By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Dec 4 2003 (IPS)

Type “sacred circle” into the Internet’s ‘Google’ search engine and you will uncover hundreds of thousands of references. Now, one group wants the World Wide Web itself to function much more like the circle, whose concept of balance is integral to many of the world’s indigenous peoples.

Led by Frits Pannekoek, director of information resources at the University of Calgary, the team is developing tools that would search the Web and organise its information using an “indigenous way of knowing”.

”The real question is,” says Pannekoek in a telephone interview, “can the Internet or the World Wide Web be culturally neutral, or at least sufficiently neutral that an alternate world perspective can use it to move in the directions that those world knowledge systems want to move?”

“Because if it isn’t and it can’t become so, then I think we’ve got ourselves a bit of a problem.”

While Pannekoek argues that simply working to connect indigenous peoples to the Internet is a shortsighted approach that could harm their cultures, aboriginal peoples are split on how to approach the technology.

In the run-up to next week’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva, Switzerland, it has become clear that some indigenous groups want to have a greater online presence; others stress that they must have the power to control their information, and then they will decide themselves the best way to communicate their knowledge.

“They all had transformative impact,” he says. “Transformation isn’t always positive.”

“In particular the hope is that the (new) software will appeal to youth and will reconnect or strengthen their connections to the worldview of their communities,” he wrote in an August research proposal.

“If such software is not developed, the lament of the Blood elders will be realised in the next generation. The young people will truly be ‘new people’ without real roots.”

Next week hundreds of indigenous people and their supporters from around the world will gather for the four-day Global Forum of Indigenous Peoples and the Information Society, being held alongside the WSIS.

The meeting’s agenda includes an “independent expert paper” by Marcos Matias Alonso, a member of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

He writes that indigenous peoples, “do not yet equitably participate in building the future information society. Consequently, indigenous visions and philosophies do not contribute to its developing concept and structure”.

Matias Alonso calls for recognising that, “indigenous traditional knowledge does not automatically belong to the so-called public domain”.

“Regulations on the use of indigenous knowledge by third parties have to be developed, in cooperation with indigenous peoples, fully recognising indigenous customary laws and protocols for sharing, disseminating and communicating indigenous knowledge and its applications,” he adds.

One Maori researcher says the focus in New Zealand should be putting the Maori language on the Internet, rather than trying to “force” the technology in a certain direction.

“If we have sites in our own language, everything else will follow. Culture follows language,” said Te Taka Keegan from the University of Waikato in Hamilton, in a telephone interview.

He said he is beginning to see many websites, both indigenous and non-indigenous, employing Maori symbols and other images. “That’s something that’s happened without anybody saying, ‘look, we’re Maori, we should be doing it like this’. It’s just something that’s kind of happened naturally,” said Keegan.

“It means that there are some inherent influences in our culture that are coming through on the Web . it’s quite good to see that it’s not all total suppression; it’s not total obliteration.”

The increasingly multimedia nature of the technology might also shape the Internet into a better fit with indigenous cultures, he suggests. “An important thing in the Maori culture is the face to face contact (‘kanohi ki te kanohi’) and the Internet definitely takes that away from you, but . in the future when we’re using video links maybe it will return”.

“Maybe the technology will catch up to our culture.”

Another group suggests that putting culture first could even lead to indigenous peoples rejecting the technology as it is now organised.

“To think that indigenous peoples’ problems with communication will be solved by just connecting them to the Internet and the digital era is another form of colonialism,” said Nilo Cayuqueo, a Mapuche activist and writer from Argentina, in an e-mail interview.

“What we are proposing is to have the rights to information and produce our own indigenous community media. Free software could help us in designing and customising our message according to our values and aspirations as peoples,” added Cayuqueo, co-director of the Abya Yala Nexus and a member of the Indigenous World Association, both indigenous rights organisations.

Pannekoek says if his group receives funding, it could develop a prototype of the Internet tools by 2007. Their major features would include a new way of “tagging” or digitally labelling information on the Web that would reflect Indigenous ways of seeing the world.

Those ways, he adds – quoting other researchers – include: (1) knowledge of and belief in unseen powers in the ecosystem: and (2) knowledge that all things in the ecosystem are dependent on each other, and that sacred traditions and persons who know these traditions are responsible for teaching ”morals” and ”ethics” to practitioners, who are then given responsibility for this specialised knowledge and its dissemination.

An innovative search tool or engine would display its ”finds” in a form – such as circles – that would be innate to indigenous cultures, unlike the text-based tools that now dominate the Web.

For example, not only would the outcome of a search be displayed differently, the parameters of the search would also be unique.

“One of the attributes of indigenous knowledge is a responsibility of the individual in the community to transmit, hold, nurture and release knowledge, so one (would have) to establish a tiered system of authorities that are controlled by communities,” according to Pannekoek.

That could mean limiting control of indigenous knowledge to certain individuals, he adds, much like the way copyright is used to protect some information now.

He says the indigenous people he is working with are ready to share their knowledge, if they can control how it is presented on the Internet.

“There’s also a legend around in North America that says, ‘the time will eventually come when the white man will need our knowledge. And he’ll need it to understand his relationship to the environment, to the greater universe and to each other’,” Pannekoek says.

“That still persists, and I’ve heard more than one (indigenous) person say ‘maybe this is a way that our knowledge will assist mankind as a whole’.”

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