- CYBERSKINS: LIVE AND INTERACTIVE -

by Buffy Sainte-Marie

On an airplane, my Powerbook is singing to me in Lakota, while the words to the song appear onscreen in both Lakota and English.

In the Canadian Rockies, Indians carrying portable computers trudge through a herd of elk and into the Banff Center for the Arts where the "Drumbeats to Drumbytes" thinktank confronts the reality of online life as it affects Native artists.

A week later in Bismarck, North Dakota, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium votes 'yes' to V-SAT technology that will facilitate distance learning in and out of various Indian communities and 30 Indian colleges.

Across Canada, thousands of First Nations children network their observations and life experiences into mainstream education, as the Cradleboard Teaching Project/Kids From Kanata partnership provides both Native content and connectivity to schools as far away as Hawaii and Baffin Island.

I make a commercial record in a tipi on the Saskatchewan plains, and CBC television films the event for international broadcast. Navajo E-mail markets crafts to 40 foreign countries. A six-foot high painting of Indian elders graces the front office of the American Indian College Fund in Washington, D.C.: it's digital and it's Indian made.

The digital scene in Indian country at the moment is a microcosm of the way it is most everywhere else, with people at various stages of expertise and enthusiasm going through the big shift. Issues of sovereignty are often the first to come up among Native intellectuals, and the spectre of digital colonialism frightens some and challenges others. Questions of control and ownership arise of course, as they do in the mainstream, but with perhaps a sharper edge, given the facts of Native American history. Indian educators, artists, elders, women, tribal leaders and business people have plenty on our minds when it comes to counterbalancing past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that we're not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are Here in this digital age. We have led the pack in a couple of areas (digital music and online art). Although our potential at the moment exceeds the extensiveness of our community computer usage, our projects are already bearing fruit, we expect to prosper and to contribute, and we will defend our data.

Among Indian people online as elsewhere, we continue to observe the usual gangs of unknowledgeable non-Indian and/or "I-was-an-Indian-in-my-last-life" opportunists and exploiters, who now are upgrading their acts, trying to take advantage of rumored tax breaks and other scams in the cyber-sector of Indian country; but we are pretty much used to this 'vapor-speak' phenomenon, having lived with it lo these past 500 years. "Beware of White man bearing good ideas and grant proposals" is a tacet refrain we laugh about over the phone. However, I am glad to report that usually this observation does not interfere with honest deals among knowledgeable people of different races; and personally I do believe that we're smart enough to know who our friends are; and they come in all colors.

Sometimes I am asked, where did all the brain and fire of the sixties American Indian activism go? In my observation, in Canada we went into every field; but in the United States, where things were far more dangerous, those of us who were not killed, imprisoned, put out of business or otherwise sacrificed to the uranium industry, went into education. If I have a message in this scant overview,
it is this: real Indian people are rising to the potential of the technology, in school and out. We were born for this moment and we are solidly behind our pathfinders.