otherwise sacrificed to the uranium industry, went into education. If I have a message in this scant overview, it is this: real Indian people are rising to the potential of the technology, in school and out. We were born for this moment and we are solidly behind our pathfinders. From Buffy Sainte-Marie's Cyberskins at http://www.aloha.net/~bsm/ cybersk.htm Notes 1 . This essay also available www.carleton.ca/~mpatters/soc.html 2. F-'irst Nations is a political construction, and a Native answer to the Canadian political system, that exists more as an abstraction than reality. The Assembly of First Nations represents "Status Indians;" I will use the term Native to refer to all people who arc descendants of or related to the original inhabitants of Turtle Island (North America). Today this includes full-bloods, mixed-bloods, status, non-Status, Inuit, Metis and distant relations. Descendants of the original people here do not have a common name, as there arc diverse histories and origin stories. People in the United Slates still often prefer to use the term "Indians," although this reference is now in disrepute in Canada. "Native" had become the preferred term here in the PMOs, but there arc now (governmental and other) advocates tor the use ol the terms "Aboriginal," " Indigenous," "Pirst Nations" and even "Firsl People" people. <4 Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Alter natif 3. Based on work by William Robertson and Henry F. Dobyns, Sioui says that the Native population in North America dwindled from 18 million in 1497 to some 250 - 300, 000 by 1900, largely through starvation and imported diseases, not warfare (Sioui 1992: 3). The population now, counting mixed-blood people, could be over 5 million. In Canada the Native population is now around 3.5% of the total population and is estimated to reach almost 4% or approaching 1.5 million by 2001 (Frideres 2000). These figures take into account status and non- status "Indians," Inuit and Metis. From 1981 to 1991 the status Indian and limit populations increased one-third while non-status Natives almost doubled their numbers. "The overall Aboriginal population is growing very fast... and (status Indians and Inuit) will continue to have higher growth rates than the Canadian population for several decades (1993: 129). Other estimates of overall Native population range from two to four million, taking into account all of the "distant relations" from early French, Irish, Scottish and Native meetings. 4."MOHAWK [MOH] 3,000 total speakers out of 10,000 population including USA (1977 SIL); 1,667 speakers in USA (1990 census). All Iroquoian mother tongue speakers in Canada 6,075 (1981 census). Southwestern Quebec, southern Ontario. Iroquoian, Northern Iroquoian, Five Nations, Mohawk- Oneida. Most speakers are middle-aged or over. In some areas younger ones may speak the language. 75% to 100% literate. Grammar, dictionaries. Bible portions 1787-1991." (Ethnologue at http://www.sil.org/cthnologue/countries/ Cana.html#MOH). There is a very strong emphasis on language at Mohawk schools these days, from Kahnawake and Kahnasetake to Six Nations. 5. The first browser was WWW devised by Tim Berners-Lee, the second was Lynx developed by Lou Montoulli at U of Kansas. The "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf developed an Internet protocol (TCP/IP) in 1974 (see http:// apcmag.com/profiles/213a_lce.htm). For earlier events in the 60s, sec http:// SurfSites.com/Internet_Uistory/. 6. Iroquois Moons include the Green Corn, Strawberries, Midwinter and The Grandmother Brings Fertility to Women. Anishnabek Moons include the Little Bears, Crusted Snow, Strawberry and Wild Rice. Norman Rosenthal, a researcher on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) which is a depression brought about by the lack of daylight in winter, says that modern medical practitioners are beginning to re-discover the effects of the seasons (natural time) on people. For instance the observance of Christmas and Hanukkah is seasonal; a gathering at midwinter in the tradition of the Ancient Romans (Saturnalia) and also Native midwinter gatherings. "While older civilizations all viewed time as cyclical, a Volume 16, 2000 35 Alternate Routes linear view of time has dominated (non-Native perspectives) since the 17th century, which is more in keeping with ideas about human progress" (Robin 1995: Al). "Unlike the future orientation of the 'Great Religions' tribal ideology emphasized that everything was good in its natural form - and should stay that way. For untold centuries the present was experienced as a continuation of the past, a perpetuation of the sacrcdncss of life in all its manifestations" (Brasser 1987: 122). 7. So-called "Indian time" is sometimes used as a reference to "indifference to promptness," but actually it "is based on an understanding of time which is often linked at the tribal level to language and structure." On an individual basis, it is "a need not to be filled with activity... Indian people know how to sit Still and enjoy things, how to look even when there is nothing to see. Indians feel no compulsion to fill time with words. Words should not be substituted for meaning." When words are used in ceremony or storytelling, "all time is fused into one, with no past, present and future. The same may be said of the dance at powwows." This view of time is also linked to the individual freedom of Native people, allowing for as much free time as possible for creation and realization of one's own potential, which is then shared with the group as part of each individual's "autonomy and responsibility" (Young 1981: 345-346). References Becker, H. S. 1989 "Tricks of the trade" in Studies in Symbolic- Interaction. 10: 481-490. Black, Shannon 1998 'Software may inhibit development of toddlers, experts warn" in the Ottawa Citizen. 2/9/98: A6. Brasser, Ted J. 1987 "By the Power of their Dreams: Artistic Traditions of the Northern Plains" in The Spirit Sings. Toronto: Glenbow Museum/McClelland and Stewart: 93- 131. Burchell G. ct al (eds.) 1991 The Foucaull Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. Cassell, Philip 1993 The Giddens Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press. «> Volume 16, 2000 Chemins Alternatif de Kerckhove, Derrick 1998 Connected Intelligence: The Arrival ofthe Web Society can be found in the Features section of the Mainstay web site at www.niainstaymktg.com. DenEngelsman, Donna 1998 "Wassa Abin Youth Centre joins the web!" in the Manitoulin Exposito. 29/ 7/98: 20. Dcnzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. 1994 "Entering the field of qualitative research" in the Handbook of Qualitative Research. 1-17. Denzin, Norman K. (ed.) 1994 Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Press. Diamond, Beverley and Winner, Robert (eds.) 1994 Canadian Music - Issues of Hegemony and Identity. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Elkins, David 1995 Beyond Sovereignity: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: U of T Press. Fay, Brian 1990 "Critical Realism?" in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 20/1: 32-41. Fleras, Augie and Elliott, Jean Leonard 1992 The Nations Within - Aboriginal-State Relations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel 1984 " 'Truth and Power,' 'space, Knowledge, and Power' and 'Right of Death and Power over Life' " in Rabinow, Paul (ed.) 77i