On Wednesday morning at 9:00 A.M. Atlantic Daylight Saving time, I will
be making a presentation on the educational value of the Internet to Elders,
educators and helping-services coordinators of the Maliseet people on the
Tobique reserve here in New Brunswick, Canada.
I plan to focus on:
E-mail
Listerservs and other mail-list servers
Gopher
News Groups
and
FTP and Telnet.
The theme of my presentation will be the power of the Internet as a tool for
professional and student alike in providing access to information and to other
like-minded people.
In preparation for this presentation, I have been particularly anxious to find
material that is specifically related to the concerns of native people. I have
tracked down some gopher sites, and I have found the materials compiled by
Arthur R. McGee and Associates relating to news groups, mailing lists etc.
When I first discussed how we might handle this presentation with my host
for the day, Pat Paul, I suggested to him that he might ask some of the people
that will attend on that day to submit some questions that I would try to
answer in advance using the Internet. Two of these questions I would like to
submit to you for your consideration. I would appreciate some help by way
of a direct response or a direction that I might be able to follow to find the
response. The two questions are as follows:
Name some specifically successful Native Literacy programs that
use distinct, unique, Native concepts in achieving their success.
What is the situation with other Native peoples in the world in terms
of their social, cultural and economic integrity. For example, how
are the native people of Australia surviving?
If you can help with these, thanks. In any case, I would also appreciate some
messages welcoming the participants to the Internet.
Charles Ramsey
Department of Advanced Education
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Canada
ramseyc@nald.fanshawec.on.ca
ramseyc@nbnet.nb.ca
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Comments from NativeNet moderator, Gary Trujillo (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us):
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to reach out to some people who
I hope would like to be partners with those of us who have been working on
the "electronic outreach" project begun by means of the NAT-EDU mailing
list. Its objective is to create projects which have as their aim collabo-
rative learning experiences around the subject of Native peoples among K-12
students. As I've written recently to the members of the newly-formed
"nn.outreach" mailing list, which is being used to coordinate this effort,
one of the first steps in launching it is getting elders and teachers in
the aboriginal peoples' communities to agree to help us formulate and
design the basic ideas, and to help us make sure that the educational
curriculum we design and recommend is true to their own understandings of
their respective peoples. (If anyone reading this item would like to be
added to the nn.outreach list, please drop me a note.) Perhaps some of
the people who will be attending the demonstration being given Wednesday
morning will be interested in helping us in this way.
I hope that a number of people who receive this article via the NATIVE-L
and NAT-EDU mailing lists will send a message of greeting to the people
with whom Charles Ramsey says he will be meeting on Wednesday morning, so
that they will get some idea of how many of us there are out here who
really care about the prospect of them becoming directly connected to the
Internet and taking part in our dialogues, information-sharing, and some
of the projects we have begun to devise whose purpose is to provide a
better understanding for all people, both Native and non-Native, of the
significance and importance of the cultures of all indigenous peoples.
When you write, make sure you use the address given above (I suppose the
first address (ramseyc@nald.fanshawec.on.ca) is the better of the two,
since it is listed first, and it is the address from which this message
originated). Please keep in mind that if you reply to this message itself,
your reply will go to the NATIVE-L or NAT-EDU list, and not to Charles,
because of the way I have the mail software set up for these lists.
If you can answer either (or both) of the questions that Charles poses,
please do reply - but even if you can't provide much help in that regard,
do at least send a friendly greeting if you can spare a few moments. I'm
sure that getting a number of brief messages would be very impressive and
gratifying. And please, if you wouldn't mind, indicate the name of the
list (NATIVE-L or NAT-EDU) on which you read this announcement. Perhaps
Charles will let us know afterwards how his presentation went, and what
kind of impression we might have been able to make regarding the size and
knowledge of our network community.
Thanks very much.
Gary