other sights

‘Digital Natives’

Between ads for beer and pop music, an elec­tronic bill­board in Van­cou­ver beams chal­leng­ing mes­sages by and about First Nations.

by Clint Burn­ham, April 5, 2011, TheTyee.ca

Orig­i­nal Arti­cle | Down­load (PDF — 934KB)

If you’re cross­ing Vancouver’s Bur­rard Bridge and glance at the elec­tronic bill­board that rises at its Kit­si­lano end, you may notice some­thing dif­fer­ent. Amidst the Guin­ness and Jack FM ads will flash the occa­sional mes­sage on a red back­ground. Some of them will seem to be about native issues:

“First Nations. We are not a stereo­type. Not gone… not lost! Still connected.”

Or: “Riot 1492.”

Or: “My great-grandfather hid his cer­e­mo­nial regalia in a cave that we have long since lost track of. Who wants to go spelunk­ing? #pot­latch ban.”

The last one gives us a bit of a clue — “#pot­latch” is a hash­tag, how you pro­vide a hot link in Twit­ter. The text mes­sages that will be up on the bill­board for the month of April are part of Dig­i­tal Natives, a pub­lic art project that Lorna Brown and I are curat­ing, bring­ing together con­tri­bu­tions by 30 native and non-native writ­ers and artists, from Van­cou­ver and from across North America.

Dig­i­tal Natives is also being pre­viewed as part of the WE: Van­cou­ver exhi­bi­tion at the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery (and this arti­cle is part of a Tyee series sam­pling voices from that exhibit.)

In what fol­lows in this piece, I’d like to talk a bit about the process by which we devel­oped the project, a bit about some of what we’ve learned about issues of tech­nol­ogy and First Nations lan­guages dur­ing that process, and a bit about what we think this all means.

An idea jogged loose

I first came up with the idea for the project in early 2010, when I was out for a jog around False Creek and ran across the Bur­rard Street bridge. The elec­tronic bill­board was newly installed then, and its size and posi­tion appealed to me — why not put a Twit­ter feed onto the sign? It seemed so easy at the time…

I use Twit­ter a lot, much more than Face­book — I like Twitter’s stream­lined feel — just a feed of mes­sages and links, none of the extra garbage you get with Face­book — no com­ments, no Far­mville, no invi­ta­tions to play Mafia Wars. And I also use it in my teach­ing, in a class I teach at SFU on auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Twitter’s a dig­i­tal form of mem­oir, a kind of 21st cen­tury auto­bi­og­ra­phy. And I think I like Twit­ter too, because as a writer its com­pressed 140 char­ac­ter limit appeals to me — it’s a kind of discipline.

And I liked the assorted con­tro­ver­sies of the site — the bike lane ker­fuf­fles about the bridge, but also the con­flicted responses peo­ple have to the sign itself. Adver­tis­ing on native land — the sign is on Squamish land — seems to give rise to all sorts of con­fu­sion and, some­times, out­right racism. It’s like non-native peo­ple don’t want to be reminded there still is native land around us. Or that native peo­ple shouldn’t use their land to make money.

So I got together with Van­cou­ver artist and cura­tor Lorna Brown, with whom I’ve worked before, and we brought the project to Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a local pub­lic art orga­ni­za­tion. We began by putting together a dream team of artists and writ­ers. Avant-garde writ­ers inter­ested in new media forms, like Michael Turner, Lisa Robert­son, Jeff Derk­sen and Larissa Lai. Abo­rig­i­nal writ­ers and artists who work at the inter­sec­tion of pol­i­tics and advo­cacy, like Marie Annharte Baker, Peter Morin, Ray­mond Boisjoly, Edgar Heap of Birds and Mar­i­anne Nichol­son. Artists and writ­ers from Kam­loops (Chris Bose), New Mex­ico (the Post­com­mod­ity col­lec­tive), Boul­der (Lori Emer­son) and Min­neapo­lis (Emily Fedoruk). (You can find more info on the con­trib­u­tors here.) Every­one was excited, and ideas started fly­ing through emails and tweets.

We worked it up, applied for fund­ing — first from the Canada Coun­cil, and then win­ning a com­mis­sion from the City of Van­cou­ver as part of their 125th anniver­sary pub­lic art projects for 2011. We also assem­bled a crack­er­jack team of tech­ni­cians, because we knew that if we were going to approach Astral Media — who run the bill­board for the Squamish nation — we had to have prod­uct that looked good and fit into their specifications.

Colin Grif­fiths and Judith Steed­man designed the look of our mes­sages — the tem­plate — as well as their dig­i­tal forms. Deanne Achong put together the project’s web­site. We also knew that we wanted a blog ele­ment, an online pres­ence to make a local project acces­si­ble from anywhere.

Fonts of wisdom

As the mes­sages started com­ing in, we started to work on get­ting them translated.

Some con­trib­u­tors’ mes­sages — like Chris Bose’s “stiʔtíʔxʷ kn qə wíʔ snk y ép: I believe in Jesus Coy­ote” were already in a mix­ture of Eng­lish and native lan­guages (in this case nɬeʔkepmxcín or Thompson).

Work­ing with UBC’s Museum of Anthro­pol­ogy, we con­tacted Deb­o­rah Jacobs at the Squamish nation, (Peter Jacobs did the trans­la­tion into Sḵwx wú7mesh snichim) and Elder Larry Grant of the Musqueam nation (for trans­la­tion into hǝn’q’ǝmin’ǝm’). Mar­i­anne Nicol­son and her mother, Glo­ria Nicol­son han­dled trans­la­tions into Kwak’wala.

What we were inter­ested in here was, to put it bluntly, the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive sides of the rela­tion between native lan­guages and mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. On the one hand, inno­va­tions like pod­cast­ing mean that oral lan­guages in dan­ger of dis­ap­pear­ing can be pre­served and even dis­sem­i­nated. The Squamishlanguage.com pod­casts, com­piled by Dustin Rivers, for exam­ple, teach a word a day in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim, or the Squamish lan­guage. Such efforts are amaz­ing ways of meld­ing tra­di­tional knowl­edge and 21st cen­tury technology.

But there still remains the “dig­i­tal divide.” This means every­thing from ques­tions of access to tech­nol­ogy to how dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy deals with tra­di­tional cul­tures. Many rural bands, like rural areas in gen­eral, lack broad­band access or wifi — a mat­ter of infrastructure.

ut, as we learned in get­ting mes­sages ready for the bill­board, there are still real dif­fi­cul­ties in find­ing a font that will carry all of the dia­crit­ics that come in local First Nations lan­guages. Fonts for Ara­bic (like the Twit­ter feeds I fol­low from Egypt since the Jan. 25 demon­stra­tions) or Korean aren’t hard to find. But ones that will show words like otłasa (in Kwak’wala) or lésiw̓ilh (in Squamish) proved to be a real chal­lenge for our tech guru (and “art whis­perer” to the stars of the art world) Grif­fiths. As he explained it to me recently in an email from Sin­ga­pore, the font site “Lan­guagegeek was the ulti­mate source for the look of the trans­la­tions — the diac­trit­ics and font speci­fici­ties are the result of enor­mous labour by that team which ulti­mately ren­ders this aspect of the Dig­i­tal Natives project pos­si­ble, once I got my head around the intri­ca­cies of the key­board map­ping ver­sus font style ver­sus lan­guage choices.”

Colo­nial colloquialisms

So that’s the tech side; there was also an inter­est­ing con­cep­tual gap between Eng­lish and First Nations lan­guages. After a dis­cus­sion with Mar­i­anne Nichol­son about the trans­la­tions into Kwak’wala, Lorna Brown wrote about some of this on the Dig­i­tal Natives blog, not­ing the dif­fi­culty in ren­der­ing Chris­t­ian Bok’s mes­sage, which only uses the vowel “i,” or Henry Tsang’s tweet, which uses acronyms like “OMG” and “2D4.” But pos­si­bly the most symp­to­matic dif­fi­culty came in trans­lat­ing Amer­i­can Indian artist Edgar Heap of Birds’ “IMPERIAL CANADA AWARDED SEX ABUSE TO NATIVE YOUTH BY THE BLACK ROBES NOW PROUDLY BESTOWS BRONZE SILVER GOLD MEDALS WITH INDIAN IMAGE” — as Brown notes, “the only non-English con­cepts” that could be trans­lated are “gift” and “pride.” So this is very impor­tant — Heap of Birds’ polit­i­cal mes­sage is almost entirely writ­ten in the (con­cep­tual) lan­guage of the col­o­nizer. His work is very pow­er­ful (he loves using the phrase “Impe­r­ial Canada” and does so in a poster work that I walk by every day at SFU), and yet it owes a debt to that colo­nial lan­guage. Heap of Birds’ cri­tique is untrans­lat­able from English.

The his­tory of the site itself is a fas­ci­nat­ing study of con­flict­ing forces and inter­ests. His­to­rian Susan Roy chron­i­cles the shift­ing bound­aries of the ter­ri­tory, in images and words.

What’s the point?

So what are we doing with all of this? Partly Dig­i­tal Natives is about start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion in pub­lic about what pub­lic space means — pub­lic art that isn’t just for the pub­lic to see, but (poten­tially) to create.

In Feb­ru­ary, with the (mas­sive) help of Phil Djwa and Kristin Kozuback, I coor­di­nated work­shops with Abo­rig­i­nal youth in Van­cou­ver, to get their par­tic­i­pa­tion. These kids saw a direct polit­i­cal mes­sage as what they wanted to con­vey — two of their tweets, for instance, are about pay­ing more atten­tion to what mar­gin­al­ized youth need: “Keep resources and pro­grams like EASY and OASIS going strong in com­mu­ni­ties” and “Pro­grams like the East Side Abo­rig­i­nal Space for Youth (EASY) shouldn’t be shut down so we can have the sup­port to suc­ceed in life.”

Halfway through April we will start adding tweets that have come in from the pub­lic in response to the project. Any­one can tweet us a mes­sage @diginativ, or post a com­ment here or on our Face­book wall.

We will select up to 30 pub­lic mes­sages to be included for broadcast.

A free pub­lic sym­po­sium about the project will be hosted by the Museum of Anthro­pol­ogy on May 1, with many of the con­trib­u­tors par­tic­i­pat­ing in round­table con­ver­sa­tions, fol­lowed by a clos­ing celebration.

With Dig­i­tal Natives, we’ve taken back — tem­porar­ily — some visual space in the city for mes­sages from indi­vid­u­als, to dis­play a dia­logue from this city and beyond. A more com­pli­cated process than I first thought — like the pub­lic space we share.

And why not use pub­lic adver­tiz­ing for direct mes­sages — as well as poetic ones — for mes­sages that encour­age a dia­logue? Why not take back our spaces, our pub­lic spaces?