R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM Workshops 2006, LNCS 4277, pp. 237 – 246, 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

Incorporating Indigenous World Views in Community Informatics

Larry Stillman1 and Barbara Craig2

1 Monash University, Australia

2 Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand {larrys@fastmail.fm, Barbara.Craig@vuw.ac.nz}

Abstract. This paper aims to provoke further theorising and action by the Community Informatics community about working with Indigenous communities. In particular, we present research undertaken with the Indigenous Maori and Pakeha (European) community in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a case study to learn from. Maori are of interest because of their engagement with, and speaking out, about ICTs. We suggest that particular attention needs to be paid from an ethical perspective in working with diversity in order that research and action are undertaken that benefits both the researcher and participant community. Community Informatics would benefit from more attention to articulating its assumptions about the nature of research and action with cultural diversity in its role as a bridge between diverse communities and the design and implementation of Information and Communication Technologies.

Keywords: Community technology; community informatics; Maoris and technology; Kaupapa Maori research (Indigenous Knowledge); New Zealand and technology.

1 Introduction

In June 2005, a number of community informatics researchers and practitioners came together in the UK to discuss qualitative research issues in Community Informatics (CI) 1 . A strong concern was expressed about the power imbalance between the researcher and the researched, including work with minority and Indigenous communities. It was felt that such concerns needed further, in-depth exploration, in order that CI develop a more sophisticated and ethical approach to action and research with non-Western communities, given the history of exploitation of Indigenous people through all sorts of research and practice projects that have frequently benefited the researcher far more than the researched [1].

This problem is further complicated by Western researchers inadequately representing the experience and worldview of the ‘other’ in their research accounts, an experience well-known to many Indigenous peoples around the world. CI cannot stand outside of this historical experience. The history of iniquitous relationships

1 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/events/ci2005/pmwiki.php/Together/Summary#theme1 (Accessed: 1

October, 2005).

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means that we should seek a form of CI practice that does do not imply dependency upon, or patronisation because of researcher or practitioner expertise, but instead, partnership with. It is for Indigenous people to decide what they wish to do with ICTs.

But how we go about this is not well-understood. Research about human actors in social-technical systems is well-advanced, for example, in the corporate world. Orlikowski has convincingly shown that the take-up of ICTs is closely linked to cultures and sub-cultures in corporations, and that these have powerful agency [2, 3]. Similar studies of Indigenous communities or lesser known forms of social organisation such as the welfare sector in developed countries are not so common [4].

Similar concerns have been raised by Salvador and Sherry in an account of their ethnographic work for Intel in South America and elsewhere. They spoke of the need to have a deeper understanding and ‘enliven the lived experience’ of the ‘local’ in the intersection between ‘people and places’ in order that technology design has real meaning in local contexts [5]. In addition, a draft Ethics Statement for CI including research with Indigenous communities is being written2. Such statements should include a specific reference to the need for developing cultural safety and cultural competence. Cultural safety and cultural respect are more than recognition of the ‘other’ on the part of the expert or practitioner: they actively partner knowledge and skills held by the different parties (such as the researcher and members of an Indigenous people)[6]. This paper is intended as a contribution to partnerships with Indigenous communities as they relate to localised social-technical opportunities3.

2 The World of the New Zealand Maori

New Zealand’s geographic isolation, small population (just over 4 million people), and ecological and economic fragility have prompted considerable interest in ICTs from its national government as a means to use ICTs for building a better society and to more effectively connect it to the rest of the world [7, 8]. Aotearoa is one of the last places on earth to be settled by people. Maori arrived there from eastern Polynesia about 800 years ago, and European colonisation only took hold in the latter half of the eighteenth century. New Zealanders are thus conscious of their origins in ways that are not found elsewhere in the world and for many Pakeha (European origin) New Zealanders, and immigrants from other cultures, their life in these islands in the Pacific is increasingly lived as a multicultural encounter with the values and heritage of the Maori, the tangata whenua4, the ‘people of the land’.

2 See (Draft) Code of Ethics for Community Informatics Researchers, http:// vancouvercommunity.

net/lists/arc/ciresearchers/2006-07/msg00024.html, 27 July 2006. 3 We do not speak with a definitive or authentic or authoritative voice for Maori. Furthermore,

this paper betrays our ideals by not being the product of a much more collaborative process with our interviews and fieldwork participants. Our paper should be therefore regarded as the introduction to, rather than end-point of ongoing research and action and a step in our and the CI community’s learning.

4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangata_Whenua

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Te Tiriti, the Treaty of Waitangi5 (1840), in which particular rights were granted, serves as a tool ‘by which we can measure the benefits, and make use of existing structures within Maori societies [9, 10]. However, the Treaty guarantees were never upheld and Pakeha dominance has persisted in many arenas of social life, including, of special interest here, the conduct of community-based research and action. This has lead to the development of a particular set of protocols for research called Kaupapa Maori research (Indigenous Knowledge). This challenges traditional Western research practices in its stance of being collectivist and participatory, and in which the subjects of research and action have a strong and determining voice [11].

3 The Tuhoe Tribe as a Case Study6

Maori are users of ICTs, even though lower direct ownership levels of computers are more a problem of cost and low socio-economic status than attitude to technology [12]. In the recent New Zealand government statement about community connectivity, it is made clear that the term ‘community’ takes on special meanings in Aotearoa and that technology has a powerful role in maintaining traditional social forms, as well as forging new relationships between Pakeha (European inhabitants) and Maori and other cultural groups:

ICT can enhance our sense of identity and connection to a particular place or group. It can extend services to isolated communities or those excluded from full participation in the life of the community. It can enable people to become more involved in democratic processes and decision-making at all levels. The government recognises the vital role that community, voluntary, and Māori organisations and iwi play in New Zealand society. ‘Community’ means more than geographic communities. The term includes traditional associations such as whānau and hapū, ethnicity or occupation, and virtual communities of interest or practice [7: 33].

Recent New Zealand government policies include extending broadband through experimental technologies into remote rural communities and linking remote Maori boarding schools through video so that all members of an iwi can be connected (whether living in urban settings or on tribal marae) and be involved in decision-making about their futures. Funding for remote and under-served community broadband is available through the Digital Strategy’s Broadband Challenge Fund. Recent funding includes the Tuhoe community network.

Tuhoe are a Maori iwi (or tribe), whose traditional land (Tuhoe rohe) is in the eastern part of New Zealand’s North Island. Tuhoe is a confederation of 25 hapu (extended families or subtribes) and 40 marae (formal meeting spaces) linked by 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi 6 This research was conducted by Craig and others as part of the 2020 Trust Computers in

Homes project which gave 200 Tuhoe whanau (family) computers, training and internet connections as a first step in the digitising of mataruanga Tuhoe, that is, Maori research and resources including physical, oral, literary, artistic, and other means (see http://www. tuhoematauranga.org.nz/).

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whakapapa (geneology). They have a strong Maori identity, including use of the Maori language. At the 2001 NZ census, 25,000 lived in the tribal areas, with another 25,000 widely dispersed globally and throughout other New Zealand communities. Traditional communities are sprinkled throughout a remote, rural mountainous area with very poor infrastructure and access to services such as telephone and electricity. Yet ICTs play an important role. Interviews with residents show how Webcams, MSN and chatrooms are all used for communication.

My uncle wants to set up a chatroom with all my cousins I haven’t seen or heard from since they were like babies (sic). I am starting to learn how to do that.

These communities are economically depressed and geographically isolated, but with a very strong local identity and culture. ICTs in these communities are tools for connecting tribal members so that all Tuhoe can be engaged in local decision-making and knowledge can be better shared. ICTs are also powerful tools for maintaining identity, culture and language and to place Tuhoe firmly on the digital landscape. Tuhoe seek alliances with various Pakeha agencies such as universities and government to appropriate the benefits of global communications for their peoples collectively. Through such partnerships they have digitised their collective history, installed WIFI across the valleys and put videoconferencing in the schools and computers with internet access into the homes. Interviews with families with home computers show this collective and reciprocal arrangement rather than individual ownership of ICTS in these communities, in contrast to the individualism and private arrangements that are more familiar to Pakeha.

The whole community comes over to use it. They play cards. They found this computer game and they put it on and gradually the game was killing everything on the machine.

There are just three of us at home. I have got a few whanau [family] boys and stuff that come around. Usually while I am at work they will come over during the day and thrash it [the computer] to bits.

Intergenerational learning is another collective way of interacting with technology in these communities. Grandparents traditionally spend a lot of time with their mokopuna, their grandchildren. This younger generation have lots of access to ICTs in school and grandparents depend on their mokopunas’ help after school with using the internet for finding information or using their email. An interview with a school principal suggested that intergenerational learning with ICTs could help foster the Maori language and culture in the young generation at the same time as bringing tribal elders up to speed with new technologies.

We had a couple of grandparents online but they gave up because their helpers – the young ones- were moving too fast. If the language of communication was Maori that will slow them down. Most of our children are not bad at both languages but our young parents have a bit of a problem and come here to school for Maori classes….our grandparents are best with Maori.

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4 Other Perspectives

For a researcher or practitioner concerned to work effectively with Maori, kin relationship and connection, what is called whanaungatanga, are at the core of any process of engagement. Bishop, a proponent of Kaupapa Maori research, suggests that establishing a research group as if it were an extended family is one form of utilising what he refers to as the ‘treasures of the ancestors’, the collective wisdom of the ages, that guides and monitors everyday practice [11: 128]. This approach to research is about re-creating the infrastructure of reciprocity and relationship in a culturally appropriate way.

While the utilisation of such a framework, and particularly, the process of engagement with community could be dismissed as distracting and time-consuming background noise that inhibits ‘efficient’ Western-style research, they are clearly real and relevant factors with strong agency and with which the researcher must engage. In fact, the process of reflexive practice and empathetic engagement with the research partner/s (called by Giddens the double-hermeneutic [13]), is integral to qualitative participatory research but here it located within the Maori world view, not that of the researcher.

This collectivist approach is not confined to academics, but is common practice for Maori in their communities in New Zealand. In other conversations conducted for a set of research interviews in New Zealand7, both Maori and Pakeha described very particular world views. Maori concepts and words were used to describe the world view, affiliations, genealogical and historical and cultural connectedness that people have with their communities and how ICTs are part of that world. In particular, the importance of genealogy and collective, rather than individual affiliation and identity were emphasised. Thus, a Maori interviewee with a high level of online skill said that:

You know, as Maori we all have responsibilities as well, so we all have a responsibility to our families, our immediate families, but to the wider community. So if you’re educated, your responsibility and the expectation is that you will contribute to your lives, to your land, to the development of your hapu, yes your tribe. Now that’s the expectation …we’re constantly [in demand], because we don’t have a lot of people that are skilled in those provinces, those of us who have those skills are expected to share them.

This orientation towards a community, rather than individual use of technology is also addressed by comments from another interviewee. Whanaungatanga is the term used by one Pakeha interviewee in discussing her technology work with Maori people:

It’s tied up with trust, it’s a safe place for them to come to, it’s familiar, somewhere where the learning, particularly out in the Maori rural areas, because the learning operates on what we call whanaungatanga, whanau is family…It is the act of doing it, it’s the inclusive family relationship that

7 These were conducted as part of Stillman’s PhD research.

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goes with learning, so that it’s not about the individual student coming along to class, to learn, bugger you, I’m just going to do what I want to do, it’s all about learning as a group, and the success of the school is the success of the group.

And another person said:

[P]eople are taught about IT in the individual sense, so when they talk

about user needs, they’ll go and study how individuals work. But say if we are going to have a plan to provide, I don’t know, broadband to a Maori, it’s not about individuals is it? It’s about how does the collective get their service? And I mean talking to them, obviously all of them, or developing tools that are meaningful for a group, and not just an individual, you see.

Another, non-Maori interviewee, experienced in community development work with particular disadvantaged communities, said that:

Tertiary [i.e. university] education has become about bums on seats, there is a need to use Maori terminology. Awhi is the word, awhi, is to nurture, when you awhi someone, you nurture and mentor them along…there’s a lot of awhi, awhi, in that process of Maori learning, and why [Technology] Project has been embraced a lot, by the Maori community and schools, because as much as possible we go in alongside them, and work with how they are, and how they want to work, rather than imposing something from the top down, you poor people, this will be good for you. You’d get short shrift out the door.

At least one Maori writer with links into both academia and community action has articulated a particular, Maori theory of technology, taking account of cultural issues and the history of exploitation, assimilation, and racism. Interestingly, her definition of information technology is one that is beyond the technical artefact, but refers to cultural processes and actions as well:

Definitions of information technology need not be limited to those found in information technology journals. Potentially, any means of storing, analysing and disseminating information can be included – even our minds. By ignoring the jargon and focusing on this idea, it is clear that Maori concepts such as matauranga and hinengaro can encapsulate (and enhance) what we believe about information technology and offer a wider context. Matauranga refers to education and intuitive intelligence, and is linked to the divine. Hinengaro is the mind, the thinking, knowing, perceiving, remembering, recognising, feeling, abstracting, generalising, sensing, responding and reacting …In this light, Maori knowledge informs us about why Maori might be highly motivated to take up information technology and why concepts of information technology, as its industry sees it, are not only accessible to Maori but even simplistic [14: 466].

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This assertion of an affirmative, localised, and Indigenous response to technology is a response to colonisation. As a Pakeha interviewee put it in explaining the different views of technology which he has encountered in the Maori community:

[People say] “Well, we were colonised once, and there is a great possibly that we are going through a digital colonisation phase as well”. But they’re saying, during the original colonisation, the white people defined their history. They gave them the literacy to do that. They defined their history for them. And the culture that the white people were coming from had no context to explain the culture of the Maori people.

In response to that loss caused by European domination in the past of their culture and history (and the potential for future loss), Maori concerned about ICTs and their people have increasingly developed their own understanding of how technology can be used for the cultural protection and production.

5 Implications for Community Informatics

Community informatics (CI) is an emergent discipline and practice that draws upon social and technical expertise. According to what is regarded as a consensus position [15] in Wikipedia:

Community Informatics… refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) … for enabling the achievement of collaboratively determined community goals; and for invigorating and empowering communities in relation to their larger social, economic, cultural and political environments. [16]

What Maori bring to the table is a particularly powerful Indigenous articulation of a philosophy of collaborative participatory research [17, 18] to take up the challenge of collaboration presented above. Indigenous culture has been too often regarded as primitive, easily acquired, and secondary to the expert knowledge (including technical knowledge) held by the Western-trained researcher or practitioner. As a consequence, the history of action and research (even of the most well-intentioned sort) with Indigenous communities has all too frequently been bound up with issues of colonising epistemologies, unequal benefits of research, and deterministic cultural, political, and economic agendas in favour of the researcher, rather than the ‘researched’ [11]. The same comment is relevant to socio-technical agendas, even if well-intentioned.

Thus, a real concern by some Maori continues to be the ongoing appropriation of ‘Indigenous knowledge, system of classification, technologies and codes of social life’ into electronic networks and their potential misuse [1: 60]. Maori have been particularly concerned about the appropriation of biological and genealogical records for public distribution, and these pose difficult ethical and practical challenges because of the spiritual and cultural significance of such data to them. Others are

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concerned about the individualist economic push revealed in ICT policy, rather than a commitment to reciprocity. The challenge is to work with communities to find socio-technical solutions to the proposition that ‘Indigenous peoples are not merely stakeholders in their heritage—they own that heritage and that the right to fully control and if and how research is undertaken on that heritage’ [19: 236 ].

This is no easy task. We need to be prepared to allow communities to develop research at their own pace and through their own processes of governance, in conjunction with outsiders so that far more equitable power relations are established. Kamira suggests that a key principle which underlies this kaitiakitanga, in which there is ‘guardianship, protection, care and vigilance of data about Maori that is collected, stored and accessed’ [9]. Such statements have enormous significance for how ICTs are to be presented, controlled, and put into effective use [20] by such communities.

6 Conclusions

Via a case study of what we have been able to discern about Maori understandings of the place of technology in their social and cultural development—and the way in which knowledge about their community is governed—we have hoped to make clearer the challenge of invigorating and empowering indigenous people on their own terms. What is significant about Maori is that they have begun to articulate a particular theory of ‘collaborative’ research and its location in the family and tribe and this provides a very clear conceptual and practice base for CI researchers and practitioners in New Zealand to work with. It is an example to be considered elsewhere. It is necessary for CI in fact, to re-interpret the very concept of ‘technology’ if it is to work well with such communities. From the perspective of welfare and community research, as well as in the writings of Foucault or Heidegger, ‘technology’ can be re-interpreted to be seen as a network of human processes or practices and techniques involving the use of resources and power, incorporating a body of knowledge and practice which can be complemented by ICTs [21, 22].

A broader definition of technology hearkens back to classical understandings of technology as a culturally-embedded skill and process [23], but it is also alluded to in the comments of Kamira, quoted previously, as relevant to Maori interaction with ICTs [14]. The more specifically ‘technical’ aspects of CI, which draw upon expertise in Information Systems and other disciplines can be considered as part of the basket or mix of social and artefactual technologies that are drawn upon in the development of community technologies such as community networks, specialist knowledge systems, databases and so on, but at the same time, social change and development processes that benefit all parties [24].

The ways in which indigenous peoples like Maori understand the process of research and action should be brought into the discussion of CI so that it develops a richer and more ethical appreciation of different ways of working with other peoples. Additionally, CI needs to embrace a broader idea of what we mean by technology and be more prepared to thoroughly and patiently negotiate and engage in a contestable discourse about what the ‘social’ side of socio-technical solutions means and then work on technical solutions in close and astute partnership for self-determination.

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