Now that I have the NATIVE-L archives fully loaded in Webspace, I thought
it might be worthwhile to test an idea I've had for some time - of creating
index pages for various issues. My first test is on the subject of the
struggles of the Ogoni people in Nigeria against the exploitation and
damage to their land that is occurring as a result of oil production and
the executions in early November of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni
activists who had spoken out against the government and Shell Oil Company,
which has been responsible for the oil drilling and extraction operations.
I have created a new geographical index page for Africa, which I expect will
grow in time as more issues of the indigenous peoples of that continent are
identified and with your help, additional Web resources are found to add to
that page. For now, there's only a single heading, for Nigeria, and all of
the entries under that heading have to do in one way or another with the
issue just mentioned. The first item under the heading is a link to a page
I've created that contains links to individual articles in the NATIVE-L
archives.
My main purpose is to demonstrate the utility of creating specific pages of
pointers into the NATIVE-L archives, so that we can easily compile background
on an issue that has some substantial history recorded in the archives. I'd
like to think about doing the same thing for a variety of other issues as we
identify the important ones based on current events (for example, the death
of Ken Saro-Wiwa probably makes a lot of us interested in learning more about
the history of the struggle of Mr. Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people, so it is
useful to be able to have a pre-fabricated list of resources for learning
about the situation - which is just a matter of creating an index page into
our existing archives).
I am hoping that as time goes on I can get some help from some of you to
make the NativeNet Web page all that it can be. I want to recruit some
advisors who are respected members of the indigenous community representing
various tribal and ethnic groups - and I plan to get some help from our
professional librarians as to how the archives can best be organized to
enable our Web resources to be as useful as possible. For now, I'm quite
content to simply demonstrate what I see as being some of the possibilities.
To get to the new page on Africa, you can use the URL:
http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/place/africa.html
Or you can get there via a few obvious clicks from the main NativeNet page:
http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet
As is mentioned in a note on the Ogoni NATIVE-L index page, the URLs of
individual articles is subject to change, since I still need to do more
reorganizing of the archives, which is one reason why I don't anticipate
creating many more such index pages right away. When I reorganize the
archives, I'll re-construct the Ogoni page so that the links to articles
are once again correct. So please don't rely on the individual article
URLs - but if you want to save a bookmark or create a link to the index
page, it should be safe.
I'll look forward to hearing what you all feel to be the possibilities
for utilizing the World Wide Web as an adjunct to our mailing lists.
I have a feeling that we've just "barely scratched the surface."
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst