About five years ago, I attended a few programs in a series which
featured speakers, sometimes accompanied by films or slide shows, at
Harvard University (with which I have no connection) concerning the
world's environmental problems, with special focus on tropical
rainforest areas. Subsequently, I went to a few meetings of a group
of local (Boston/Cambridge area) activists working in various ways to
preserve and protect these endangered regions of the planet, and I
learned about an upcoming conference to be held in the western part of
Massachusetts which would focus particularly on "industrial nations'
exploitation of tribal resources." I attended that three-day
conference at Smith College, in Northampton, and heard numerous
speakers, most of them representing groups of indigenous peoples from
various parts of the world (including North and South America, Africa,
Malaysia, Samiland, and Australia) talk about how "first world"
corporations and governments have "run roughshod" over their human and
legal rights, and about the importance of understanding how these
problems are intimately related to the more general problems of global
environmental devastation now occurring on a massive scale. When I
returned from the conference, I began corresponding via e-mail with a
few people who I knew shared my interests in these subjects, and I
created the initial mailing list within a couple of weeks (9/89) to
facilitate a dialogue among this group of people as a whole.
Primarily through word-of-mouth contacts, and listings that were
placed in a few electronic lists out in net-land, our subscriber list
grew, and the original list was moved (in early 1991) to the LISTSERV
site where it presently resides (TAMVM1, at Texas A & M University).
Subsequently, additional lists were created (NAT-1492, for information
and discussion concerning the Columbus Quincentenary, in September '91,
NATCHAT, for general discussion of indigenous peoples' issues and
NAT-EDU (based at INDYCMS, at Indiana University at Indianapolis), in
spring of '92, NAT-LANG for topics of the languages of indigenous
peoples, in February '93, and NAT-HLTH in mid-'93). Because of the
fact that when the original list was begun, there were really no
Internet or Bitnet-based mailing lists dealing with any aspects of
indigenous peoples, these lists have taken on a rather general
character as compared with the more focussed kinds of topics that had
interested me when starting the lists, and they have tended to be
dominated by information about and discussions of the indigenous
peoples of North America, though I have done what I could to keep them
globally-based. Since the inception of the original mailing list,
which has now become NATIVE-L, it has been coupled with a series of
electronic "conferences" operated by the worldwide Association for
Progressive Communications (APC), by means of an automated link between
my own computer here in the Boston area and the APC affilitate in the
U.S. (the Institute for Global Communications, which operates the
PeaceNet and EcoNet services), with offices in San Francisco, California.
Many organizational participants in our discussions are connected via
IGC or one of the other "fee-for-service" APC systems around the world
(the "conference" user interface, though it leaves something to be
desired, is somewhat superior to the mailing list interface in some
ways, since it permits a user to be more selective about which articles
are read, and a user doesn't have to worry about her/his mailbox
filling up). Though I experimented for a few months last year with a
fully bidirectional link with the Usenet "soc.culture.native"
newsgroup, which I and other NativeNet subscribers were instrumental in
creating, the volume from that source finally became too great, and we
went back to only feeding articles from NATIVE-L into that newsgroup
(and into the older, though less widely distributed "alt.native"
newsgroup, since some Usenet sites still do not carry soc.culture.native).
As I indicated in my last open letter, keeping things going has been a
lot of work during these past four and a half years, and I have come
to the point where I feel I need to carefully analyse how I'm spending
my time and energy and what my real priorities are and how it might be
possible to continue the present operation while expanding in some new
directions that let me follow through with some of my earlier ambitions
and to explore some new interests, along with the assistance and support
of whoever is willing to help in one way or another. I think I have at
least the broad outline of what needs to be done, but I may need to ask
for some help in thinking things through at some point, and in actually
putting in place whatever we jointly decide needs to be done.
One part of the solution, I feel, may be to attempt to automate more
of the tasks I'm presently doing manually. I'll go into a bit more
detail on this subject in a future letter, after giving you a better
idea of how things work. For now, suffice it to say that I've spent
this weekend automating a few functions (like sending out copies of
subscription instructions to the many people who ask for them, some-
times to me, and sometimes (far too often) to the posting address for
one of the NativeNet lists, and tracking the comings and goings of
subscribers, to enable surveys to be done later, if we decide that
doing so could be of value, and automatically sending out basic
information to new subscribers (once I get a chance to write out that
information)).
In the next installment of this series, I'd like to go into a bit more
detail concerning where I personally would like to go from here in
order to get back to a nurturing of the interests that drew me to this
activity in the first place (and to place those interests into a somewhat
larger context). I'll try to describe how we can retain what we have,
coordinate better with information resources made available by others,
and move in new directions, possibly taking advantage of new technology.
Thanks for listening. (And thanks to those who have written to me
recently to indicate their willingness to help!)
Yours,
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst