This is just a brief bulletin being sent to members of the NATIVE-L list in
an effort to help you become better aware of what's been happening behind
the scenes lately, to give a sense of some possible directions, and to sol-
icit your suggestions. I hope you will read the entire article, since I
make some recommendations toward the end, and mention the survey which we
have been long planning to do to help us get a better sense of who we are
and what we want from NativeNet, and give some indications of possible
directions which I will need your help to determine.
I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome the many new members of the
list who have signed up in the past little while, many of them probably due
to the start of a new school year. I'll be sending an introductory message
out to those who have joined the list in the past several months which
explains a bit about the way the list operates and how to obtain additional
information. (Anyone else wanting a copy of this information can just send
a message saying "get nn-intro intro native-l" to the address
"listserv@tamvm1.tamu.edu" or "listserv@tamvm1" (if you're on a Bitnet
host)).
This month marks the third year of operation for NativeNet. We began in
September of 1989, just after I returned from the "From the Arctic to Ama-
zonia" conference, full of a sense of needing to do something to deal with
the sense of urgency I had obtained during that weekend experience about
the global situation of indigenous peoples facing massive problems involv-
ing ongoing threats to their cultures and way of life - sometimes involving
threats to their very lives themselves due to the appetites of the
industrially-oriented societies which have encroached on the lands of indi-
genous populations.
I have personally learned a lot in these three years, and I find great
satisfaction in the many personal messages that have come in expressing the
thought that others have done so as well. It would take a while to list
what I feel I have learned or of which I have become more acutely aware, so
I'll save my list for another time.
One of the most crucial things I've learned is that the members of this
list form a rather special group. In the present world, having access to
electronic mail is a privilege which is far from universally available. It
is something that many of us take for granted, just as most of us take the
conventional postal system ("snail-mail" as some of us have come to know
it) or the telephone for granted, and as many of us come to feel the
increasingly-ubiquitous FAX machine to be an absolute necessity.
I think it's useful to keep in mind that, whatever the near-term future may
bring, the majority of indigenous people of the world have probably never
even *heard* of electronic mail, let alone used it. We have the luxury of
sitting in our electronic armchairs discussing in various terms of abstrac-
tion the nature of the world-view of indigenous versus non-indigenous peo-
ple (as we have recently been doing on the NATCHAT list), or exchanging
information about some particular group of indigenous people, but I often
wonder how much thought we give to how useful this kind of tool could be
for those people themselves, and what we might be able to do to try to
extend these benefits to those who do not have any natural means of access-
ing what to us has become a basic way of life.
Personally, I am trying to find a means to become less involved in the
day-to-day operation of NativeNet in order to focus more of my own energy
on trying to regain a foothold in the larger world, which my involvement
with this project has at times made difficult. But as I do so, I will keep
thinking of how I might help extend the benefits of this technology to the
kinds of people I met at the conference I attended in the fall of 1989, and
I'll be seeking others who would be interested in helping in such an
effort. I will also continue to hope that the NativeNet community can be
raised up off its collective haunches to help combat the kinds of problems
I heard talked about at that conference. I think we have a tremendously
powerful and vastly underutilized potential here as long as we use it only
as a means of exchanging information, rather than finding ways to work
together in an active way to do what we can to help stop that onslaught on
traditional culture I spoke of before. I'd really like to see a series of
electronic committees formed, each one working on a specific project, such
as the James Bay / Hydro Quebec situation, or the mission of the Hopi eld-
ers to the United Nations, or the Lubicon or the Peigan Lonefighters or the
Mohawks in Quebec, where there is still a great deal of tension, or of the
Sami in what we used to call Lapland, or people who struggle to maintain
their traditional way of life in Siberia or Australia or Malaysia or Panama
or Guatemala.
I think it is vitally important to exchange information, but I sometimes
wonder how the information is being used, just as I wonder what people do
with all the information they read in their daily newspapers and books and
magazines. Maybe that's the problem, in fact; many of us look at this
mailing list as if we're passive consumers of information, because we have
been trained to use "information sources" in this way. This medium gives
us an opportunity to "talk back," and to form relationships with one
another that permit us to enhance our own life experiences and to make com-
mon cause around ambitions that inspire our enthusiasm. I hope others
besides myself are willing to think through the possibilities and to become
engaged in a more active exploration of what we could do if we put our
minds and hearts into realizing some of these possibilities. (I can easily
create specialized mailing lists on a variety of subjects as new projects
are identified.)
At the very least, I hope that more subscribers of NATIVE-L will take it on
themselves to share whatever information they come across that seems worthy
of sharing. I receive a lot of information via "snail-mail," but lack the
time and energy to enter it all. On the theory that "many hands make light
work," I'd like to suggest that as others come across little information
tidbits they at least offer the rest of us little hints of the stories and
how we can get more information - even if you can't type in a whole arti-
cle. I feel that just little things such as this idea could go a long way
toward making NATIVE-L more interesting and useful.
Among the projects we've talked about in the past, some of these things
have taken some steps, but, possibly due to lack of effective and suffi-
ciently dedicated leadership (sometimes on my own part, I must admit), they
have not realized their full potential. One of the important projects that
a number of people have been working on in fits and starts is the idea of
creating a database of resources for addressing the Columbus quincentenary
celebrations that will be taking place next month. Due to the complexity
of the undertaking, and the short amount of time available, we have only
gotten as far as identifying the nature of the task and some of the details
involved and obtaining and doing preliminary tests on some software to
facilitate the project. At this point, I'd be happy to at least pull
together a list of resources which can be updated over a period of the next
few weeks so that we'll at least have something. The database project will
likely be reoriented to focus on the needs of the "Year for Indigenous Peo-
ple," which was recently announced on NATIVE-L, to be launched in December,
and which will run through the entirety of 1993.
I hope to write a separate article on various NativeNet projects, and to
solicit your ideas as well shortly. In fact, if anyone has any ideas,
please do send them along.
I have been very pleased with the operation of the new NATCHAT mailing list
(which began in early June), under the able stewardship of Mary Kuhner and
Jon Yamato in Seattle. By removing the discussion-oriented materials from
NATIVE-L, we leave it free as a means of information exchange. If anyone
is not on the NATCHAT list who wishes to be, please send a message contain-
ing "subscribe natchat Your Name" to one of the same LISTSERV addresses at
TAMVM1 given above. (Replace "Your Name" with your own full name - NOT
your email address.) The NAT-1492 list, for discussion of the Columbus
quincentenary can be subscribed to in the same way (in fact you can put
both subscription requests in a single message sent to the LISTSERV). The
NAT-EDU list has yet to really get off the ground, though it is fully set
up and functional. If you're interested in matters pertaining to education
and indigenous peoples, please send a subscribe message to
"listserv@indycms.bitnet" or to "listserv@indyvax.iupui.edu" (If you're
interested in the native languages list, please send a "subscribe nn.lang
Your Name" to "nn.request@gnosys.svle.ma.us")
There is one other matter which deserves some thought, I feel, and which
will require some assistance to resolve. The essence of the situation is
that, even though the original impetus for NativeNet was to provide a chan-
nel for information about a specific set of issues pertaining to indigenous
peoples, namely specific threats talked about at an in-person conference,
the absence of any pre-existing channels for exchanging information and
opinion about a broader set of subjects made NativeNet a natural for deal-
ing with these more general subjects. I hope we'd all agree that permit-
ting our exchanges to handle these more general subjects does not neces-
sarily detract from accomplishing the original purposes of NativeNet, but,
as I stated above, I hope we can remain acutely aware of the importance of
considering the specific problems which the industrialized societies have
imposed upon indigenous peoples, under the rubric of "development," which
is taken to be a unquestionable positive good. I'd be interested in know-
ing what others feel on this subject - and what you feel your own priori-
ties to be. You can send your comments to the entire list using the
address:
nn.general@gnosys.svle.ma.us
or you can send them to me personally (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us). I hope you
wouldn't mind being quoted anonymously in an article summarizing whatever
comments I receive.
A related matter, about which I'd also like to get your thoughts concerning
the fact that we have been dealing in all of our mailing lists (NATIVE-L,
NATCHAT, NAT-1492, and NAT-EDU) with indigenous peoples and cultures in a
*global* context. Some people seem mainly interested in some particular
group of indigenous people, especially those of North America. There may,
in fact, be many of you who *are* American Indians or aboriginal people of
Canada or of other lands who feel that you'd like to have a means of carry-
ing out discussions and exchanges of information in a more exclusive kind
of electronic setting. I'd also like to know if you find yourself in one
of these categories, to help plan future developments.
Lastly, I'd like to mention the fact that for quite some time, a number of
members of one or more of the NativeNet mailing lists have been discussing
the idea of conducting a survey of our membership to give us a better sense
of who we are, both on an individual level, by means of (optional) personal
profiles, which can be stored in the NATIVE-L filelist so that anyone can
access the information, and as an aggregate. Those of us who began this
discussion last spring, which resulted in the approval of a preliminary
draft of a questionnaire, are presently resuming the dialogue, and should
be in a position shortly to approve a final format. We also talked about
collecting information which might be of use to social scientists, but that
purpose would be secondary, and has not yet been approved even by our com-
mittee, let alone by the subscribers of NativeNet as a whole. It is not
yet clear to what extent the two kinds of information queries are compati-
ble with one another and whether they should be conducted jointly. If you
have any feelings about any of these matters, or if you would like to take
part in the remaining survey planning discussions - or if you have any
suggestions for questions to ask in the survey itself, please get in touch
with me just as soon as possible. I will make periodic announcements con-
cerning progress on this idea, and I'll announce the survey itself before
it is initiated.
Well, I guess I've covered enough ground for this "brief" bulletin I set
out to write. Thanks to everyone who has been helping with various tasks
recently - and welcome once again to all of our new subscribers. I hope
everyone had a good summer, and you're all ready to roll up your electronic
sleeves and to help tackle what lies ahead.
All the best!
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst