Igloolik crew

Despite Canada’s longstanding concern that it is on the periphery of the U.S., it seems to be in the avant garde of certain kinds of media theory and practice that have much to teach us. Canadian media scholars such as Marshall McLuhan addressed the sensory, temporal, and spatial regimes elaborated by various media forms, while the political economist Harold Innis cautioned us to be wary of the speed of electronic communication and its capacity to centralize cultural and political power. The development of projects at the National Film Board of Canada such as Challenge for Change in the late 1960s, shifted the paradigm, recognizing the possibilities of small format, easy-to-use portable video (then in its early years) to put cameras into the hands of Canada’s marginalized others. Over the 1970s, as satellite-based television made its way into the Canadian Arctic, Inuit people began exploring the possibilities that these combinations of media forms offered for local productions that could be distributed over the vast expanses of Canada’s north. Zacharias Kunuk, a young Inuit man at that time, had the vision to turn these technologies into vehicles for cultural expression of Inuktitut lives and histories, forming a media production group called Igloolik Isuma, turning his friends and family members into a remarkable team of non-professional actors who recreated the stories of the transformations of their own lives over the last century, starting with works such as Qaggig in 1988, and quickly moving on to create the remarkable series entitled Nunavut, which is also the name of the recently formed Inuit-controlled territory where Zach’s home settlement is located. The series Nunavut was a staple not only of TV Northern Canada (the pan-Arctic satellite station that preceded the current first national indigenous cable television station, Aboriginal People’s Television Network) but which also screened at MoMA in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Fast forward to 2001, and the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of Kunuk’s first feature, the epic recreation of a well-known Inuit legend, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner at the Cannes Film Festival; there, this first film ever made in the Inuit language of Inuktitut, received the coveted Camera D’Or award for best first feature, and went on to stunning critical and theatrical success, picking up many more awards along the way. Now Kunuk and his crew are busy shooting their second feature, a Danish co-production entitled, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, based on the writings of the famous Inuit-Danish explorer who traveled throughout the Arctic in the 1920s exploring the transformations of Inuit life that were occurring in the early 20^th century, when Inuit shamans first encountered Christian missionaries. The journals provide the story line for a film that provides an Inuit perspective on that fateful historical encounter. But never content to think conventionally, Kunuk and company have established an incredible web site from the film’s production location, that allows us to follow what’s happening on the film set on a daily basis, while also sending us back to Rasmussen’s journals, and the key characters he met in his journeys through the Arctic. Daily blogs by an “embedded” journalist and (of course) their own anthropologist, provide different perspectives, while quick time movies show us how multiple languages (English, French, Inuktitut, Danish) are negotiated, as well as how props and food are managed in this remote Arctic locale. Pop ups offer a linked glossary for foreign or more arcane words. Background bios on key personnel – on and off screen – illuminate the community-based approach to filmmaking that Kunuk and his partner Norman Cohn have perfected. (My personal favorite is the interview with the lead sled dog, Tooguyuk who “describes” the trials of learning commands in both “Greenlandic” and “Igloolik”, and talks about looking forward to his “girlfriend having puppies so I’m excited to be a daddy”)

The site is beautifully designed in every sense, and presents a remarkable demonstration of how this technology can be successfully “indigenized” (to pick up a theme from the last column I wrote) to help Inuit school kids, college students in New York, Maori colleagues in New Zealand, and many others, learn about their filmmaking, the Arctic, indigenous lives, missionization, and new ways of “understanding media” and its possibilities in the 21^st century.

I recently interviewed Katarina Soukup, website producer, about the project and its origins.

Isuma has wanted for a long, long time to use the Internet to connect the remote Arctic with people around the world, a way to bring people to Igloolik without the extreme expense and inconvenience of traveling here, as well as to allow Inuit to remain in their communities and out on the land without losing touch with the 21st century. One dream is a nomadic media lab/TV station out on the land connected to the Internet. It just has not been technically possible until now. When we go to the remote outpost camp this weekend to shoot exterior scenes, we will still be uploading reports to the website, thanks to a high-speed data satellite phone. And when wireless broadband is launched in Nunavut (anticipated next month), this kind of remote, nomadic computing will be much less expensive.

What are the project’s goals?
The goals with the educational website are to connect people to Inuit culture through the Internet and our films. We have been creating materials for the educational market for about 2 or 3 years (e.g. the Isuma Inuit Culture Kit), and the site is another step in this direction. The Rasmussen micro site and the live from the set are building blocks of a large site that will be launched in fall 2005. The website targets youth ages 12 and up, as well as their teachers and parents. The project employs an innovative technical infrastructure to deliver to the world priceless Inuit cultural content, such as interactive e-learning activities, video-on-demand, customizable teacher resources, and Inuktitut language lessons. It will be a platform for North-South communication and collaboration. In addition to educating the public about Inuit culture, another goal of the site is to develop a youth and educational market for our films.

When Atanarjuat came out, so many people asked us “how did you make this film in the Arctic?!”. So, for the LIVE FROM THE SET component, we wanted to invite the world to be our “virtual” on-set guest and experience (as much as possible) the process of making a film in the high Arctic with an Inuit production collective.

Who are the producers of the site?
We have a team in Igloolik and Montreal. In Montreal, our production manager Natalie Melançon is coordinating our graphic designers, programmers, and integration specialists. In Igloolik, I’m coordinating the team of reporters, which does the daily coverage. In Igloolik, the team is made up of about 9 members: 3 videographers, 1 audio reporter, 1 photographer, and 3 writers who do the daily blogs. Most of our team is from Igloolik, including 8 youth trainees from the community who are learning about media production while we make this website and feature film.

Note: Atanarjuat and other 23 feature films by indigenous directors will be part of First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film, a groundbreaking showcase at MoMA in New York City and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. beginning May 12, 2005. For schedules and further information please visit First Nations First Features.

Image credit
1. Igloolik crew

Links
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
First Nations First Features
Igloolik Isuma
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: Live From the Set!

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Today, as I write, the United Nations is inaugurating a long awaited program, a “Digital Solidarity Fund”, that will underwrite initiatives that address “the uneven distribution and use of new information and communication technologies” and “enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the information society”. What this might mean in practice – which digital technologies might make a significant difference and for whom and with what resources — is still an open and contentious question. Debates about The Fund at the first meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December 2003, are symptomatic of the complexity of “digital divide” issues that will no doubt be central to second phase of the information summit scheduled for November 2005 in Tunisia.

Terms such as the Digital Age and the Digital Divide, continue to shape our sense of the world and drive markets for ever greater consumption of the latest digital technologies. Yet, according to statistics from the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, only 12% of the world is currently “wired” and only 16% have access to telephone land lines (though cell phone technology is rapidly spreading). Digerati may see those numbers as opportunities for new markets. But for an anthropologist who has spent a good portion of her career looking at the uptake of media in remote parts of the world, the unexamined First-Worldism that has underwritten assumptions about the digital age and its inequalities is discouraging. I am not suggesting that the massive shifts in communication, sociality, knowledge production, and politics that the internet enables are simply irrelevant to the world’s poor and remote communities. My concern here is with how the language smuggles in a set of assumptions that paper over cultural and economic differences in the way things digital may be taken up, if at all, in radically different contexts, and thus serve to further insulate thinking against recognition of alterity that different kinds of media worlds present.

Some iconic cases might provide counterpoints of hopeful possibilities, in a futuristic nostalgic mode. In an article in the NY Times (1/27/04) entitled Digital Pony Express links up Cambodia, James Brooks, describes the work of MIT’s Media Lab and the American Assistance for Cambodia group in O Siengle, Cambodia, a village of less than 800 people on the edge of the forest, a location that is emblematic of life for millions of Asians. Through the Motoman project, the village connects its new elementary school to the Internet. Since they have no electricity or phones, the system is powered by solar panels. Once a day, a ‘Motoman’ rides his red motorcycle with a Wi-Fi chip, around the school, creating a temporary Internet hot spot, enabling e-mail to be up and downloaded. He then takes the data to the provincial capital where a satellite dish allows bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world.

Tellingly, this story was in the Business Section, suggesting that part of its charm is the possibility of new markets. In such stories, the Digital Divide, even as it wants to call well-intentioned concern to inequities, invokes neo-developmentalist language which assumes that less privileged cultural enclaves with little or no access to digital resources – from the South Bronx to the global south — will simply be “left behind” without such attention from epicenters such as the MIT Media Lab.

Remarkably, there are new and unexpected allies to my concerns. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, once the personification of new media evangelism, had, by 2000, demonstrated a remarkable change of heart, offering a serious critique of the idea of the digital divide and its capacity to blind people to the reality of the conditions of the globe’s poorest people. As he put it in a speech in 2000 at a conference entitled Creating Digital Dividends:

O.K., you want to send computers to Africa, what about food and electricity — those computers aren’t going to be that valuable. The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, “my children are dying, what can you do?” They’re not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.

Rather than giving out computers, Gates’ priorities for his Foundation are now with health care, in particular the development and distribution of vaccines which account for two-thirds of the grants made.

In their current cover story, no less an advocate for the spread of free enterprise than The Economist features a rethinking of the term (and terms of) The Real Digital Divide, along with a compelling photo of a young African boy holding an ersatz cell phone made of mud to his ear Its lead opinion piece, states that “the debate over the digital divide is founded on a myth — that plugging poor countries into the internet will help them to become rich rapidly … So even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and cause a computer to appear in every household on earth, it would not achieve very much: a computer is not useful if you have no food or electricity and cannot read.”

Ideas about what the digital age might offer look different from the perspective of people struggling to manage to make ends meet on a daily basis. Some qualitative studies suggest that radio and cell phones may be the forms of digital technology that make the difference, once basic needs are addressed. It seems that terms like the digital divide too easily foreclose discussion about what the stakes are for those who are out of power. Rather than imagining that we know the answers, clearly, we need to keep listening the 88% of the earth’s population that is on the unwired side of the so-called digital divide.

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It is 2005 and the term “The Digital Age” is as naturalized for many as a temporal marking of the dominance of a certain kind of technological regime (”the digital”) as is “the Paleolithic’s” association with certain kinds of stone tools. What does “the digital age” feel and look like in indigenous communities in remote regions of the world where access to telephone land lines can still be difficult? The dominant phrase invented to encompass such concerns — the digital divide — assumes that such cultural enclaves are simply waiting, endlessly, to catch up, yet inevitably falling further behind in the techno-imaginary universe that seems to further stratify the world, despite the utopian promises of the digerati of the possibilities of a 21st century McLuhanesque global village.

Recent developments give some insight into what it might actually mean for indigenous subjects Going Native on the Net, to borrow the title of Kyra Landzelius’ forthcoming edited book. In this column, I focus on a new project developed by activist lawyer and documentary maker David Vadiveloo in collaboration with Aboriginal youth in Central Australia. UsMob is Australia’s first Aboriginal children’s television series and interactive website, made with town camp children living on the outskirts of the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia. On the site, users interact with the challenges and daily lives of Harry, Della, Charlie and Jacquita and their Aboriginal bush community friends in the town camp of Hidden Valley, following multi-path storylines, activating video and text diaries, forums, movies and games that offer a virtual experience of the camp and surrounding deserts, and uploading their own video stories. The site, which is in English and Arrernte with English subtitles, will launch at the Adelaide Film Festival on February 25, 2005 and simultaneously on ABC TV and ABC online.

The project had its origins in requests from traditional elders in the Arrernte community in Central Australia to David Vadiveloo, who first worked with that community as their lawyer in their 1996 historic Native Title claim victory. Switching gears since then to media activism, Vadiveloo has made six documentaries with people in the area, including the award winning works Trespass (2002), Beyond Sorry (2003) and Bush Bikes (2001). UsMob is the first indigenous project to receive production funding under a new initiative from the Australian Film Commission and ABC New Media and Digital Services Broadband Production Initiative (BPI); it received additional support from the Adelaide Film Festival, Telstra and the South Australian Film Corporation.

The UsMob project was motivated by Vadiveloo’s concern to use media to develop cross-cultural lines of communication for kids in the camps.

After ten years of listening to many Arrernte families in Town Camps and remote areas, Vadiveloo explains in an interview, I am trying to create a dynamic communication bridge that has been opened by the Arrernte kids of Alice Springs with an invitation extended to kids worldwide to play, to share, and to engage with story themes that are common to all young people but are delivered through UsMob in a truly unique cultural and physical landscape.

In keeping with community wishes, Vadiveloo needed to create a project that was not fictional. Elders were clear: they did not want community members referred to as “actors” — they were community participants in stories that reflected real life and real voices that they wanted heard. To accomplish that, Vadiveloo held workshops to develop scripts with over 70 non-actor Town Camp residents, who were paid for their participation. The topics they raised range from Aboriginal traditional law, ceremony, and hunting, to youth substance abuse and other Aboriginal health issues. Building bush bikes is the focus of one of the two UsMob games, while the second one requires learning bush skills as players figure out how to survive in the outback.

Producer Heather Croall and Interactive Producer Chris Joyner were integral partners for Vadiveloo. Apart from raising finance, they wrote the project together with Vadiveloo and then final scripts were written by indigenous screenwriter Danielle McLean. Camera work was by Allan Collins, the indigenous award winning cinematographer and Alice Springs resident. The final project has been approved by traditional owners and the Indigenous organization, Tangentyere Council.

In creating this project, Vadiveloo hoped to create a television series about and by Aboriginal youth, raising issues relevant to them, as well as an online program that could engage these young people to spend time online acquiring some of the skills necessary to be computer literate. He was particularly concerned to develop an alternative to the glut of single shooter games online, and the constant diet of violence, competition, and destruction that characterize the games they were exposed to in town.

When kids play and build together, Vadiveloo explains, they are learning about community and consequence and that is what I wanted to see in the project.

And rather than assuming that the goal is that Aboriginal children in Central Australia catch up to the other side of the digital divide, based on someone else’s terms, he wanted to help build a project that dignified their cultural concerns. This is charmingly but emphatically clear in the first encounter with the UsMob home page which invites you in but, as it would be if you visited them in Alice, notifies you that you need a permit to visit:

Everyone who wants to play with us on the full UsMob website will need a permit. It’s the same as if you came to Alice Springs and wanted to visit me and my family, you’d have a get a permit to come onto the Town Camp. Once you have a permit you will be able to visit us at any time to chat, play games, learn about Aboriginal life, and share stories.

We love going out bush and we’re really looking forward to showing you what it’s like in Central Australia. We’ll email you whenever we add a new story to the website. We really hope you can add your stories to the website cos we’d love to learn about your life too.

UsMob and Hidden Valley suggested another perspective on the digital age that invites kids from “elsewhere” to come over and play on their side.

Links:
UsMob
Adelaide Film Festival
Aborigine News

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It’s one of those unseasonably warm Saturdays in November,a beautiful autumn day in New York City that competes with the films being shown in darkened rooms during the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival. Staunching my impulse to turn into Central Park,I enter the American Museum of Natural History, the site of the festival. At the 77th St. entrance, I am greeted by the famous replica of a Kwakwaka’wakw war canoe,then walk past the towering totem poles and dioramas that punctuate the cavernous space of the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. This is the Museum’s oldest exhibition, based on its first major field expedition, made just over a century ago and led by Franz Boas, known as the “father of American anthropology”. This seems the right pathway to take to the screening I am attending, part of the festival’s focus on Native Voices, featuring new media work from Native communities from the American Southwest and the Northwest Coast, complementing the Museum’s most recent exhibition,Totems to Turquoise: Native Jewelry from the Northwest Coast and the Southwest.

A far cry from the mute, traditionally clothed figures in the life groups created by Boas, the indigenous producers in this session have a lot to say to each other and the rest of us; to do that, they have turned to contemporary media forms and a range of distribution strategies. The work they showed ranged from Native Pride (2004), small format rap style video youth media shown on Seattle’s KCTS, to Rez-Robics for Couch Potato Skins (2003) a comedy with native actors who also delivers deadly serious health information on videos that circulate free of charge in “Indian Country”; to the New York premiere of Raven Tales: How Raven Stole the Sun (2004), the first of a series of experiments in digital animation by Simon James (Kwakwaka’wakw)and Chris Klentz (Cherokee), that create new versions of centuries-old stories to be shown across Canada on that country’s Aboriginal People’s Television Network.

Mead Festival curators, Elaine Charnov and Kathy Brew, wanted the program to reflect the range of work coming out of indigenous communities, from local community-based work, to health initiatives, to more high-end productions that are making it onto the international film circuit. Native Pride, a rap-influenced short digital video piece, was made by a group of 25 Swinomish youth who came into Seattle from their reservation to work on Native Lens, a new program made with the 911 Media Arts Center, and shown on Seattle’s KCTS. For the kids who made it, perhaps its most important venue has been its screening on reservation cable TV, where their poetic declarations about their dreams and identities have the greatest resonance.

Rez Robics features two prominent Native actors, Elaine Miles (Utamilla), known for her work in Northern Exposure and Smoke Signals, and Drew LaCapa, the Apache comedian, who calls himself “300 pounds of love”. Together they draw successfully on the understated and self-deprecating Indian humor associated with “the rez” to help address the deadly epidemic of diabetes facing their communities. In this case, with their public health goal of spreading the word, video’s low cost and easy replicability is a plus. As they point out, there is no FBI warning preceding the programs; rather, piracy is invited in the opening title: “Please make copies and give them to your friends and relatives.”

The premiere of the 22 minute, Raven Tales, was the hit of the afternoon, and testimony to the curators’ commitment to showcasing innovative animation works. This work in particular was selected for the way it has brought to life the famous Northwest coast myths from Kwakwaka’wakw, the Squamish, and Haida peoples — bringing the comical raven trickster figure to life, along with eagle, frog, and the first humans. It includes voices ranging from well-known native actors such as Evan Adams of Smoke Signals fame to the voice of Hereditary Chief Robert Joseph. Cutting across both centuries and generations, it uses the playful spirit of animation to visualize and extend the lives of these myths. These stories and the distinctive look of Northwest Coast design have been proven, as producer Simon James joked during the Q & A, by “10,000 years of local market research”.

Spicing up these stark and complex traditional stories with some contemporary humor and the wonders of digital animation is always a risk. But, clearly it was a risk worth taking, judging by the collective gasp of the audience when the murky darkness of the Myth Time is suddenly (and digitally) transformed from barren smoky greys to brilliant greens, the result of the Raven’s theft of the gift of light, and its release into the world. Raven Tales premiered last month in Los Angeles at the National Geographic’s All Roads Film Festival, which gave the project completion funds, the only digital animation in that project. It is slated to air on Canada’s APTN aboriginal TV network in February 2005.

At the end of the Q & A session, the animator Simon James’ father, a Kwakwaka’wakw artist, who had been one of the elders who helped in the ceremonial opening of the Totems to Turquoise show a few weeks earlier, came on stage with his drum, which was embellished with the distinctive raven design. Inviting today’s storytellers onto the stage, he sang, Wiping the Tears, to remember those who have come before and are gone, and to praise the work of this new generation. When Pam Belgarde, the Chippewa woman who produced the Rez Robics tape came up, he dressed her in the traditional black and red regalia, a stunning full-length button cape with appliqués of wild roses, and a regal fur hat.

As he draped the cape across her shoulders, he explained: “When we meet someone we are honored to meet, we dress them to show that we are willing to go cold in order to keep our guests warm.” Simon began to beat the drum, and asked us to look at the empty seats in the theater and think of those who came before; the media producers on stage lowered their eyes. At the conclusion of his song, he addressed the audience and said, “All our ceremonies need witnesses. And as witnesses, we ask you to be part of that tradition, and go and share with others what you have seen today.” The path from the canoe to the century-old totem poles to this room — and between very old and very new media — suddenly became very clear.

Links
Aboriginal Peoples Television Network
Margaret Mead Film Festival
Reviews of The Rez

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