Handing Down of Culture | Chapter 6 | Frits Pannekoek

Chapter 6 | Frits Pannekoek

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And with English and the internet comes politics. The individual sites in the Canadian Digital Aboriginal Collection, amongst the largest on the net, for the most part avoid controversy. These sites are intended to celebrate whether it is business achievement, culture, history or language. The Waskaganish Net Site (Waskaganish aka Rupert’s House is located on James Bay) near is an excellent and typical example (idem).2 The main “buttons” are “culture,” “development,” “history,” “myths,” “profile,” “talent” and “tourism.” All of the topics seem to be intended for the outside, particularly tourists, business investors and employers. The site paints the community as modern and connected, with a strong future in heritage tourism — particularly with the development of Charles Fort the first Hudson’s Bay Company establishment. Of equal note is the “history” timeline — which starts with the coming of the first European in 1611. This is not unusual in the various sites included in Canada’s Digital Collections. The “Rat River/Ddhah Zhit Han,” “Peguis First Nation” or the “Wecome to the Big House Kwakwaka’wakw” e sites3 offer similar treatments of the past — a past which begins with the arrival of Europeans!

Yet Aboriginal sites can be more than “celebratory.” The non federal government sites are dominated by tribal and territorial governments. And this should not be a surprise. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut governments are both elected by majority native populations. These sites are comprehensive offerings of government services, although often through the tourist gaze. However, only the Nunavut sites offers service in the dominant Aboriginal languages.4 The Government of the Northwest Territories does not. Tribal government sites tend to be more introductory and political, but always with a strong heritage component. For the most part the native government sites appear to be for those “gazing” in rather than for the community itself. Self-validation is probably the prime reason for the creation of many of these e-sites. In today’s world, if you do not have a presence on the web — you do not exist. The mere fact of having a web page is a statement of existence to an often disinterested world.

The Aboriginal internet is controlled by the “power elite.” To participate a computer, software, expertise and a host server are all required. The internet is frankly expensive and does not permeate most homes in native communities, although this is not true everywhere. In Inuvik, for example, cable access is available to almost every home and this has had considerable impact on how the news is accessed. If a review of North American internet site indicates anything it is that the Canadian Aboriginal sites are less radical, and are mired in the niceties of treaty and land negotiations and the outcome of court cases. Oka5, Gustavsen Lake, Burnt Church6, which were expected to be hot points, were not when they were checked on Google, Excite and Yahoo search engines. Several sites associated with these issues were explicit in the damnation of government action, but they were not sustained nor supported internationally over any length of time. A few had had no postings for several months. The most active protest sites are associated with Leonard Peltier.7 Most appear to be maintained by American interests.

The most radical active e-sites in Canada were those of the Innu government of Labrador, and those of the Lubicon Nation. Both seem to employ the rhetoric of marginalization and seem to be related to the internet guerrilla movement. In the 1990’s, there has been a strong internet based movement amongst the American and South American indigenous peoples to radicalize the anti-colonialist protests against NAFTA and the imperialism they believe it represents. It saw its greatest success in its support of the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico. It became an international cause and was the first movement that won its victories in cyberspace.8

The cyber rhetoric of the Zapatistas is evident in that of the Labrador Innu, as is the support of the cyber intellectuals. The Innu site at http://www.innu.ca is worth a careful examination. The titles suggest anti colonialist positioning. On the front of the web page there are articles like “Canada’s Tibet: The Killing of the Innu” which on further drilling down was written by Colin Samson, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, James Wilson, author of “The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America” and Jonathan Mazower. Another front page article the WEB page is “An Appeal for Justice for the Innu of Labrador.” While authorship cannot be determined for some of the articles, they uniformly resist the neo-colonialism that they see around them. The Lubicon pages, many hosted on a server at the University of Victoria Department of Fine Art, are poorly designed but the messages are equally sophisticated and uncompromising.9 These sites would all argue that Canada’s history is an artificial construct which marginalizes Aboriginal peoples. Joyce A. Green’s “Towards a DÄtente with History: Confronting Canada’s Colonial Legacy” first published in the International Journal of Canadian Studies which makes this case is placed on one of the key Lubicon sites (Green, 2001).

Chapter 6, continued >