<nettime> ICT and Aboriginal Peoples

[michael gurstein <gurstein@gmail.com>]

Below is a message posted by a young First Nations Canadian living and
working (doing web development and sysadmin from a fly in only community in
Northern Ontario!  The group that provides the infrastructure that he works
from (and with) K-Net,< http://knet.ca/> is a very powerful example of
community based ICT in action but I thinkk Jesse's comments are worthwhile
in the context of the recent discussion on ICTs and Indigenous People.

Best,

Mike Gurstein

> On 18/11/2007, Jesse Fiddler <jessefiddler@knet.ca
> <mailto:jessefiddler@knet.ca> > wrote:
>
> Good Morning,
>
> I've been following the conversation and yes I would be able to help
> present Adam Fiser's paper on the Kuh-Ke-Nah Network.
>
> For myself I would like to discuss how the K-Net model follows the
> traditional community minded approach of Aboriginal people and what 
> this means for other Indigenous communities the world over.  
> Keewaytinoook Okimakanak and K-Net was not founded as an ISP or 
> business where there was a need and money to be made.  Keewaytinook 
> Okimakanak was founded under the principal that collective communities 
> can work together and pool  resources to benefit each member more than 
> it would on its own.  K-Net was founded under the need that our 
> communities need excellent communication technologies to grow and 
> thrive.  You put both of those principals together and you've got the 
> K-Net model.
>
> This follows very closely to the mindset of how traditional aboriginal
> families and communities would be able to survive in this land that we 
> call our home.  With the harsh climate and lack of abundant resources 
> that our cousins to the south have, cooperation and 
> inter-dependability is more essential to be able to survive.  In this 
> new age where all the opportunities, resources, and technologies are 
> urban centric, we are in a  similar situation where we are starved of 
> access to these resources that  enable us to be productive members of 
> this new world society.  For the past 50 years we have been told that 
> in order to be successful we have to  leave our communities and our 
> land.  In these past 10+ years, KO and K-Net have been working on the 
> reverse of this where we can bring everything to us by the means of 
> communications technology.  This as least gives us a choice on what 
> kind of life we want to live.
>
> K-Net follows the community building/living mindset to the point where
> you always hear "community" in every sentence, lol.  But its true, and 
> it's one of the main reasons why K-Net has been accepted in every
> community in our area and why it is a successful model.   Adam Fiser's
> paper discusses this model in various contexts and I wouldn't mind 
> further discussing his paper in relation to indigenous communities and 
> their traditional living models.
>
> All Indigenous communities at one time or another were
> self-sustainable. For the ebario conference I would like to see how 
> the traditional sustainable community models of the Kelabit and other 
> Indigenous Asians are used to own, adapt and implement this technology 
> for their own benefits. Hope I'm not going too far off here, but since 
> we will be in the home and heart of the Kelabit, this topic became 
> very prominent for me.
>
> Jesse


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